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Liberty and freedom are not givens. They can only be possessed when inevitable battles are fought and won.  This has been the case for 140 billion years.

 

Can the weight of human knowledge crush rationality?

 

Yesterday I had a lengthy conversation with a friend I have known for 50+ years. For  people who have known one another that long, the  talking is easy.  They trust each other.  They have developed ESP and control the flow of ideas better than the Army Corps of Engineers controls the flow of a river.  If the speakers are black males from Mississippi who graduated from Tougaloo College, they have convictions about social justice, criminal justice, why equity is a better notion than equality, and why representations of slavery  usually avoid discussion of the bloody hands that picked the cotton.  You do not find the bloody hands in Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices or in James Agee's  Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. Representations of American history tend to evade what at a given moment is not convenient;  tend to overlook that calls for justice are actually calls for revenge, a primal instinct; tend to avoid that "criminal justice" is fundamentally criminal and not essentially just.

 

Good news from yesterday was a brief announcement that Paramount has optioned  the novel The Man Who Lived Underground and has begun planning a film adaptation.  According to my way of thinking, the film  should adopt the style of film noir, but my opinion counts for nothing at the box office.  I can only hope the filmmakers do not distort Wright's prophetic insights by pandering to the twisted tastes of 2021.  One can't predict what will occur in the whitesmith shop of Hollywood.

 

Now that I have spent a small fortune to replace the roof of my house, I am forced to have a love affair with poverty for the remainder of the year.  So be it.  I was born poor.  I can accept departing for an afterlife in  poverty.  Perhaps being crushed by knowledge is a good thing.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            6/27/2021 8:37:40 AM

 

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