Jerry Ward's Blogspot

ABOUT SNOW TREES They improve our world, these fragile trees bringing   small relief to the pain of never-healing wounds. We must not presume to own these gifts shaped by Nature's imperial imagination. Better that we pray in the eternity of music, confess the limits of minds unfit to box with art. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             January 23, 2020

SOMEWHERE NEAR CHARLOTTESVILLE he tasted the tragedy of his tongue, in the coffin of Monticello for want of imagination in the mortality of his words, he shuddered, he quaked, he cringed thinking no more no less his properties personified in heirs wearing his lurid face should, when God in justice comes, should make him a slave unique in an autobiographical noose no less no more is his story our comedy of belief. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             1/17/2020 10:54:42 AM

Myth of American Multiethnic Praxis, Part I 2020 is a year for making crucial choices about one's identity and a future for American government. It will be less than a happy year.   How shall people identify themselves as they complete census forms?   How could census figures be rendered useless for the allocation of public funds if 46% of our population checked "OTHER" and wrote "human" on the blank line?   It will not happen, of course, but it is tempting   to consider how a national information crisis would awaken indifferent citizens to the looming dangers of the post-human, the post-racial , the post-true.. We do not have to imagine a crisis. We can cherry-pick from an array of crises. Our fairly dim recognition that politics is linked to polis is one of them.   Voting in November 2020 will ensure that we shall be burdened for many years with a crisis of great magnitude. The woman or man who is declared the new POTUS will be ...

CARNIVAL AND POLITICS In the Roman Catholic church calendar, January 6 is the Feast of the Epiphany;   in the secular imagination of New Orleans, it is the beginning of carnival.   On Wednesday, February 26, we cease our revels, adorn ourselves with ashes, and repent.   We Catholics are lucky.   We can move seamlessly from sin to salvation.   No doubt, non-Catholics have the option of doing likewise   As the pious among us whisper, "God is good." Like Countee Cullen, "I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind," but I must marvel in 2020 that "His awful hand" punishes us with the juxtaposition of carnival and politics. Carnival is a season of lush excess, satire and malice, bold transgressions, and a few practices best left unnamed to protect the guilty.   It is an opportunity to consider that in the Age of Trump carnival and politics share alacrity in the mismanagement of the rule of law, squandering reason for nonsense...

Anticipating 2020 Evil is a contagious choice . Prepare. 1.        Speak plainly.   Avoid jargon that mystifies. Don't be abstruse. 2.        Read articles and books that challenge your cherished prejudices. 3.        Use critical thinking and inductive reasoning   in constructing arguments;   segregate verifiable facts from enthralling opinions. 4.        Be cold, nuanced, and confident.   Meekness in a combat zone is not effective. 5.        Stand your ground.   Blast first.   Apologize later. Act. 1.        March forth with discipline, honesty, and rededication to ancestral wisdom. 2.        Let us be supportive and constructively critical of one another. 3.      ...

KWANZAA ANNOTATIONS: building a cage for meaning WINTER poems --what they bury blooms in SPRING WHEN IMAGES   MAKE WAR   IN WINTER words celebrate irony:   Gosden and Correll, old inkfaces blazing for no exit, blazing in justice, blazing forever more the faux-blackness of what James believed to be "the real thing." When truth is truly told Rastus, Jemima, and Ben take paper to pen, implode boxes, deform cages, liberate graven images of iconic laughter, eradicate soul damage. Such epic chaos has become the duration of beauty, the unheard noise of peace, the unseen evidence of treaties yet unsigned. December 21,2019 ANNOTATIONS Stanza 1 ---The proximity of Christmas Day and Kwanzaa provides a habitation for irony and reasons for thinking about appropriation, how people of African ancestry (products of linguistic and physical creolizations ) have incorporated contradictions in the historical process ...

KWANZAA 2019   / NOTES   1.   UMOJA (unity)   ---Face it.   Striving for unity in the family, the community, the nation, and the race is praiseworthy.   Notice, however, the results of striving are contingent.   Forces beyond our control are operative.   Erosion of will power leads wretchedness;   systemic racism is an abstract equivalent of nuclear warfare;   benign genocide, a staple in education, flourishes; bad choices and self-hatred maintain dysfunction.   Family is not necessarily a traditional unit   of parents, children, and assorted relatives.    "The community" is an ungainly trope.   It is useful in moments of extreme crisis.   At other times the phrase fails to provoke rigorous analysis of how we organize ourselves and our contradictions "The Nation" is most certainly only "unified" in stories of inclusion and   excluding , the object of many revisions; some of these revisions te...