Reading into 2016
"Gentlemen, I know a cigar is a phallic symbol,"
Sigmund Freud is alleged to have said, "but it is also a cigar." Likewise, the public intellectual David
Walker addressed commonsensical words "to the coloured citizens of the
world, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of
America." Freud's words are beyond verification; Walker's words yet hammer
nails into consciousness. Thus, citizens
of the world, but very expressly American citizens, deserve to be warned that
2016 will be an amoral year of hostile humor.
We should take up our barrels and laugh into them.
January 1, 2016 marks the beginning of the sunset of the Age
of Obama, and the ignoble luxury of blaming our first Kenyan American President
for all the illich of the world shall begin to evaporate. As we prepare to indict ourselves in the
November 8, 2016 election of a new President, we should clearly understand that
our voting will be neither a symbolic affirmation of democracy, a taking back
of our country, nor a reason rather than an excuse for partisan jubilation. The election will be such a Mammon-tainted
performance that we shall have to admit that Democrats and Republicans have
snookered and bamboozled us into donating our sovereignty to a death-bound new
world order.
Readers trained in the natural and social sciences may have
a slight advantage over those trained in the
human sciences ( classical humanities) in 2016, for they will be more
disposed to read deeply and interestedly than closely and disinterestedly. Deep
and close may live in the same
neighborhood, but they have divergent intellectual class identities.
American readers who are deep will be less likely to
"pig out" on literature as such and more disposed to do work hard at
trying to understand the legacy of Leo
Strauss (1899-1973) with help from the Leo Strauss Center
(http://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu).
They will be deeply interested in how our government has adapted ideas Strauss proposed about political
philosophy, Jewish studies, and Islamic studies. They will be even more deeply interested in
understanding how those ideas have been translated into domestic and foreign
policies which are related to the phenomena of fear, terrorism, and abject
disregard for anything close to the sanctity of human life on Earth. They will
note in passing that the Strauss Center gets major support from the Winiarski
Family Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
These readers will give passionate attention to Pierre
Teilhard De Chardin's The Phenomenon of
Man (1955; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961), and the date of the original
French edition of Le Phénomene Humain ---1955 ---will wave like a
bloody white flag before their eyes. 1955? 1955? Ah, in the summer of 1955, the lynching of
Emmett Till in Mississippi began the writing of what Charles Blow calls "a
vital American story" (see his op-ed in the August 31, 2015 edition of The New York Times). But a few months
earlier, April 18-24, 1955, twenty-nine African and Asian nations met in Bandung, Indonesia. So, the deep readers will examine the final communiqué
(April 24) of that conference and give special notice to the claim in section B
(Cultural co-operation).1 that "the cultures of Asia and Africa are based
in spiritual and universal foundations." EPIPHANY. In 1955, our nation, the U.S.S.R, and selected European
nations were busily hatching the eggs of Cold War neo-colonialism, and close
reading of the Bandung communiqué may yet prove these imperial powers attended
too cavalierly to the profound implication of what the emerging Third World
countries agreed upon in Bandung and did not say specifically.
As the chickens of rainbow colors have come home to roost with violent
and deliberate speed throughout the world in 2015, we may be persuaded to add
to our list of required reading for 2016
Diamond, Jared. Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005.
Faust, David. The
Limits of Scientific Reasoning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984.
Lorenz, Edward N. The
Essence of Chaos. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1993.
Power, Samantha. "A
Problem from Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Perennial, 2003.
Reich, Walter, ed. Origins
of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind.
Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center
Press, 1998.
Roberts, Brian Russell and Keith Foulcher, eds. Indonesia Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard
Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Wright, Richard. The
Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. New York: World
Publishing Company, 1956.
Reading will not resolve existing problems or those as yet
unborn. Nevertheless, reading can assist
us in not being wimpy and weepy on November 9, 2016. No matter what a cowrie shell is forced to
symbolize in the collective American mind, it is still a shell of a marine
gastropod mollusk.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 7, 2015
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