HAIKU, FRACTAL
SONG, AND OTHER MATTERS
China Haiku
Snow: winter sugar
making fortune delightful
for Beijing mornings.
FRACTAL SONG
(Boston: Black Widow Press, 2016)
Hope lives.
This morning during a conversation with 3rd graders at
Grandville T. Woods Elementary School in Kenner, LA, I asked the students to
name their favorite books. One student
said "FRACTAL SONG." After a nanosecond of surprise, I asked him
to read the poem "He Has Wonderful Eyes" (pp.73-74) for his
classmates. He did. And he read
brilliantly. This young genius forced me to believe that hope for a future
still exists in the Age of Trump.
Tragic ignorance
prevails.
Watching the news this evening, I was jolted by
commentary on a crime of abject hatred that two young males and two young
females recently committed in Chicago.
Their victim, a target of tragic ignorance just as a few dozen African
Americans have been targets since the death of Trayvon Martin, did not deserve
to be tortured in Chi-raq.
Art is not sociology nor an inspired description of
social pathologies in the United States of America. Nevertheless, much of the art of Spike Lee draws
attention to extreme flaws in the human condition. It is fair to guess that the
four young criminals have never watched Lee's Bamboozled. And if they did,
they very apparently learned
nothing. It is blatantly stupid to video
and broadcast one's criminal activities.
To do so is to embrace with alacrity and celebrate the stupid end of a
false revolutionary suicide. it is also fair to guess the young criminals did
not watch Lee's more recent satire about the city in which they live.
I feel a moral obligation to update remarks I made in
2015 about Lee's Chi-Raq, because the grains of truth in that film are given daily
affirmation in Chicago and other major American cities. The moral boomerang of the film bludgeons us
each day. it is cowardly to plead that
we are innocent and a matter of twisted indulgence to plead that we are guilty. There is no exit from the twilight zone of
the existential.
CHI-RAQ (update 2017)
If Spike Lee were truly as full of hubris as he might wish American consumers of
film to believe he is, he would have asked two Chicago ministers, the Reverend
Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to pray to their God for the success of Chi-Raq the film and for the end of urban violence in the city of
Chicago, code name ShyRack. He did not
hesitate to ask Reverend Jackson to pray for the success of School
Daze. See the caption and ocular
proof in The Films of Spike Lee: Five for Five (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1991). 58.. And
the film would have been endowed with the blessings of
liberation theology and spiritual credibility had he also persuaded
Reverend Wright to portray Father Corridan in the film. Wright and Jackson
would have given historicized Chicago authenticity to his enterprise, but their
involvement also would have prevented Lee from creating Chi-Raq as stereotype-reifying, slapstick pornography. The
ministers would have forced him and his actors to burn in flames of tragic
rather than comic "truth." Spike Lee is infused with chutzpah. And it is telling that neither Jackson nor
Wright have grabbed media opportunities, as far as I can determine, to condemn the prevalence of crime in
Chicago/Chi-Raq.
Lee has been in the
cinema game too long to waste his juice or to send Hollywood an ISIS
message. He is not a fool. Despite his obvious possession of some
political consciousness, he is not a radical or an heir of Malcolm X. Like Aristophanes, he is a trickster of the
first water. And like the ancient Greek playwright from whose Lysistrata he borrows theme and surface
features, Spike Lee has good entrepreneurial skills. Satirizing the amoral/immoral
cesspools of society and pious
belief in the sanctity of human life (# All Lives Matter) has commercial value
in the world of cinema. Money
talks. It sponsors the confusion of
shared values in the United States of
America. Money reinforces the documented reluctance of many
citizens who inhabit ShyRackish territory to enforce communal values, to break
silence. To be sure, those citizens are
not silent about the debilitating effects of entrenched systemic racism, the
mental illness which thugs and police people cultivate, and the production of genocide in the heart
of whiteness. They are quite vocal. On
the other hand, those who are most vocal about social injustice are most
frequently silenced and disappeared by money, mass media, and such films as Chi-Raq.
A comedy or
comic film in the United States that smells of morality or serious
interrogation of political and social issues is damned from the
start. It is destined to turn no profit,
because (1) the conventions of comedy demand exaggeration and (2) Americans are
gluttons for trivia, the trinkets of nonsense.
Abnormality has to be normalized. The comic valorizes a certain degree of vulgarity. Comic satire, as Bamboozled demonstrated,
must embody dread, the quality of conjoined
repulsiveness and attraction that can provoke laughter. Should abnormality and
dread be the actual norm (the unfortunate case in sectors of American society
where ShyRackish communities exist),
satire tends to succeed as entertainment.
It does not move significant numbers of people to adopt progressive,
life-valuing behaviors. Thus, Lee's
attempt to transform Greek satiric comedy into American comic satire delivers
a gender-laden, niggardly mess of sexist, death-oriented, racist
affirmation.
As a filmmaker, Lee is at the top of his game in terms of
understanding his audiences as well as the ideological apparatus of the music, entertainment, and film industries. He is not, let me hasten to say, obliged to carry all the weight for
what film in America has wrought since the advent of Birth of a Nation (1915).
Some of the criminality of films
involves the effort to serve competing desires.
Artists who possess more than the intelligence of a prenatal fetus
generally desire to do the right thing.
The industries , on the other hand, desire to maintain power and what
Charles W. Mills aptly named the American racial contract. The ethical dilemma can be addressed, but it
can't be resolved. It is a Forty Acres
and Zora Neale Hurston mule no-brainer
to be outraged by the sexism of Chi-Raq,
its selling the slogan "No peace. No pussy," its moral treason. This no-brainer is paralleled by the
possibility that treason lives with immunity in the Trump Tower.
Some viewers of the
film might be able to cut through all the audiovisual, hip hop anointed shit
and hear Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) utter the name Leymah Gbowee and advise
Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) to discover why, at least once in African and world
history, sisterhood, prayer, and sex did matter and did make a difference. Out of the chaos of murdering cultural memory
in Chicago, of minimizing Iraq's erectile dysfunction, and of selling the booty call crack of America's
puritanical Founding Mothers, Spike Lee
and company drop on viewers the challenge represented by Leymah Gbowee,
Liberia's president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Tawakkul Karman, the winners of
the 2011 Nobel Prize for Peace. Chi-Raq
is not about peace.
It is not about pussy
and guns and what D. H. Lawrence wrote
or did not write about Lady Chatterley's cunt.
It is not about globally abused females and pathetic , demonic males,
and innocent dead children and the manifest destiny of ethnic self-hatred to
perpetuate genocide. It is not about
child soldiers in the darkest hearts of the African continent. Chi-Raq
is about the world's orchestrated failure
to learn what needs to be done from Aristophanes' Lysistrata , from the 2008 documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, or from Gbowee's book Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation
at War (2011). It would surprise no
one should it ever be revealed that Pope Francis prayed for Chi-Raq on December 8, 2015 when he opened the doors of St. Peter's
Basilica to mark the advent of a Year of Mercy during which the world can
celebrate a Supreme Being's love for those who thrive in sin and are need
of unconditional mercy. It would surprise everyone should Pope
Francis put his imprimatur on Giorgio Agamben's The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days (to be
published May 2017 by Stanford University Press) and thus use his papal
infallibility to back Agamben's argument "that Benedict's [resignation],
far from being solely a matter of internal ecclesiastical politics, is
exemplary in an age when the question of legitimacy has been virtually left
aside in favor of a narrow focus on legality" (Stanford University Press promotion).
The air we breathe is
tragic and ignorant, and there's no reason to doubt we shall continue to
prevail in it. We are legal.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. January
6, 2017
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