Lincoln's Birthday
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States,
celebrated his 208th birthday on February 12, 2017. He did not fail to inform everyone that he
was of the party of Donald John Trump.
In the first half of the 20th
century, a number of Negroes and their non-Negro allies esteemed
Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.
They possessed fewer facts about Lincoln's dream that the enslaved
should be freed and exported in a reverse Middle Passage back to their motherlands
than their African American and multi-ethnic descendants now have. Richard Wright used Lincoln's birthday and
iconic status to contextualize the behavior of Jake Jackson, the anti-hero of
the novel Lawd Today! At crucial points throughout Wright's satiric
portrayal of Jackson, a radio station broadcasts platitudes about Lincoln's
greatness.
Readers can't ignore the distance Wright established
between Lincoln's mythological greatness and Jackson's wretchedness as a
classic stereotype of the urbanized Negro male. Lincoln and Jackson are at the
opposite extreme ends of a line drawn through the American Dream. In 2017, Trump and his tribe are alternative
surrogates of Lincoln; American citizens
who castigate Trump, whether they look like Jackson or not, are commodities in
the political supermarket. Eight decades after the draft of Lawd Today! was completed in 1935, we
still grapple with the disconnection between American political leaders and the
constituents whom they hesitate to serve, the disjointedness of ideologies as myths.
It is reasonable to add Lawd Today! to the growing list of fictional works we can use in
mapping the ideological foundations of the American Dream's rapid
transformation into an American Nightmare, an alleged prerequisite for making
America great again. Just as Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm serve as fictional strops
for honing vision, Lawd Today! can be
a tool for sharpening awareness of why our democratic, racialized and gendered
social contract authorized the ascent of a Trump. Wright's novel offers us an
excellent portrait of what, to use Albert Murray's term, an uncritical
omni-American can be and fail to do.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. February 13, 2017
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