Oblivion: A Literary Act
It is painful but necessary for some Americans over the age
of sixty to remember that Medgar Wiley Evers was assassinated on June 12, 1963
in Jackson, Mississippi by Byron “Delay” Beckwith and that Lee Harvey Oswald
allegedly assassinated John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22,
1963. To minimize remoteness from the actual encouraged by the fantasy of
history which enthralls American citizens in 2013, it is necessary to
remember. To remember is painful, because
death is an agony, the consolations of faith and spirituality
notwithstanding. Our American penchant
for trashing moments of historical martyrdom with celebration is shameful and
undignified. There is some virtue in
displacing celebration with analysis of cold facts and the small contributions
of lukewarm recall. Tears for Evers and
Kennedy, like prayer, should occur in private.
Analysis of what these assassinations tell us about the present should
be internationally public. Analysis unveils how the world is resegmenting
itself and why, to some extent, the United States of America is devolving into
barbarity. Can we abstain for a cosmic second
from the mechanical fornications of literary criticism and exercise the option
of being homo seriosus?
Remembering the deaths of Evers and Kennedy does intensify
notice of the gap between privilege and deprivation; the abyss between the
primal racial contract of the United States and the regrettable pretense that
the contract has been canceled; the distance between magnanimous statecraft and
the deadly theatricality of American government which results from sinister
deconstruction of the Constitution of the United States. Analysis of the actual must stand in opposition to the game of critiquing the real. From such a vantage, analysis retards its becoming
more of a whiteface parody of itself than it currently is.
Reading Michael V. Williams’s Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr (2011) within a context made
available by Ira Katznelson’s Fear
Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013) strengthens the
work of memory, because these two books are literary acts informed by moral
transparency and integrity. They are
models for engaging the unfreedom of freedom, the dominant oxymoron of the
United States in 2013.They expose historical sources for the existential dread
explicit in the narrative of oblivion being told by globalization, a narrative
we are condemned to annotate with fear and trembling.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. October 29, 2013
