Requiem for Credibility
Forgetting and remembering the fifty years between 1964 and
2014 is intimidating. You listen to
Eddie Harris’s “Cold Duck Time” (played with Les McCann) and doubt you can
remember the day you took your first sip of Cold Duck and compared it to what.
Now you remember you inhaled marijuana for the first time during your senior
year in college, freaked out the night at Fort Knox when the combination of
scotch, Valium, and pot enabled jazz to travel like a spider from one side of
your brain to the other, and experienced the bliss of smoking grass in Viet
Nam.
At your reunion with Tougaloo College Class of 1964, you
remember the voices of your now dead fraternity brothers. You note how changed
are the speech patterns and vocabularies of the women and men with whom you
acquired an education in the ways of the world and in the necessity of civil
rights struggles. You remember the
hypocrisy of hope in the United States of America, the profound pain of
segregation, the assassination of a dream on April 4, 1968, and the rich hues
of cynicism that have enhanced your career for forty-six years. Change is the
quintessence of moiety. Time obligates
you to sing a requiem for credibility.
What credibility is there in your having forgot the murder
of Kitty Genovese and the alleged thirty-eight witnesses who did not want to “get
involved” or in acidic remembering that George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon
Martin? Winston Moseley, the damned killer of Genovese, is prisoner 64A0102 in
New York. George Zimmerman, the damned killer of Martin, swims as freely as a
twisted Florida shrimp in a thick Louisiana gumbo. Credibility is quite defunct. It orbits eternally in the astrophysics of
misinformation, universal terrorism, and social networking. Are your own words any longer credible? The
pseudo-Islamic obscenity in Nigeria and the pseudo-Christian insanity
everywhere else on a planet enthralled by capitalism makes language impotent.
We are forever enslaved by something. What a cruel joke is the audacity of
hope.
In 2014, your mind suffering in the iron maiden of
remembering and forgetting, you cast your fate to the wind. You believe in the
sanctity of the uncertain. You believe in the rightness of death, in the edgy
promise of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and Ellington’s “Come Sunday” in nine dimensions
you have never known or will never know.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
May 21, 2014
