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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992)
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"What’s
with Mayor Nagin?"
Epistle
to Dr. Rambsy
By
Jerry Ward, Jr.
TKP:
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Dear Howard,
Being Roman Catholic, I find it necessary to
abandon the confessional of the Church and its suspect orthodoxy
and to enter the estranging emptiness. No, I am not disowning
belief in a Supreme Being. Quite the contrary. Indeed, the
mystery of a Trinity that lacks a female component --- I have
always conceptualized God the Father and God the Son as male and
the Holy Ghost as presence devoid of gender ---continues to
inspire belief. I am moved to believe we pray to a strange god
who has as little respect for ying and yang as Hurricane Katrina
had for the sanctity of human life.
The belief, however, shifts
and slips like a house in a hurricane. And there is no adequate
theory to account for where either house or belief shall come to
rest. From the vantage of New Orleans in this post-Katrina
moment, it is possible and reasonable to entertain the idea that
anything is everything. Ashe.
You have asked for my opinion by way of the
question “What’s with Mayor Nagin?,” a question raised by
his Martin Luther King, Jr. Day address at City Hall. I do have
strong opinions about Mayor Nagin. To avoid the accusation that
I am a threat to national security, I shall write my opinions
slantwise.
It is doubtful that his speech will rank in
memory on a par with famous speeches by Abraham Lincoln,
Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Winston Churchill,
Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther
King, Jr. Nevertheless, it should not be forgot that in the
performance of the speech, the jeremiad, Mayor Ray Nagin was in
direct contact with God through Dr. King’s serving as God’s
linguist. Please note, Howard, that such communication is not
governed by American rhetorical conventions but by elaborate
Akan protocols. The Word is replaced by Nommo. When Nommo trumps
Word print representation fails us.
Did not some ancient authority once propose that
those whom the gods would bless, they first make mad? Was the
ancient authority uttering a lie from the foundation stones of
Western Civilization? I will not claim that our mayor is mad in
the clinical sense. I do suggest that the pressure of being in a
questionable position of leadership in the dark, empty horrors
of post-Katrina New Orleans has driven Nagin to speak in the
churchy cadences of an Old Testament prophet. Who am I, marked
in my baptism by Jeremiah and St. Jerome, to cast stones at a
prophet? Should I cast any stones, it shall be at the words, the
language, wherein the prophet fabricated a message.
Let us go to
the source, a transcript of Nagin’s speech as printed in The
Times-Picayune of Tuesday, January 17, 2006 on page A-7. The
newspaper’s source was WWL Radio. The punctuation of the
transcript betrays the discrepancy between what Mayor Nagin
vocalized and what the transcriber heard.
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Transcript
of Nagin’s Speech
I
greet you all in the spirit of peace this morning. I
greet you all in the spirit of love this morning, and
more importantly, I greet you all in the spirit of
unity. Because if we’re unified, there’s nothing we
cannot do.
Now,
I’m supposed to give some remarks this morning and
talk about the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. You
know when I woke up early this morning, and I was
reflecting upon what I could say that could be
meaningful for this grand occasion. And then I decided
to talk directly to Dr. King.
Now
you might think that’s one Katrina post-stress
disorder. But I was talking to him and I just wanted to
know what would he think if he looked down today at this
celebration. What would he think about Katrina? What
would he think about all the people who were stuck in
the Superdome and Convention Center and we couldn’t
get the state and the federal government to come do
something about it? And he said, “I wouldn’t like
that.”
And
then I went on to ask him, I said, “Mr. King, when
they were marching across the Mississippi River bridge,
some of the folks that were stuck in the Convention
Center, that were tired of waiting for food and tired of
waiting on buses to come rescue them, what would he say
as they marched across that bridge? And they were met at
the parish line with attack dogs and machine guns firing
shots over their heads?” He said, “I wouldn’t like
that either.”
Then
I asked him to analyze the state of black America and
black New Orleans today and to give me a critique of
black leadership today. And I asked him what does he
think about black leaders always or most of the time
tearing each other down publicly for the delight of
many? And he said, “I really don’t like that
either.”
And
then finally, I said, “Dr. King, everybody in New
Orleans is dispersed. Over 44 different states. We’re
debating whether we should open this or close that.
We’re debating whether property rights should trump
everything or not. We’re debating how we should
rebuild one of the greatest cultural cities the world
has ever seen. And yet still yesterday we have a
second-line and everybody comes together from around
this and that and they have a good time for the most
part, and then knuckleheads pull out some guns and start
firing into the crowd and they injure three people.”
He said, “I definitely wouldn’t like that.”
And
then I asked him, I said, “What is it going to take
for us to move and live your dream and make it a
reality?” He said, “ I don’t think we need to pay
attention anymore as much about the other folk and
racists on the other side.” He said the thing we need
to focus on as a community, black folks I’m talking
to, is ourselves.
What
are we doing? Why is black-on-black crime such an issue?
Why do our young men hate each other so much that they
look their brother in the face and they will take a gun
and kill him in cold blood? He said we as a people need
to fix ourselves first. He said the lack of love is
killing us. And it’s time, ladies and gentlemen.
Dr.
King, if he was here today, he would be talking to us
about this problem, about the problem we have among
ourselves. And as we think about rebuilding New Orleans,
surely God is mad at America, he’s sending hurricane
after hurricane after hurricane and it’s destroying
and putting stress on this country. Surely he’s not
approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But
surely he’s upset at black America, also. We’re not
taking care of ourselves. We’re not taking care of our
women. And we’re not taking care of our children when
you have a community where 70 percent of its children
are being born to one parent.
We
ask black people: it’s time. It’s time for us to
come together. It’s time for us to rebuild a New
Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans.
And I don’t care what people are saying Uptown or
wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the
end of the day.
This
city will be a majority African-American city. It’s
the way God wants it to be. You can’t have New Orleans
no other way; it wouldn’t be New Orleans. So before I
get into too much more trouble, I’m just going to tell
you in my closing conversation with Dr. King, he said,
“I never worried about the good people -- or the bad
people I should say --- who were doing all the violence
during civil rights time.” He said, “ I worried
about the good folks that didn’t say anything or
didn’t do anything when they knew what they had to
do.”
It’s time for all of us good folk to stand up and say, “We’re tired
of the violence. We’re tired of black folks killing
each other. And when we come together for a second-line,
we’re not going to tolerate any violence.” Martin
Luther King would’ve wanted it that way, and we
should. God bless all. |
Comments on the transcript and other
opinions
Howard, given the expertise you have
developed in dealing with visuals, print, and sound in your
“cool black consciousness” project, you will no doubt see
and hear what the transcript leaves as a faint trace. The
rhetorical structures of the speech eventually fall apart. They
implode from the absent horror of what needed to be said about
New Orleans on January 16, 2006. All that will be left in your
hands or mine after a rigorous analysis will be historicized
cultural dust tracks and smoke. The jazz you will find in the
transcript is not Louis Armstrong or Buddy Bolden or Papa
Celestine. It is Sun Ra on a cosmic acid trip.
The speech does not give me access to Mayor
Nagin’s consciousness, but it does permit me hear alarms, the
sounds of sustained stress which live in the minds and vocal
chords of all of us who have been intimately affected by natural
disasters. We are displaced physically and mentally. We meander
in whatever version of silva rhetoricae we find familiar.
Some of us have become preachers, invoking the Church to help us
with matters that are material and very secular and very
remotely related to any proof that we are sinners in the hand of
an angry god/God.
We seek salvation in the tenets of a
popularized, faith-based African American history that makes a
quantum leap over the fact of enslaving Puritanism (then and
now) and shelters itself amidst the Hebrews in pyramid-building
Egypt. Time-damned by our vernacular tradition, Nagin commits
political suicide in the guise of leading the children out of
bondage by the means he deemed necessary into the funk-fantasy
of Chocolate City. The Uptown Other (the business barons and
their Republican cousins who have all the plans for insuring
that “urban removal” and “genocide” shall prevail) is
thoroughly delighted with Nagin’s performance on January 16.
There is a name in French psychoanalytic
philosophy for what the Uptown Other champions: barbarian socius.
Read carefully the chapter on “The Barbarian Despotic
Machine” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In New Orleans, we are not
in the hands of an angry god. We are in the paws of the despotic
barbarian formation for which President Bush serves gleefully as
Commander-in-Chief.
It is impossible to understand the
psychological crimes that are committed daily in post-Katrina
New Orleans without understanding how our country’s elected
leaders, either blindly or with full knowledge, support the
growth of fascist imperialism in the context of international
globalization. Please urge your students, Howard, to see through
the smoke of sentimentality and platitudes manufactured by
state-controlled mass media. Please encourage them to think
critically about what a political and psychological swamp is or
has the probability of being. Nagin’s speech was fox fire.
What much disturbs Mayor Nagin, I suspect, is
his impotence. He cannot fight FEMA, Governor Blanco, the
military and the hired merchants of death who may have murdered
approximately 1,500 African American males during the early
weeks of our post-Katrina aftermath. If you want to know where
their bodies are, ask the American Congress to investigate why
there is a sealed morgue in Gonzales, Louisiana. The bodies that
have bullet holes in their skulls want to speak, to tell the
stories of what we thought would never happen in the United
States.
In the context of the barbarian machine, he
is a mere factotum. He can vent his and our [black New
Orleanians’] deepest frustrations in black-flavored language,
but he can not prevent the process and progress of bleaching the
city. Cleansing is the priority. Toxic waste has to be removed
from the city. Vermin must be exterminated. Hilter’s children
are having a holiday in New Orleans and the holiday in not Mardi
Gras.
The Uptown Others and their cousins will
pretend conservative political correctness as they criticize
Mayor Nagin for being racist, crazy, and unfit. Many of them
helped to put Nagin in power. Now they will take anything like
real power away from him and other elected African Americans as
New Orleans suffers like a woman in the hands of a sexist
god.
After all, in their perverted Christian
minds, New Orleans is a whore in need of behavior modification.
Gliberals of all complexions will contend that Nagin’s speech
was a blatant violation of the fine spirit of Dr. King’s dream
of democratic transracial cooperation, for they would like very
much to have Dr. King be the mirror reflection of their secret
god Booker T. Washington. I hasten to say they understand
Washington as much as I understand the Holy Trinity.
At some point very soon, Howard, black people
who do want to return to New Orleans and to participate in its
physical and cultural reconstruction must stop hiding behind
dreams, their own and those of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The
stone I cast with alacrity is not at Mayor Nagin the man, the
human being , who is as frustrated about reality as I am.
I cast the stone at language that would have
me believe that dreams are more effective than razing fire. I
cast the stone at language that gives me no reason to believe
large numbers of African Americans will ever be free of
self-hatred or other Americans will cease to hate and seek to
injure us or that the United States will ever rescind its
variously inscribed racial contract.
I have a real quarrel with St. Paul, but I
think he used language accurately when he or somebody wrote
“It is better to burn….”
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Responses
I can only say that
this is the most cogent, insightful, and powerful analysis of
Nagin and his words—both
their "substance" and their rhetorical
flourishes--that I have read. You sound like an Old
Testament prophet, and, Lord knows, we need that kind of
prescient wisdom in these troubling times. —Miriam * * *
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posted 21 January 2006 |
