New Column: "(Jeremiah) Wright Reasoning"
Saturday, 22 March 2008 - 701 words
[i] Juan Williams, Enough, page 110 in the hardback edition.
Always better for the interested observer to read Barack Obama’s speeches as opposed to watching or listening to them. As is designed, the mind tends to wander when he speaks, so distracted by his masterful delivery that the substance of his remarks, provided there is any substance, becomes irrelevant. When foregoing essence, Obama can be expected to offer creepy neo-socialism, petty vagaries, and / or various renditions of “Aren’t you wonderful for being so open-minded as to vote for a black man?”
Unfortunately for Senator Obama, no one was particularly interested in last Tuesday’s broad-brushed simplifications of slavery at the time of the Constitution’s writing, or a generic rehashing of his books. (“I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.” We know, we know.) All we wanted to hear about was Jeremiah Wright, and whether Obama would take the occasion as his opportunity to fashion his very own Sister Souljah Moment.
Not quite. Senator Obama chose instead to walk an intellectual tightrope: Racism is horrible and oughtn’t be tolerated (check); so much so that even his own grandmother, who is still alive, is fodder for an embarrassing public backhanding (gee whiz, really?); but even though Wright should be condemned, “in unequivocal terms,” it’s important to know that his displays of overt racism and paranoia are part of a bigger black religious experience. Or something. “The church [Trinity United] contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.”
Are kindness, cruelty, intelligence, and ignorance unique only to the black experience, or do they also have bearing on the white experience? If they do indeed have some bearing, shouldn’t large pockets of white racism and suspicion be excused on the grounds that sometimes dignity escapes us, as it did so often for Reverend Wright?
We know now that Obama’s white grandmother has 1) fretted over young blacks on the street, and 2) made minorities the subject of some backward comments. Well, on the first count, so has Jesse Jackson (“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved”[i]), but don’t hold your breath waiting for Obama to throw him under a bus. On the second count, it would be interesting to know whether White Grandma’s comments were as sand-poundingly idiotic as Reverend Wright’s greatest hits, as opposed to simply being ignorant.
Senator Obama’s point was that he can no sooner divorce himself from Wright than he can his grandmother, which seems a stunning lack of tenacity for someone who thinks he can handle our enemies better than George W. Bush has handled them. Geraldine Ferraro’s latest salvo against the Obama campaign was to essentially say, Look, he can mention me in his little speeches all he wants, but Barack Obama’s continued association with Wright only brings his judgment into further question. You’d be hard pressed to prove she’s wrong.
Anyway, the problem with Wright’s reasoning isn’t necessarily that he’s anti-America; he’s barely indistinguishable from the rest of the liberal Left, as far as that goes. The problem is that what passes for his thinking only seems to draw one half of a circle; add the other half and his arguments become … well … circular. If God would damn America, in the form of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then who’s to say Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t God’s punishment for Pearl Harbor?
And why would God damn America for “treating [its] citizens as less than human” when the closest we come to enslaving people these days is through the income tax? Wouldn’t God have been better to damn James Buchanan’s America, or Franklin Roosevelt’s America for interring Japanese, or Hitler’s Germany for its concentration camps, or the Soviet Union for the Gulag? Wouldn’t it be safer (and smarter) to speculate that the War Between the States and the Second World War accounted just fine for God’s punishment?
Unfortunately for Senator Obama, no one was particularly interested in last Tuesday’s broad-brushed simplifications of slavery at the time of the Constitution’s writing, or a generic rehashing of his books. (“I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.” We know, we know.) All we wanted to hear about was Jeremiah Wright, and whether Obama would take the occasion as his opportunity to fashion his very own Sister Souljah Moment.
Not quite. Senator Obama chose instead to walk an intellectual tightrope: Racism is horrible and oughtn’t be tolerated (check); so much so that even his own grandmother, who is still alive, is fodder for an embarrassing public backhanding (gee whiz, really?); but even though Wright should be condemned, “in unequivocal terms,” it’s important to know that his displays of overt racism and paranoia are part of a bigger black religious experience. Or something. “The church [Trinity United] contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.”
Are kindness, cruelty, intelligence, and ignorance unique only to the black experience, or do they also have bearing on the white experience? If they do indeed have some bearing, shouldn’t large pockets of white racism and suspicion be excused on the grounds that sometimes dignity escapes us, as it did so often for Reverend Wright?
We know now that Obama’s white grandmother has 1) fretted over young blacks on the street, and 2) made minorities the subject of some backward comments. Well, on the first count, so has Jesse Jackson (“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved”[i]), but don’t hold your breath waiting for Obama to throw him under a bus. On the second count, it would be interesting to know whether White Grandma’s comments were as sand-poundingly idiotic as Reverend Wright’s greatest hits, as opposed to simply being ignorant.
Senator Obama’s point was that he can no sooner divorce himself from Wright than he can his grandmother, which seems a stunning lack of tenacity for someone who thinks he can handle our enemies better than George W. Bush has handled them. Geraldine Ferraro’s latest salvo against the Obama campaign was to essentially say, Look, he can mention me in his little speeches all he wants, but Barack Obama’s continued association with Wright only brings his judgment into further question. You’d be hard pressed to prove she’s wrong.
Anyway, the problem with Wright’s reasoning isn’t necessarily that he’s anti-America; he’s barely indistinguishable from the rest of the liberal Left, as far as that goes. The problem is that what passes for his thinking only seems to draw one half of a circle; add the other half and his arguments become … well … circular. If God would damn America, in the form of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then who’s to say Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t God’s punishment for Pearl Harbor?
And why would God damn America for “treating [its] citizens as less than human” when the closest we come to enslaving people these days is through the income tax? Wouldn’t God have been better to damn James Buchanan’s America, or Franklin Roosevelt’s America for interring Japanese, or Hitler’s Germany for its concentration camps, or the Soviet Union for the Gulag? Wouldn’t it be safer (and smarter) to speculate that the War Between the States and the Second World War accounted just fine for God’s punishment?
[i] Juan Williams, Enough, page 110 in the hardback edition.
posted by Brian S. Wise | 2:07 PM
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