On the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, I want to address another assassination, this one by youtube, our new smart bomb.
I’m talking about the assassination of Pastor Jeremiah Wright. Like MLK, Pastor Wright is a prophetic preacher. As did MLK, he preaches equality and non-violence. And as did MLK, he has become the target of a concerted campaign to discredit and defame him. Nothing personal. It’s not about him. It wasn’t about MLK either.
In the virtual world we live in, we can blow up hope and goodness with the click of a mouse.
Before Obama surged to a lead over Clinton, most Americans knew next to nothing of Pastor Wright’s 36 years at Trinity Church. They didn’t know and they didn’t care that
Wright had increased the congregation to bursting, opened up 70 ministries, and saved the poor from starving, the homeless from dying
on Chicago’s cold streets.
On the verge of retirement, Pastor Wright could look back on the kind of life most of us wish we had, but are too self-centered to have earned. His was a life of service and inspiration. His huge flock loved him; his pastoral peers respected him; his sermons were legendary.
Reverend Wright was to the pulpit what Bobby Knight was to basketball. He would retire a star in Pastoral circles, but also a man who had made a real difference, the kind of man who stood out, the kind of man commended by Lyndon B. Johnson, invited to the White House by Bill Clinton.Then came Obama’s steep, unbroken rise; with it, Pastor Wright’s unprecedented fall.
This morning, writing this, I’m listening to Chris Hitchens carry on about Obama’s “Crack-pot” pastor on “Meet The Press.” A month after Fox fired up its smear-campaign by proxy, it still sets the terms of the debate.
Ted Russert, Hitchens, and Andrew Sullivan re-hash the same abrupted bits from the same audio-bite. Hitchens makes the well-worn case that Obama must “do something” about “his Jeremiah Wright problem.” Never mind Obama’s historical speech on race– even if blacks and whites wept as one listening to it–Obama hasn’t done enough.
Daily, hourly,Obama’s ex-pastor draws the wrath of T.V. hosts and bloggers, paranoics and pundits. In this collective public eye, Obama’s campaign, in fact, his entire political past and future, boils down to the youtube Gotcha.
Tim Russert glances slyly at his notes as though they’re classified. Looks up. Arches brows slightly. He lays his cards on the table. The pundits marvel.
Full House! Obama, Wright, Farrakhan, and KHADAFI! Ted’s got KHADAFI! They chaw on a secret trip to Libya and speculate about how hot things will get when the rest of MSM discover Obama is Khadafi’s secret agent. Ted shuffles again.
Ted puts the white grandmother on the table. He looks from one pundit to another. They assume the stance, Oxford Deans debating Foucalt.
En Garde! He’s using his grandmother.
Touche! He loves his grandmother.
Parry: Typical white grandmother. Thrust What did he mean?Typical white grandmother?
Parry, thrust, parry, thrust
Obama needs to tell America exactly which of Wright’s statements he objects to.
The controversial ones.
But what does controversial mean?Lunge: He needs to come clean with America about his relationship with his pastor.Leaning in for the kill: Why did he sit in those pews all those years?
Missing from the loop-to-loop is Wright himself, the real Wright. But since he’s only collateral damage, his total absence is fitting. OOPS, we hit a pharmacy when we meant to hit a despot. So let’s bomb,bomb,bomb again.
WRIGHT AS PROPHET: WHY CLINTON and MSM WON’T ARGUE THE REAL MESSAGE OF “CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST”
I don’t know Reverend Wright personally. But I do know a great deal more about him than the mass of online and television critics who work themselves and their audience into a frenzy over “the constant litany” they imagine Wright “spewed” at Obama and his family. These critics, whether high-paid journalists or bloggers named “mad dog”, extrapolate the man and his ministry from the “youtubed” hit job, and palm it off as scholarship.
Funny, those of us Wright offends the least are the most informed about the semon the most “appalling” seconds is extracted from. We have read or watched this tour de force aria as Wright originally sung it.
The singing is heart-rending, masterful, the message as outrageously moral as it gets: only God, not America, not a nation, not a government, is all-powerful, Almighty. Wright’s righteous rage is directed at America’s abuse of power all over the globe. Like MLK, Reverend Wright is ardently anti-war. In sum, Wright’s operatic turn is a passionate and agonized call for an end to America’s militant response to global crises.
What is truly revolutionary is that Wright challenges us to see Japanese and Vietnamese and Latin American lives as EQUAL to our own.
What is “anti-American,” is Wright’s angry condemnation of Truman’s government for unleashing a nuclear holocaust on a civilian, not military target: Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Contrary to MSM’s spin, he deplores the 9/ll attack, vividly describing the horror he watched that day on television.
In fact, 9/11 brings the sermon on. But not only do we need to contextualize the youtube seconds, but the days following 9/11 when the reckless, bloody cry for revenge, blind revenge trumpeted throughout the American public, MSM, and the Bush Administration.
So Wright’s “the chickens have come home to roost” sermon is a prophetic, bibically-inspired warning to congregation and country to “stop the cycle of violence” God deems unholy. Wright’s warning wasn’t heeded any more than Senator Obama’s measured and secular speech delivered a year later.
In the Gotterdamerung of U.S. sanctioned violence, the war in Iraq is one of the longest and costliest cycles. Thus far, 4,000 U.S . soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been sacrificed, in part, because Bush and MSM began to connect Sadaam Hussein to 9/11 even before the date Wright gave this sermon. Prophetic? Nostradomus caiber!
The seeds of war were blowing in the wind well before the smoke died down at ground zero. These seeds grew into the full-blown nightmare we can’t seem to wake up from. U.S. sanctions against the Iraqis and two wars has meant not only incalcuable civilian deaths and unjury, but damage to the infrastructure that will surely kill thousands more, just as Nagasaki and Hiroshima suffered from radioactive fallout for generations.
MSM and the Clinton campaign certainly don’t want to argue with Wright’s REAL message– for it is prescient. Better to portray the sermon as blaming the victims of 9/11, than as a warning against a blind vengeance that would take 50 times more life.
MEN OF GOOD WILL STAND UP FOR WRIGHT, CLINTON SITS IT OUT
So this diary doesn’t become a total tome, I won’t detail more of Reverend Wright or Trinity Church’s rich resume. Both have a dedicated history of service to country and community.
But I will explain that President Clinton invited Wright to The White House as a member of a highly select pastoral delegation whose mission was to provide spiritual support to the President during the critical period of his public shaming and contrition. Ironic.
Ironic too that while Clinton now lobbies superdelegates for votes, claiming Wright’s defamation has ruined Obama for the GE, as First Lady, she sat next to Reverend Wright, a fact she has never once mentioned.
But others have attested to Wright’s excellent reputation.
These Christian and Jewish church leaders wrote an open letter calling for an end to the month-long attack on Pastor Wright. Dean Snyder, the pastor at the Clinton’s church has written to Hillary Clinton and made a television appearance decrying Wright’s defamation. Recently, CNN news covered a press conference at which, among others, the President of the United Church of Christ and Trinity’s new pastor joined together to support Wright and to call for a serious discusssion of race and religion.
Their defense trumps “mad dog’s” condemnation because they know what it was like to hear Wright preach. Not one of these esteemed Christians expresses a qualm about Obama’s sitting “in those pews” for twenty years listening to Wright preach.
Not one expresses a qualm about Obama bringing his wife and children to Wright’s sermons.
Rather, Reverend John Thomas, President of UCC, took a turn at the microphone to sum up supporters’ opinions, lauding Wright for his inspired ministry, affirming Wright and Trinity’s stellar reputation in Chicago. Reverend Moss, Trinity’s new Pastor, spoke, as he has before, giving Wright credit for Trinity’s success in its many missions, while his own demeanor showed that the church continues in good hands.
Let me explain that the United Church of Christ is the white denomination Trinity belongs to. And so, though it is indeed heartening that UCC’s distinguished President, and other men of good judgment and faith, joined Moss on Wright and Trinity’s behalf, it also begs a question:
Why should a predominantly black church need its white leadership to bolster its testimony? Of course, there is the fact that UCC is Trinity’s “parent” denomination. But isn’t it also the case that the white American public gives greater credence to white people’s testimony than to black people’s, to white churches than to black? Why is it that white religious leaders, no matter how divisional and far-fetched,have never been targeted by such a relentless cycle of bad publicity?
The answer rests on the crack in our country’s foundation, on the unequal division of power underlying our institutions, on the taint of money and favor in our media ; and finally, on racial stereotype that far too many white Americans still endorse and propagate, thoughtlessly, recklessly, at times maliciously.
I do believe our shared wound will open and bleed forth before it heals. We can, we will, begin to heal together.
To start, we must reject and denounce this hi-tech character assassination of Reverend Wright and Trinity Church. In doing so, we will demand, not only for this man and this church, but for all, our absolute right to freedom of religion, regardless of color or creed.
