The Reverend, Research, and Timing

Jeremiah Wright is back in the news, and it's interesting to see what the billions of pundits, both professional and amateur, are making of it. Of course there's still the right-wing bloviating about what a horrible excuse for an American he is (although he served in the Marine Corps, see below, and in the Navy as chaplain, and most of those doing the spouting have no service record). There are the denials, the parsing of words, the running away, the wringing of hands, etc etc etc.



What's lost here is the plain fact that this has nothing to do with anything. Jeremiah Wright is a pastor, Barack Obama is a politician. They speak different languages and serve different functions. Did anyone hold W. to everything Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or Ted Haggard ever said or did? (Off point, has anyone even noticed that one of W.s current spiritual advisors, Reverand Kirbyjon Caldwell, has apparently endorsed Obama despite this controversy?)



This is non-news. It's heartening in a way to see Wright come out into the open to defend himself, his church, and his sermons against those who know nothing but assume everything, who attack without firm ground to stand on. Wright's sermons belong to a larger context than this ridiculous primary season. The black church itself is something that is all but unknowable to white folks. It comes from a place of resistance, of clinging to identity for survival, and to think Sean Hannity or anyone else can sum it up and dismiss it in a sound bite is beyond absurd. It's idiotic.


(The picture below is of Wright, right, tending to LBJ in the hospital in 1966.)



And while I'm at it, the same thing goes for the attacks about William Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground. Stanley Fish writes eloquently about the absurdity of this line of attack, as he has done previously about the absurdity of requiring politicians to denounce and reject things other people have said.

The bottom line is, if you don't know the entirety of what the man has said and done, you don't know what you're talking about. A few words or phrases lifted out of context for immediate judgment are not a reasoned argument, but a sign of ignorance and laziness.

Dig deeper, learn the whole story, then see if your thoughts have changed. If you can't learn the whole truth, perhaps the best option is to avoid spouting platitudes and opinions about it. Otherwise, proclaim and pronounce all you will, but it's just meaningless noise.

Now, that said, after following some of Wright's publicity tour and reading some of the reaction to it, I have to wonder why he's doing this. The obvious answer is to defend himself against all the accusations flying around about him. But he has to know this isn't doing Obama any good. In fact, it's giving lots of people the excuse they need to vote against him.

Andrea Mitchell said it eloquently on Meet the Press on Sunday: "I think racism is a real factor here. I don't think it's being polled correctly because I don't think it can be polled correctly. I think it is what you see in some of his failure to connect with a particular sector of the electorate... it is a real issue that there is a resistance to him on some level in the electorate, and you hear these things from voters when you talk to them. "Oh, I heard that he's not really a Christian." "Oh, well, he didn't, you know, put his hand over his heart." All this willingness to believe totally erroneous things about Barack Obama, which begins to congeal, and I think it's a problem."

I believe that. No one wants to admit to being racist. But the willingness--almost the urgency--to believe some of these ridiculous things, to find an easy excuse to not vote for the guy, signals some other thought process going on just below the surface. Call it what you will.

So will Wright go away? Will he hurt Obama's chances? Or will this all eventually just fade from the front pages? Who knows. We've come a long way in this silliest of primaries, and unfortunately, it feels as if we've got a long way to go.