Er, ahem, it's all about politics... isn't it?

Friday May 9, 2008

The recent ‘surrey’ which carried the sound bites of the Reverend Wright around the world and gave a new meaning to the blogesphere, almost destroying the candidacy of a senator who has distinguished himself as a loyal American citizen and man of faith in the pew demands sound analysis. Of course, ‘sound analysis’ is a relative term. What appears ‘sound’ to me may seem sheer lunacy to others. I am willing to risk that attribution in posting commentaries by two men I admire, one a journalist the other a bishop. You can be sure that both Bill Moyers and John Shelby Spong have their friends and enemies. The feast of Pentecost is for me both a challenge and an equalizer; a challenge because it forces us to confront our biases and prejudices; an equalizer because it offers a level field in which all people of good will can be recognized for who they are—children of God who are equal in God’s sight regardless of their race, color or creed.

As an American citizen and as a Christian reared in the Catholic tradition, I respect all three candidates, two of whom will be running against each other for the presidency in November. I may not agree with one or another aspect of their respective party platforms or their individual platforms but they have a right to state their case and cause with sincerity in the knowledge that not everyone will agree with them. That’s what has made America great in the past and what will make America great in the future.

That stated, I am waiting for any or all of the candidates to recognize the fact that America is turning the corner. The golden days are over and unless we pull together and make the sacrifices demanded of our ancestors, we may well become an anachronism. The rich must sacrifice for the poor and if they don’t there will be consequences. Racism and sexism must give way to true equality or there will be consequences. Sacrifice is not a politically correct term, which the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families understand only too well. Only within the last few weeks are we beginning to understand the consequences of a national budget gone wild on a field of globalization and the cost of a war out of control at the gas pump, at the supermarket, at the real estate broker and of course in the credit card ‘industry’

I have many close friends in the media. I respect them for their integrity and their commitment to truth. However, I am losing confidence in the media hierarchy. I suppose they are no different from other ‘hierarchies’ in that they do what they need to do to keep money flowing in as well as out. It is hypocrisy to state that there is no spin in the media. None of us is exempt from putting a spin on the facts by quoting ‘authorities’ out of context or editorializing on the facts. I am as guilty as the next person. However, the minimum for honest dialogue is the recognition that in real time, facts must be seen for what they are rather than what we would like them to be.

And so it is against that background that I post two commentaries that make sense to me. Whether or not website we agree or disagree with the opinions presented is less important that that we give them consideration and allow them to challenge our thinking and if necessary, to do the homework necessary to be taken seriously in an intelligent dialogue with public opinion.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
May 2, 2008
I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, “Who’s telling the truth over there?” Everyone he said. Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.” That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright. In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical,” one viewer wrote. A “nut case,” said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist. Many black preachers I’ve known – scholarly, smart, and gentle in person—uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I’ve known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else; a safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed. I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three -fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, “We the people.” Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic.

That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances this week. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle — forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy. Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the united states deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated, while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test. Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide or yourself. At least it helps me to understand the why of them.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions, or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of a preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon white house in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong—white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.
Which means it is all about race, isn’t it? Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this — this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said “beware the terrible simplifiers”.

And from John Shelby Spong, retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark:

May 7, 2008

Jeremiah Wright – Racial and Tribal Politics

The emergence of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright into the presidential campaign is, I am sure, an unexpected and probably unwelcome diversion for the Obama camp. It gets him, as they say, “off message” and lays bare those elemental places in the human psyche where race and tribe collide. People seeking to exploit this issue for political purposes may well be racially motivated, but it is not just race, it is race tied to deep tribal emotions that is being mined.

Few people like public attention focused on the dark side of a nation’s history. Indeed there is pressure, both internal and external, to keep unacceptable shadows out of sight. This desire, however, tends to come only from those who live on the top of the social ladder, it does not work well for those on the bottom. Jeremiah Wright is, therefore, a voice that establishment figures do not want to hear, for they do not want to listen to themselves defined as oppressors. It is, however, difficult for the oppressed not to name their oppressors for what they are.

Slavery was a legally recognized institution in the United States in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The colonists, predominantly both European and Christian, did in fact traffic in human cargo that involved kidnapping Africans, treating them inhumanely, breaking their wills with both fear and the lash, refusing to allow them to be educated, and tearing apart families by selling them individually. White males regularly used black females for sexual activity, producing in America a mulatto population that was without equivocation defined as black. This country was committed to a capitalistic economic system, but the power structure of America did not allow that system to work for people of color. Whites owned both the bodies and the products of black labor, so any wealth created accrued not to the slave but to the master.

Given that situation, it should surprise no one that the victims of this treatment would not regard the ruling class as virtuous. They did not appreciate capitalism since capitalism never rewarded them. Patriotism never grows among those who are a nation’s exploited. When anger, therefore, emerges from this dark history, it is hard to condemn it is inappropriate.

In the distribution of power in this nation, people of color were always left out. Physical labor was all they had to sell and it amassed no economic power in times of slavery and only the barest crumbs in times of segregation. Political power was not available to them since voting was rare. Black males did get the vote after the Civil War, but their ability to do so was compromised through poll taxes, constitutional requirements and the vigorous use of both threats and fear. Social power was also non-existent among those who were defined as the underclass.

Thus the one institution that black people “owned” was their church. Far more than white people have ever realized, the black church was their primary source of power. The black church was the one place where black dignity was conferred, black opinions were honored and black leadership was recognized. The black church was the center of black life and a powerful organizing force that whites have never fully understood.

It was no accident that the leadership of the Civil Rights movement was made up largely of black clergy. It was the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev Al Sharpton, the Rev. Floyd Flake, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, and on and on we could go. These leaders were the only people in the black community not directly dependent economically on the white power structure. Their salaries were paid by the sacrificial gifts of the people they served. Two of these black clergy, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, actually ran for the presidency of the United States. They were both treated benignly by the press for people assumed that their efforts were symbolic, more like tilting at windmills than serious candidacies. The voting rights law signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 made voting easier for black citizens and black candidates could count on these votes. There was little hope then, however, that a broader coalition might be led by a black candidate. The pattern was that the black vote ultimately became part of a larger consensus, normally led by a white candidate. That pattern, however, was destined to change.

In Boston, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2004 I was in attendance, as a member of the press, at the Democratic National Convention that nominated John Kerry for president. He received the endorsement of Al Sharpton, his fellow, but unsuccessful, aspirant for that office. Al Sharpton addressed that convention at length with colorful “preacher” oratory. The one thing that was obvious to me, however, was that the torch of black leadership was about to be passed to a new generation. This shift was personified in two rising leaders.
Harold Ford, a five times elected member of the House of Representatives from a predominantly black Tennessee district, was present. He would win the nomination of the Democratic Party for the vacated senatorial seat in his state in 2006. He was bright, well-educated, articulate and urbane. He was believed capable of crossing the racial divide by winning white voters to his side in sufficient numbers to win Tennessee senate seat. The second figure was a young 42 year old state senator from Illinois, named Barack Obama, who was chosen to give the keynote address by the presumptive nominee, John Kerry. Obama was a Harvard Law School graduate, chosen editor of the Harvard Law Review, who was at that time the nominee of the Democratic Party in Illinois for the office of United States Senator. His address was powerful and electrifying, lifting people beyond the fears that divided blue states from red states, and beyond the boundaries of regional, sexual and racial politics. When I filed my column that week from Boston, I noted that I had finally seen the future. Here in both Harold Ford and Barack Obama were African Americans who could navigate the political waters, build coalitions beyond race and who had the ability and the potential to become the president of the United States. Fate would dictate different paths for the two rising stars. In the 2004 election Barack Obama was a huge winner in Illinois, projecting him to a national status. In 2006 Harold Ford was defeated narrowly by the Republican nominee, Robert Corker, who clearly played the race card to achieve his victory. People still remember that ad with a scantily clad white woman winking at Harold Ford as she invited him to join her at the “playboy party.” I did not anticipate that Obama’s bid for the White House would come as soon as 2008, but when he announced that he was running an immediate recognition spread throughout the nation that here, at last, was a candidate for whom both the party nomination and the presidency were clearly within reach.
Obama’s campaign projected him as a unifier able to articulate tomorrow’s dream, one who would bring about the changes for which the nation yearned. At first some black leaders questioned whether Senator Obama was “black” enough to win the black vote. In the Iowa caucuses, an almost all white state awakened the nation to his potential as a leader. Then in primary after primary he won sufficient votes to move from being a viable candidate to a leading candidate, to where the nomination became “his to lose.” America stood on the threshold of seeing a black president. Those unhappy about that began to do what politicians always do, find something in his background that would cause racial fears to rise, making him unelectable. Enter Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, serving a predominantly black section of Chicago and counting among his members Senator Barack Obama and his family.

The sermons of this man had been videotaped for years. Quoting snippets from them, the Obama critics tapped into the anger of the oppressed that had always been there. Jeremiah Wright’s post 9/11 sermon was particularly rich in passionate, rhetorical and potentially damaging material. Wright was quoted in one short out-of-context sound bite as saying not “God bless America” but “God damn America.” Suddenly our tribal honor appeared to be under attack. What was the context of such a remark? It was a review of what Wright called “majority” acts of terrorism in America’s history: terror by European settlers against Native Americans, by whites against African slaves, by the government against the Japanese Americans in World War II. His point was that if a nation persists in this kind of oppressive behavior, it will eventually create sufficient hatred towards itself that will someday make that nation a target for other’s hate. Those who had been oppressors of their victims can hardly expect their oppressed victims to praise them for it. Victims of American oppression can not say “God bless America,” they rather ask to have those tactics damned. It was strong stuff, but it represented the message of the black church for decades. Whites simply had never heard it before. Could a black candidate nurtured in this kind of church ever lead America as its president? That became the essence of the political debates. To bring together racial fear with tribal zeal is a powerful combination. To run sound bites out of context can also be a powerful shaper of public opinion, This is where we are now politically as a nation. Someone, seeking to destroy America’s first viable African American candidate, had linked him to the historic anger of the black church. This caused some citizens to rethink their broader instincts that enabled them to be Obama supporters in the first place. It was and still is a critical moment in the national consciousness.

How will it play out? Time alone will tell. What is already obvious, however, is that racial fear is still alive and well in America and people will face and deal with it whenever they cast their vote. What is also clear is that when newcomers to the political process achieve power, someone else has to lose it and no one does that easily. Obama is still favored to win the nomination, but one may expect more of this racially tainted fear in the general election. That is when we will determine whether or not a new consciousness has emerged on race in America.

John Shelby Spong

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