Mo, you're right: Wright is not only a "wackadoodle," he is a flaming egotist who has himself discredited all his learned and compassionate talk with Bill Moyers last Friday. He is not only saying "God damn America" in the abstract, he is saying "God damn America and everybody in it who doesn't recognize me as the supreme last word on the black church in America and God damn Barack Obama the politician," even though Obama has been the best hope for America as a presidential candidate who has had a real chance to take us at last in a direction we all hunger for.
I've seen a press conference in which Barack reluctantly denounced Wright's barnstorming tour of egotism of the last few days, and it's clear that the infantile behavior of the man has taken a lot of fight out of Barack. I know why. Barack said this:
"I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings. That's who I am, that's what I believe, and that's what this campaign has been about."
I fear that those words are going to be this good man's epitaph. I wish it were not so but I don't believe in miracles the way I once did.
Two other African-Americans, Gene Robertson in the Washington post and Bob Herbert in the New York Times, have said that Reverend Wright does not speak for them or for most of the black community but for himself. E.J. Dionne in the Post said that the campaign has shrunk from a great to a small one.
Small campaigns for small people. The chickens have come home to roost, indeed. The press eats this shit up and we eat it up. We get what we deserve.
Footnote: By the way, even though I damn Wright for his wackadoodle behavior, I believe that he has been rendered wacky by the endless loop sound-bite of his sermons that have dismissed and caricatured the man. In his shoes I think I'd do the same thing he has done. The chickens have come home to roost. R.I.P.
2 comments:
Come on,now. Defeatism is not the answer.
Thanks, friend. I feel a little more heartened today. In my case, the word is fatalism, not, I hope, defeatism. Fatalism is a venerable old philosophical approach which I've learned both professionally and personally and often forget to put into practice when in the trenches. "Let go and let God," we say.
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