The Wright Stuff

So Obama's old pastor said some controversial stuff. It would behoove voters, however, to consider more than just the three- or four-second clips that have been played so much in order to get a better idea of exactly what this Wright guy was saying. (Of course, I realize that the average voter is, unfortunately, not terribly interested in getting "hooved," preferring to let his opinions be formed by sound bites and hysterical pundit types, so I don't have a lot of hope that people will delve more deeply on their own. But, for the sake of the more intelligent...)

I have looked, for example, at a 10-minute clip of the sermon containing the "chickens are coming home to roost" quip about 9/11. What does it show? Well, the gist of the argument seems to be that 9/11 was something like retribution for all the awful things America itself has done in the past. Wright mentions how the country was taken forcefully from Native Americans through genocide, how nuclear bombs killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan, and the like. 9/11 then, he says, is something like America being punished for its sins.

So, is this really all that controversial?

I think not. While I think it obviously wrong (in the sense of incorrect) to draw any causal connection between things like the bombing of Hiroshima and 9/11, it is just as obvious that some of America's actions in the Middle East (many of which have been unjust) were viewed by bin Laden et al. as provocations (why obvious? Because he (bin Laden) said so). Now, does that make bin Laden's slaughter of civilians justified? Of course not. But anyone with a little common sense can see that in some vague sense, Wright was right: 9/11 was retribution for some American actions; it was "chickens coming home roost."

Of course, Wright's argument, if one can call it that, was not nearly so subtle: again, there is really no connection whatever between, say, America's mistreatment of the Sioux over a hundred years ago and Al-qaeda's attack. In suggesting that there was, Wright has to make the illogical sort of suppositions that religious types are always keen on making: one, that there is a God, and two, that He would be both so interested in human affairs and so unjust that he would punish individual members of a nation for what other individual members of that nation did at one time or another. Surely, that is stupid on both scores. But, to the extent that the vast majority of voters are kind of stupid in these regards, it wasn't a particularly radical argument that Wright was making.

My larger point, then, is that while brief snippets of these sermons certainly are proving controversial, when one views them in their context it appears far more questionable that they should be so controversial. Now granted, I haven't heard all the contexts for all the offending clips, but if the one above is representative, it seems that the media are successfully making mountains out of molehills.

All of which has some bearing on the even bigger question: how do Wright's statements over the years reflect on Obama himself? Granted, if Wright had been saying, "Go out and kill whitey" or "America is the Great Satan" in all of his speeches for the twenty years or so years Obama has been attending the church, then I'd say Obama would be rightly dead politically. If, however, these few clips, taken out of context, are the very worst people could find, I don't think they can really be taken to reflect seriously on Obama's own views. And indeed, while right-wingers fulminate against Obama over these snippets, saying that he must have known what a bad man his preacher was, I'd say it's perfectly plausible to think that he didn't happen to hear the three or four bits of rabble rousing upon which all the accusations are based.

But hey, let's say he had heard them all. So what? I mean, really. Wright is variously being called a racist, someone who hates a America, and (race-specifically) an anti-Semite. But wait, what, exactly, about even the most offensive of his comments makes him any one of those things? Granted, the "God damn America" bit (which I think is easily the most damaging for Obama) could certainly indicate that Wright is unpatriotic (though again, the context may suggest a far more nuanced view), but I see nothing in the abrasive clips that suggests Wright is a either a racist generally or an anti-Semite specifically. Does he, like so may black leaders, seem to view the world through an excessively race-tinted lens? Fo' shizzle. But I see no "kill whitey" clip/smoking gun that could have demanded, reasonably, that Obama should have leapt up in the middle of some sermon and denounced Wright then and there some 5, 10, or 15 years.

And lacking that, it seems pretty silly to say that Wright himself is a racist, not to mention vastly more ridiculous to say that Obama is too. Even if Wright had made one or two inarguably racist comments over the years, would it follow that Obama must share his pastor's views? Well, could one or two racist comments by someone who is not Obama reasonably be taken to override the hundreds, if not thousands, of statements clearly calling for racial harmony made in this campaign by someone who is Obama (i.e., Obama)? I mean, if Obama says, in effect, "I am not a racist" and "I am not a Muslim" and "I love America" over and over and over again, why would anyone with half a brain not simply take him at his word? I mean, why the hell would someone who hates America run for president? To think that he would, and would lie about his seething hatred just so he can win, you have to actually believe that he is some sort of Manchurian candidate bent on winning the presidency simply so he can destroy the country. And if you're gonna believe something that obviously, well, retarded, then you should just count yourself amongst the conspiracy nuts who think that the moon landing was faked and that aliens walk among us (maybe Obama is one of them!).

No, sadly, what the whole Wright controversy and its effects on Obama in the polls demonstrate, is that far too many voters still have knee-jerk, visceral reactions to images of an angry looking black man. As Wright thunders away in the clips, alarm bells go off in the reptilian parts of some people's minds: "Angry black man scary! Me no like!...What? Obama like angry black man?! Grr, me no like Obama!" A little condescending? Oh hell yes, but all the same, far far closer to the truth, I think, than the Obama's-preacher-is-evil-and-therefore-Obama-himself-is-evil narrative.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that all this might not hurt Obama significantly in the long run. I mean, voters wouldn't be the saps that they are if fear-mongering images of wolves and red phones and angry black men didn't have greater power over them than they ought to. And, after numerous efforts by Clinton surrogates and right-wingers to turn Obama's race into a negative, the Wright flap has clearly met with the most success, and I think it will continue to dog Obama no matter what happens.

That said, his speech on race has certainly done a great deal to lessen the damage, and while, as kgaard recently demonstrated so pointedly, partisan hacks will find things to howl about in even the best of speeches, it seems that if anyone has the chops to weather this political storm, it may be Obama.

Meanwhile, Clinton must be hoping, on the other hand, that white voters will flee from Obama en masse, because with the would-be re-votes in Michigan and Florida all but dead, she's gonna need colossal victories in the remaining states to overcome Obama's delegate lead. And, as I said before, I don't think even the Democratic party is self-destructive enough to try to take the nom from Obama if he wins the most pledged delegates, no matter how much Clinton's scurrilous attacks might leave him weakend for the general.

And hey, after five years in Iraq, McCain still doesn't seem to have a firm grasp over something so basic as the difference between Shiites and Sunnis, so I hardly think even a weakened Dem nom can't still have a very solid shot at beating him.