Do I Hear An Amen?

The tempest in the Obama teapot rages on, as he attempts to distance himself, with ever-increasing ferocity, from the Wright Reverend's inflammatory rhetoric. To which my first reaction is, "If this is how he treats his friends..." And I guess the second half of the sentence could be "... how's he gonna treat these gun-toting, Bible-clinging, typical white folks once he becomes president and acquires the power of life and death over half the world?" But you can finish it your own way. In any case, it seems that the threatened stunning blow from the Clinton camp -- assuming there really was one in the works, and it was not like Saddam's alleged WMDs -- won't be required, because the Obama campaign is melting down based on its own internal contradictions, not unlike the Soviet system (but -- thankfully! -- in much less time). Now, if I were a true-blue conspiracy theorist, I might suggest that the Rev. Wright is secretly on the payroll of the Clinton campaign -- or that of McCain -- or both. But I'm afraid that the real explanation is not nearly that, um, colorful. It's just that Rev. Wright refuses to play politics -- at least in the usual sense -- whereas Obama has dipped himself in politics like a sheep in sheepdip, and as a result is being forced to publicly distance himself from ideas he believes in, or used to, and from people whose ideas he believes in, or used to, and... well hell, what _is_ the story here, anyway? Everyone is saying, well, Obama could not have sat in a pew in that church for 20 years and not absorbed some of what was being said from the pulpit. To which I respond, how many church services have the Clintons attended? How many Masses has Ted Kennedy gone to (and Mario Cuomo, etc.)? Things don't necessarily rub off. But the real issue goes a bit deeper than that.

The first thing we have to consider is that black preaching -- i.e., preaching by a black minister in a black church -- really is a different phenomenon from what we (if the reader is white) remember growing up with. Black preaching is, first and foremost, an art form. It is designed to entertain... to stimulate... to excite... and to aid and abet bonding and cohesion within the "faith community". Only secondarily is it intended to cause a significant change in "hearts and minds", and even less is it intended to transmit factual information. The "content" of a black sermon can be compared to what was called, in the salad days of Bolshevism, "agitprop", i.e. propaganda disseminated for purposes of agitation, or rabble-rousing. In agitprop, the facts are secondary; in fact, they really don't matter at all. What matters is that the content appeals to pre-existing grievances, grudges, and persistent ideas (AKA "memes"), and that it provides an energizing force and a point of focus for that energy. To try and pin down a propagandist as to the factuality of what he is saying is totally beside the point -- and as someone once remarked about "black" rhetoric, "If it rhymes, it must be the truth." (As evidence for that notion, you need seek no further than Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Or Johnnie Cochran.)

So -- if we allow that there is only a vague correlation between the content of black preacher rhetoric and "fact" -- and that it would not unduly upset anyone to have this pointed out -- is it not then appropriate to ask not only whether Obama "believes" what Rev. Wright says -- or said -- but whether Rev. Wright _himself_ believes it? And I'm not saying that black people -- preachers, politicians, or anyone else -- have any more of a "truth problem" than whites. (They certainly have much less of one than the Clintons, for example.) I'm just asking, is it appropriate to subject their every utterance to a standard that would qualify as cross-examination before the bar? Because that's what the media, and the Clinton camp, and the McCain camp, all appear to be doing, and Obama himself is caught in the middle. He has successfully migrated from a world where words serve certain purposes to a different world where words serve different purposes -- but is late in morphing himself, and his ways of thinking, to match. If he were truly honest -- and maybe a bit of a deconstructionist -- he would say, "Rev. Wright spoke the truth then, and he speaks the truth now. I believed him then, and I believe him now. But there are other truths that ought to be considered. And don't waste my time, and yours, arguing about the apparent contradictions, because it's all true on some level, in some sense." That's if he were truly honest -- and white. Because Bill Clinton has come right out and said things that sounded every bit as crazy, and the media simply ignored it. A white president can do it, but a black candidate has to adhere to the logical standards of Oxford and Cambridge debating societies.

On the other hand... as I've already discussed in detail, Rev. Wright has made some very good points, and it's not enough to just dismiss him as a "radical". If 9-11 was chickens coming home to roost, our own Ron Paul has said that "They [the terrorists] are over here because we're over there." I defy you to tell me the conceptual difference between those two statements. But in Ron Paul's case, the statement was basically ignored by everyone except Rudy Giuliani, who had a conniption right there on stage. Then we have the notion that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government as an instrument of genocide against blacks. Does Rev. Wright believe that as much, or in the same way, as he believes what he said about 9-11? Or is it "agitprop"? Can we expect him to sit down and carefully parse all of his controversial statements, sorting out which ones are factual, which are speculative, and which are designed to elicit amens? No, of course not. He might be able to do this, but he won't, because that would blow the whole business sky-high. He has to hang tough -- and just because his golden-haired boy (so to speak) is in the running for president, he's not about to start groveling, and apologizing, like simply another gutless politician who would lap up dog vomit if he (or she) thought it would get him (or her) one more vote. So yeah, Wright is a radical, and he has guts. He is, like it or not, a man of principle, and Obama is, by comparison, a will-o-the-wisp. That's the difference between preaching and politics. That's why blacks can do both at once, up to a point, whereas whites have a much harder time. Blacks understand (if only implicitly) the nature and value of propaganda, whereas whites have a tendency to be tied down by facts. One would think this would mean that blacks would make better politicians -- and they do, up to a point, and that's the point at which the cross-examination by the media and other politicians begins.