From the Editor's Desk
“God Damn America”
The Case for Reverend Wright
“Who wants to be well-adjusted to injustice? What kind of human being do you want to be?” — Cornel West
I feel a sense of disbelief when I read the lies of Media Street. — Angelic Upstarts
Although I realize I run the risk of sounding naively optimistic, I like to think that most intelligent media observers have by now figured out — or indeed figured out long ago — that the scandal surrounding the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s supposedly inflammatory statements about race and America is nothing more than the knee-jerk jingoism of a self-righteous, monolithic, and largely conservative corporate media, obsessed with ratings, advertising sales, and substanceless controversy. The idea that Barack Obama, a black, liberal, Democratic Party candidate, would have to defend himself for something that his pastor said more than six years previous is not only ridiculous (considering how many other, more important things the media could have chosen to talk about: such as the candidates’ positions on Iraq, Iran, the economy, health care, or job creation) but smacks of the worst kind of ideological hypocrisy. No one, after all, is asking McCain or Bush and company to condemn the misogynistic and homophobic ramblings of reverends Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or John Hagee, all three of whom supported or continue to support the Republican Party and its candidates. The thought that Fox News would run loops of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell agreeing with one another that the ACLU, feminists, gays, and abortionists were to blame for the attacks on the World Trade Center is laughable. That they would do so in an election year when the Republicans were facing their toughest challenge since Bill Clinton’s first run for the presidency is, of course, unimaginable.
But that’s not the real point here. It is obvious — to me at least — that the Wright controversy was at best a hypocritical distraction, and at worst a calculated assault on an already battered and struggling Democratic frontrunner. What I find most disturbing about the whole issue, however, is not that the media spent so much time smearing Barack Obama and Reverend Wright, but that they spent so little time actually thinking about what the reverend said. Not a single commentator thought to ask whether or not the vengeful god of the Old Testament might in fact, if he were still around, “damn” the United States; not a single mainstream columnist asked whether the attacks of September 11 may have actually been generated by US foreign policy; and not a single commentator had the good sense to wonder out loud if indeed we do still live in a country that actively disenfranchises whole portions of its citizenry (namely African Americans).
This unforgivable absence of thoughtfulness brings us to the heart of the Wright controversy, for it is not the factual nature of the Reverend’s statements that were so disturbing for most commentators; it was the way that the reverend refused to conform to the narrow confines of “acceptable debate.” For most Americans, on both sides of our supposedly polarized political spectrum, criticisms of the country or its government are almost always taken as personal attacks. When Reverend Wright said to his congregation “God damn America!...for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!” this was not an attack on the people of the nation, the constitution, or our “amber waves of grain.” It was the good reverend’s way of holding accountable, the historic actions of a people and a government, which, God knows, has sinned as well as any other empire. Indeed, just prior to the reverend’s qualified condemnation of America (“as long as she…”) he made a point of describing and condemning the failures of other “empires,” including Britain, Germany, and Russia. The Reverend’s sermon was theologically about the divine will of God as greater than the governments of nations — a position, I am sure he shares with Falwell, Robertson, and many other people of faith — but of course, figuring this out requires an exertion of effort greater than just watching the evening news.
Likewise, when the reverend talked about “America’s chickens coming home to roost,” a phrase that received an enormous amount of media attention, he was not merely free associating some kind of anti-American tirade. Nor was he, as it might have appeared to many viewers of Fox News, directly quoting Malcolm X. He was in fact quoting a September 16, 2001 interview with US Ambassador Edward Peck, “ a white man,” as the reverend made sure to tell his audience, who had himself quoted the phrase from Malcolm X to help explain the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. In this case too the context of the Reverend’s words is extremely important. The sermon he gave that day was not a condemnation of America, but was an attempt to understand the September 11 attacks and what Wright called “the insanity of the cycle of violence and the cycle of hatred.” Wright was perfectly correct to argue, as he did, that the enslavement of Africans, the annihilation of native peoples, and the bombing of civilians in Panama, Grenada, and Iraq were all acts of “state sponsored” terrorism. To suggest that that other history of terrorism against the united States, including the attacks on the World Trade Center are somehow unrelated to this history of US aggression would not only be intellectually dishonest but politically naive. But Wright is actually in some pretty good company here, since his rhetoric is really not so distinct from Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, when he says:
“we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.”
Yes, some of the atrocities that Wright condemns are thankfully a distant part of American history, but the fact that many of these atrocities have continued past their “appointed time,” the fact that we have not learned from our mistakes, that we refuse to make amends for these actions, and that we continue to aggressively pursue an imperialist agenda, is at least one rationale for the hatred that we’ve incurred and the costs we still have to pay.
Reverend Wright, far from representing the lunatic fringe, is in fact more closely aligned with the historically mainstream activism that has helped to define that other America: the America of Emerson, Thoreau, Douglas, Lincoln, Dewey, DuBois, and King. Perhaps we can forgive the political maneuvering of Barack Obama’s more recent condemnation of his former pastor — after all winning elections sometimes requires playing the game of politics — but who do we blame when our true political culture and the culture of our political debate becomes nothing more than a sacrosanct, chauvinistic, and reactionary hatred of difference. If you ask me, the reverend’s righteous anger is a welcome and necessary antidote to what has too long been a feckless and unthinking politics of patriotism.
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