Burying Barack
Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times is not overjoyed by Jeremiah’s tirade:
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.
Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media — this reverend is never going away. He’s found himself a national platform, and he’s loving it.
It’s a twofer. Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived.
While Alessandra Stanley, the Times TV critic lays bare the real problem here:
Cable news commentators have focused on the damage the spectacle inflicted on the embattled Obama campaign. And while Mr. Wright’s behavior may not have been politic for Mr. Obama, it was politics as usual for the television age. In at least one way, Mr. Wright’s star turn may have helped defuse his importance in the long run. The pastor who was thrust upon the public consciousness as a caricature of the angry black man emerged after an exhaustive series of performances as a more familiar television persona: a voluble, vain and erudite entertainer, a born televangelist who quotes Ralph Ellison as well as the Bible and mixes highfalutin academic trope with salty street talk.
Mr. Wright, “voluble, vain, erudite … highfalutin academic trope” is, God help him, a professor!
And if he actually uses the word “trope” in everday conversation, forget about it, he’s REALLY an academic!
Hard to know whether to respond here or in the post above.
Seperate questions appear evident here:
1)Rev. Wright: Is he.as Jiuan Williams said on nPR today, just using the black church as a means of self justification? He certasinly exaggerates and is clearly given to bombast.
I’d like to hear what his mentor, Martun Marty has to say about his speeches this weekend and maybe hear from Fr. Massingale as well. It struck me that there were both good and bad things in what he had to say including stuff abou t’life” on Moyers and also violence at the NAACP meeting. I suspect that will get lost. Also, it might be useful to hear the view of NAACP leadership that invited him.
2)Barak Obama? Consensus is that he’s hurt by Rev. Wright’s speeches, keeping the sound bytes alive, etc.
There is some validity to saying he’s still conjolined in some way to his pastir, despite disagreeing with the bombast,
It’s facile to say that I’d leave my church if my pastor said that.
The game of politics and racial politics is clearly in play here (e.g. NC Republican politic ad.)
3_The media- has any coverage of all this been “fair amd balanced” and I don’t only mean the stilted Fox News approach?
I would still urge a thread her eon Elizabeth Edward’s NYT Sunday Op-Ed on coverage of the campaign and maybe some self examination by folk on how we react to that and to our curent media.
Fr. Imbelli. Thanks for pointing out these articles. Bob N. I’m sorry I can’t respond to your good questions, but I’m running out of time right now!
I just finished reading and discussing Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome this morning with my “Exploring Catholicism” class. I find myself thinking a lot about the similarities and differences between Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Fr. Rinaldo Smith, an alcoholic priest who, in a resemblance to the 4th century ascetic St. Simeon Stylites, lives on top of a 100 foot fire lookout tower in the middle of nowhere. He is not quite at home in the world. Fr. Smith is also the hero of the novel.
Both bearers of the good news – Wright and Smith – are a bit eccentric, “crazy uncle” types, if you will. Both offer scathing and at times powerful social critiques. Smith, in case you haven’t read the novel, remarked that “Tenderness leads to the gas chambers.” Just as offense is taken and eyes are rolled at “Goddamn America,” one can imagine the same reaction to Fr. Smith’s elusive and provocative statement. Percy takes this, by the way, from Flannery O’Connor’s “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann.” [“When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber”]. In the character of Fr. Smith, Percy is arguing a point he has articulated elsewhere, namely, that “certain consequences, perhaps unforeseen, follow upon the acceptance of the principle of the destruction of human life for what may appear to be the most admirable social reasons.” He paints a picture in many ways of what JPII might have had in mind in his culture of life/culture of death framework, while recognizing that such a dichotomy often cuts right across the human heart.
So I was giving Wright the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to follow the advice of my former teacher John Kavanaugh, S.J. (a piece in America to which David Gibson pointed us), who challenged us not to cast too quickly from our midst any criticism of our way of life or any indictment of our cherished ideologies. Yet Wright’s latest speaking tour and the book deal are prompting me to question this. A theme that runs throughout Percy’s writings is the devaluation of religious language: “So decrepit and so abused is the language of the Judeo-Christian religions that it takes an effort to salvage them, the very words, from the husks and barnacles of meaning which have encrusted them over the centuries.” “And it doesn’t help, writes Percy, “that when religious words are used publicly…they are often expropriated by some of the worst rogues around, the TV preachers.” While it would be highly unfair to place Jeremiah Wright in such a narrow column (the Moyers interview is evidence of this), he is beginning to evoke a similar affect in me, the kind of affect I feel when I hear a TV preacher [Alessandra Stanley’s “Avatar of the American Celebrity Principle.”]
In this respect, I much prefer Fr. Smith’s self-presentation and tone – exemplified in his address to members of the medical community (including abortionists, euthanasists, etc.): “Do you know why you are going to listen to me? Because every last one of you is a better man than I and you know it! …Every last one of you knows me and what I am, a failed priest, an old drunk, who is only fit to do one thing and to tell you one thing…”