I watched Bill Moyers interview the Reverend Jeremiah Wright tonight on PBS. Anyone who knows Moyers knew what to expect: propoganda disguised as hip, thoughtful, journalism. In this case, Moyers and Wright missed a great opportunity, for it seems to me that all the material was there, right in front of the viewer, out of which Reverend Wright might have constructed a reasonable explanation for his rhetorical excesses.
Two of those excesses, saying Goddamn America, and blaming 9/11 on America, did seem a bit more defensible when more of the preceding sermons were included. All Wright had to say was something like this: as someone who loves America, I hold her to a very high standard; as a preacher of the gospel, I am duty bound to remind her of her sins. For both reasons I sometimes get carried away and say things that I do not mean and do not really believe. That wouldn't have entirely gotten him off the hook, or made everyone feel better, but I think it would have let most of the air out of this balloon.
Instead, Moyers presented Wright as a Biblical prophet, on the same level as Martin Luther King (to whom Wright repeatedly compared himself), if not Jesus. Neither Moyers nor Wright found fault with one word of the infamous sermons. They blamed the scandal entirely on wicked people who produced sound bites from the sermons, taken out of context.
The defense of Wright that emerges from the interview was based on two sophisms. The first goes like this: Reverend Wright criticized America and he said "Goddamn America." Therefore, anyone who objects to the latter is really intolerant of the former. When Wright said, quite rightly, that no government is God and that all governments fail, Moyers chimed in to say that you [Wright] could be crucified for saying that. That, of course, is utter krap. No one prays to George W. or confuses the U.S. Government with the Divine Power. This was a straw man made of rather transparent straw.
The second sophism, for which Reverend Wright was solely responsible, was that in saying "Not God Bless America, but Goddamn America" he was simply saying that God disapproves of many of America's actions. But that is a silly argument. A blessing does not imply approval, else no human being would warrant God's blessing. When someone says "God Bless America," this is a simple, informal prayer for God's help, on behalf of one's country. It is the equivalent of "God Save the Queen." If Reverend Wright was saying that God condemns many of America's past deeds, he would surely be correct, or so it seems to me. But condemnation is something we can respond to by atonement, and a will to be a better people. Damnation is final judgment. Reverend Wright is a smart enough man to know that he is playing the sophist with language here.
Reverend Wright said that 9/11 was a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." He defended this by saying that he heard it from a White man, an ambassador speaking on Fox Channel. But surely race has nothing to do with it. It is one thing to say that America's misdeeds have created the conditions that were partially responsible for the terrorist attack on the world trade center. It was reasonable and altogether appropriate for a preacher to warn us against the excesses of revenge at that moment, days after the September attack. It is something else to say that we deserved the 9/11 attack, which is what the phrase "chickens coming home to roost" means. That is analogous to saying that someone who is infected with HIV when he was shooting up smack deserves to die from AIDS.
Most, but not all of Reverend Wright's criticisms of America in the passages quoted from his sermons were undeniable. Slavery, the treatment of Africans before and after the end of slavery, are examples. I do not agree that the use of atomic bombs on Japan was wrong, but that is certainly a respectable opinion. But precisely if you think that such criticisms are important, you have to avoid adding stupid and irresponsible accusations to the list.
Unless I missed it, Moyers never asked Wright whether he really believes that the U.S. Government deliberately provides drugs to Black Americans, or that the U.S. Government invented the AIDS virus. or that the death of Christ is laid at the feet of "Italians." These bits of lunacy may play well before some congregations, but they give license to anyone else to ignore all the rest of what he is saying. It is Wright's flights of fantasy, straying into conspiracy theory and racist territory, are what got him and his friend Barack into trouble.
Reverend Wright's real trouble, I think, is the same as Obama's: they never talk to anyone who doesn't believe the same things they do. Wright's interview with Moyers was more of the same. He efforts at hagiography did Wright no favors.
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