On Some Things Being Wrong
I do not think that Obama’s relationship with Wright reflects meaningfully on him or tells us anything about his politics or spirituality, anymore than would Bush’s relationship with Falwell, who offered this after 9/11:
I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’
Bush repudiated these remarks, as Obama has Wright’s (Bush publicly expressed sorrow at Falwell’s death, so we can assume the break wasn’t total). We are accustomed to politicians needing to appeal to the most morally atavistic “spiritual leaders” of our time, whether Democrats must pretend to find Sharpton intelligent or Republicans must nod in agreement with the disingenuous Pat Robertson.
The entire Wright affair is phony. That is, the Republican and Clinton machines are manufacturing intellectual and moral indignation and leading the media in a chorus of consternation, when it is plain that they understand -as well as anyone- that Obama is not a real disciple of Wright’s so much as a politician who joined an important church; and he has distanced himself from him exactly as far as Bush has from his many dubious benefactors.
But.
While the media noise is bullshit, so too are efforts to contextualize Wright’s idiocy. This is not an intelligent man, despite the rather pained efforts of some exceedingly smart people to suggest otherwise. For example, Squashed -who is normally spot on about politics- offers the following tortured assessment of Wright’s claim that the US government created and distributed AIDS to kill the poor (my comments are in brackets):
It’s a bit paranoid-conspiracy-theoryesqe. [A bit?]. While the government didn’t create AIDS, it was notoriously sluggish to respond to it. [A factually irrelevant non-sequitur that suggests moral equivalence]. There were large segments of the population that considered it divine judgment on homosexuals. [That some citizens believe this is not the government’s fault; even if Reagan thought that it has no substantive bearing on Wright’s statement, and Wright has only recently abandoned his own homophobia]. But eventually we got things sorted out. And the government didn’t deliberately spread it. At least, not AIDs. Small pox infected blankets to wipe out Native Americans? Well, that was a long time ago. We didn’t have a government then, at least the first time it happened. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male? Um…well, it’s not quite as bad as creating and deliberately spreading AIDS. [Bad, yes; but not the same].
What’s notable here is that Squashed searches for ways to make Wright seem less imbecilic, actively seeking to buttress a moronic argument, perhaps out of sympathy for Obama or antipathy towards Obama’s foes. I propose an alternate method for assessing a statement’s validity instead of this historical-free-association technique. Let’s use critical interrogation:
- To believe the US created AIDS to kill the poor is completely and ludicrously ignorant (a) historically, (b) scientifically, (c) in terms of what we know of human behavior.
- To be so ignorant requires either a total lack of education or an hysterical hatred of the US sufficient to justify delusion (or: a willingness to lie).
- As the US did not create AIDS to kill the poor, saying that it did makes you wrong in precisely the same way that you’d be wrong to say that 9/11 happened because of abortionists.
Indeed, the only difference between Falwell and Wright is that the latter is aesthetically more palatable to liberals, although no less a lying demagogue. All politics is oppositional, though, so I see atheists and socialists and academics rushing to the defense of this narcissistic charlatan.
Indeed, elsewhere, Squashed (and I’m not picking; I just know Squashed is down for debate!) writes of Wright’s bastardized and shallow understanding of racial science, an understanding similar to that offered by White Supremacists, “The science on this one is, I believe, bad, but the main sentiment, that it’s okay to be different, should be pretty uncontroversial.” Okay, but why are we falling all over ourselves to excuse factually inaccurate statements and asinine pseudo-science? Are we Creationists now?
I favor Obama and am rather livid to see Wright back in the news, but I think it does Obama’s cause a disservice if we pretend Wright is somehow different from one-world-government-fearing right-wing lunatics, or Moral Majority reactionaries, or Stalinists, or extremists of any hue anywhere on the spectrum.
As usual, Squashed gets a great last word: “I wish we could have a political dialog that recognized that America has done both great and terrible things. It’s a lot easier to learn from our mistakes if we can talk about them.” I agree, and think the first step is that both sides must be intellectually honest and must think less oppositionally. Whether he is attacked by Rush Limbaugh or Raul Castro is irrelevant; Wright is just another witless egomaniac with a microphone.