Lately callers on right wing talk radio (so called because the hosts don’t know how to listen) have been assuming it is a fact that Barack Obama abandoned the Grandmother who loved him and whom he obviously loved in return just because he said some of the statements she made about black men sometimes made him cringe. He didn’t disown her, or Rev. Wright, he disowned their statements. On the black side and the white side, that’s consistency about what to do with crazy relatives. My own white mother, who had a Master’s Degree in Education, used to say,
“Dennis, don’t go outside without your shirt on. You’ll get black as a nigger.”
What am I supposed to do? Say it didn’t happen? Disown my mother? Or just condemn the statement?
The answer is you can’t win, so shut up and play. After he gave credit to the feelings of bitterness over affirmative action in poor white communities callers continue to accuse him of doing exactly the opposite. After he said he absolutely condemned the offensive statements by Jeremiah Wright, they said it wasn’t enough, that he should have condemned the man in addition to condemning his behavior 20 years before he committed the offenses. Why aren’t Republicans required to condemn Oral Roberts when they go to Bob Jones University to give a speech and get his obligatory blessing? .
Yes Wright is paranoid and just generally crazy, but even crazy talk has a basis and even paranoid people have enemies. When you consider that terrorism is defined as killing innocent civilians, what do you call firebombing Dresden and nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki? We all know terrorism and torture are wrong when they’re done to us, but that condemnation tends to fade when they’re done to our enemies. Throughout the ages new methods and inventions in warfare have been condemned as unfair by the defeated. The British said the Indians didn’t fight fair as they took their land. The French said the British didn’t fight fair at Agincourt because they used the longbow. Connecting Hiroshima and Nagasaki to 9/11 is a stretch, but connecting 9/11 to assassinating democratically elected leaders and bringing down elected democracies in the third world under Kissinger’s doctrine of “the economic imperative” might be a little more debatable. Paranoid ideas about the government introducing AIDS to wipe out blacks have reasonable roots in experiments on black mental patients at Tuskegee and eugenic experiments on black welfare recipients in the fifties. There may not be evidence that the government is selling drugs to black people right now, but in 1986 the San Jose Mercury News ran an expose entitled “Dark Alliance. The CIA’s Complicity in the Crack Epidemic. The Reader’s Digest of March, 08, has an article in which an FBI agent let five innocent men go to the chair or life imprisonment to protect unreliable information from a snitch. There are other articles and books that say the CIA has a record of running arms and drugs and hiring the Mafia to do its dirty work. Are they all totally wrong?
How wrong is Wright in his claim that the U.S. is engaging in state sponsored terrorism through its support of Israel? There is evidence, some of which was cited in Jimmy Carter’s book, of human rights abuses of the Palestinian people. If this is good evidence, it is proof that Bush Violated “The Arms Exports Control Act” by providing 2.2 billion in military aid to Israel in 05 alone. Would this be unusual for the U.S.? In 1984 Reagan’s policy of “constructive optimism” provided a rationale for continuing the white minority regime in Pretoria, which continued to mow down the black majority in the streets, keep popular democratically elected leader, Nelson Mandela behind bars, and provoke Bishop Desmond Tutu to characterize Reagan’s support of Aparteid as “Immoral, evil and totally un-Christian”. Just another paranoid black leader on a rant?
Is that characterization of Reagan totally inconsistent with a man who according to some sources manipulated the hostage crisis so it was ongoing when Carter ran for re-election, and a man who at least consented to the arms for hostages deal but somehow got no condemnation for the Iran/Contra scandal? Which is more obscene, saying GD America or taking the solar panels off The White House? If you want it from a white guy, in the 1800s Mark Twain begged his country, “America, redeem your honor! Come home!” In 1909 President Taft ordered the overthrow of Nicaraguan President Jose Santos Zelaya. Are Stephen Kinzer and John Perkins (“Economic Hit Man”) both just crazy radicals for citing Guatemala, South Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Panama, Iraq, Granada, Haiti etc.. as places where we, or the CIA, or United Fruit or Exxon displaced dictators AND democratically elected presidents with generals or outright thugs, and tried to do the same thing with Cuba? There’s always room for doubt, but what kind of country tells ministers such as Desmond Tutu or Rev. Wright not to talk politics from the pulpit? How about a country that as of 1850 was still enforcing “The Fugitive Slave Act” under Article IV, Section 2 of its constitution? Yes Wright’s crazy, but compared to what? Which “crazy old uncle’s” vision of America is crazier, Walt Disney’s, Norman Rockwell’s, Ronald Reagan’s or Jeremiah Wright’s?
To ask some people to let go of their spite is to ask them to be nobody. It only elevates their bile to ask them to consider the reasons for the anger that has been boiling under pressure in the black community for over a hundred years and their frenzy is still being whipped up by talk show hosts who love to pit race against race, in order to divert attention from economic injustice across the board. Even Gloria Steinem played the race, not to mention the victim card when she said white women got the vote fifty years after black men. She somehow forgot to put that statement in context with the fact that fifty years before that black men were slaves and fifty years after that they got The Voting Rights Act so they actually could vote unless they were lynched, required to present proof of residence, were automatically classed as felons, were given wrong information or just had their votes discounted.
McCain’s not going down the road of criticizing Rev. Wright because he doesn’t want the same scrutiny directed at his own minister’s comments, but he can game the media by having an operative put videos & negative information out there and then fire the operative so he can have it both ways. One pundit played the game with himself: “What do you think about Obama kicking his flag lapel pin to the curb? Well maybe that’s not so important, but no hand over the heart during the national anthem? Well I really don’t care about that, but Michelle said this was the first time she felt proud of her country, well maybe that’s nothing but…..”, so he can seem to be big and generous by “forgiving” minutiae, add zero to zero and keep on coming up with more than zero. This is genius math.
Or at least clever the way Rush is clever, getting Republicans to switch parties to mess with the Democratic primaries, scewing over 8 percent of the vote in favor of Hillary in Texas and Ohio. Clever like Hillary borrowing from Rove’s playbook and accepting his help, if not his endorsement, even if he’s giving it because he thinks, the way Rush thinks, that McCain can beat her. And these assaults on democracy AREN’T unpatriotic? As fast as a fast fact checker can check the mess they throw out the bus, as fast as a person can realize the rules of debate, logic and semantics have been violated, they can throw twice as much misinformation out and throw twice as many operatives under the bus, and by the time the cleanup operation is over, they’ve delivered the entire nation for McCain, the polar ice has melted and it’s too late to do anything except continue to slaughter each other in 140 degree heat.
Barack would have been right when he said, “This is not a zero sum game in which your dreams come at my expense.” IF his speech could even reach those it tried to address, who only had time to listen between takeout and sit coms to the bytes and pieces excerpted by the very talk show hosts he mentioned who’ve built careers on race- and poor white- baiting. He said he still has faith in the basic goodness of the man & woman on the street, but my faith in said people, at least as represented by the callers on talk radio, has been seriously shaken.
How am I supposed to HOPE for CHANGE when all their motivation goes the other direction? To see the big picture, to see America, warts and all, to bear witness to greatness, can sometimes make the best of us feel unbearably small. No wonder they hear voices, and find coded messages in the newspapers, political speeches and even on Sesame Street. No wonder they KNOW about secret plots using the Trilateralists and the U.N. as fronts, aliens who want their jobs and their organs, special interest groups like environmentalists who want their cars, and liberals using the IRS as a front to get their money.
Listening to their unreconstructable bitterness, I was reminded of Jacquelin Kennedy begging Bobby not to run “because America is too full of hate.” It especially seems to hate those who take the high road like MLK and JFK. But there was no assassination, people just cried when W was “elected” in 00 and 04. Is it just me, or are more and more people losing it and going into road rage on and off the road lately? Looking at the estimated cost of the war as 3 to 5 trillion, not counting social damage from returning vets with PTSD, and looking at the ecological/economic emergency looming over us, it’s not unreasonable to assume we could be in bigger trouble than during the depression and WW II combined. Feelings of fear, frustration and hopelessness may not be evident because they run deep, but the fact of our emergency has to be gnawing at us SOMEWHERE. And having our government do horrible things in our name in secret or known CIA prisons can’t be helping much. For good or bad & win or lose, we are herd animals & ironically enough, even those of us who are classed as unpatriotic by the right can’t help identifying with our country. When it supports The School Of The Americas and death squads in South America we feel like crap whether we had a vote on it or not.
Barack’s quote of Faulkner was dead on: “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” It’s all here, everything is here, inside us. So if we want to be real as we attempt to carry our nation’s glorious moments forward we must also consciously carry its injustices and atrocities. Studies in PTSD prove that we, or our bodies at least, continue to run old tapes, in loops; inaccurate, edited loops just like the loops Fox news made of snippets of Rev. Wright’s sermons. The past isn’t dead, we keep on imitating it in myths and pieces until we die of terror or boredom. PTSD proves at least in some sense, a corollary to the golden rule: that what we did to the Indians, the third world, the Iraqis & what we do to others in general, we do to ourselves. Day after day, I sit in my service truck, wishing I could talk INTO the speaker of my radio, and realizing year after year I am not only alone, but totally silenced. Talk radio and politics in general just keep on presenting more and more convincing evidence to me that some small part of all of us is housed in a little room at Abu Ghraib. And nobody can hear us scream.
