Reverend Wright is not necessarily wrong

As I listened to Reverend Wright's Sunday night speech to the ACLU, his speech and later Q and A to the National Press Club, it struck me that on many particulars, he is not actually wrong. Some of his points are well founded and deserve to be part of the national discourse. The fact that they are not tells us a great deal about the national media. Because most of us on Daily Kos already take it for granted that Hagee is at least as bad(far, far worse IMO) I'll dispense with the normal gratuituous swipes at Tweety Bird and the rest of the corporate media (for now). Below, I try to put some context to Wright's remarks.

First, what is this man right about?

He is right to point to U.S. foreign policy as the primary motivating factor behind the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. This does not justify the attacks (and Wright  never said it did): It explains the attacks. U.S. foreign policy is indirectly responsible for the attacks in two ways.

1. It helped to create and for a long time turned a blind eye to the growth of militant, Salafist Islamic groups sponsored by factions within the Saudi government;

2. It has for several decades sponsored and promoted a number of corrupt, repressive regimes.

This does not mean (I hasten to add)that I have any sympathy with extremist groups in the Middle East (or elsewhere). By bringing this issue up, along with discussing our past sponsorship of death squads in Central America, Wright hit the real third rail of American politics-questioning the underlying assumptions that the U.S. should  be the hegemon in world politics. Perhaps it should be-but this issue at least deserves to be discussed.

What is he almost right about? He is almost right about "God damn America". Let's put that comment into perspective. He was quite explicit that he meant God condemns America for the sins of slavery, racism, foreign policy atrocities, an ongoing drug war that disproportionately punishes black men and other similar issues. He said-it is in the Bible and in fact it is. That means he is correct from a Biblical point of view. Perhaps one of the reasons I find Wright to be not offensive on these points is due to my past assocatiations with Mennonite and Quaker churches. No Mennonite or Quaker would be likely to have issued those words in that way, but both Mennonite and Quaker theology would assent to the idea that God condemens slavery, war, etc. To be frank, a part of me finds the attack on Wright to be an attack on my own past religious background.

My objection to Wright on this issue is that I do not believe in a God who condemns or damnsy nations. In fact, I am pretty much an agnostic and am no longer affiliated with any Church. I do recall however how as an undergraduate at Eastern Mennonite University (formerly Eastern Mennonite College) Reverend Tom Skinner gave a series of sermons/talks to the student body, parents and interested community members that theologically was not very different at all from Wright's theology.

So I guess now I have to denounce and reject the influence of both EMU and my second undergraduate institution, Guilford College (a Quaker college).

Reverend Wright however is wrong in my estimation to associate himself with people like Farrakhan who have been active in spreading outright hatred. He is also wrong to embrace Afro-centric theories of education which have the potential to do real harm to the academic opportunities of African American children. He is wrong to embrace crank theories about the origins of HIV.

Finally, his response to Obama showed outright disrespect to Obama. I have my differences with Obama, though I still on balance support his campaign. Obama has made a choice to embrace vital center liberalism and to reject radicalism. I have no reason to believe his choice is other than genuine. In accepting vital center liberalism, Obama explicitly rejects the more radical critiques of American history and American foreign policy that Wright embraces, and he also rejects the Afro-centrism that Wright seems to embrace.

He is free to criticize Obama for this, but his actions and mannerisms and timing over the weekend suggested a complete lack of awareness of how to contribute to the national dialogue. And in so doing, he inserted himself needlessly into the election in a way that was bound to insure his valid points would be lost and he would only damage the chances of someone who at least as a chance of turning American politics in a different and better direction.

The real tragedy here however lies with the national media. For more than a month we have had this man pilloried, demonized and taken out of context, played over and over and over again while people who spread far worse (and far more dangerous) bigotry got a free ride.

The two most disappointing people to me in the national media on this issue have been Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman, who in the end, perhaps against their better judgement, wound up buying into the meme of Wright as crazy man. Of course, I never expected any different from Tweety, ABC, Fox News, CNN, etc. and Hillary "let's nuke Iran" Dr. StrangeClinton.