I dare say that Barack Obama was a smidgen disingenuous (a fancy word for “dishonest”) when he claimed that he was not present and therefore unaware of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s vitriolic outburst against whites and America. After the revelation of a 20-year close relationship with the vituperative pastor and a 17-year active membership in his congregation, the senator had to back off the allegation that he was not privy to the extremist rant of the bilious preacher.
Realizing he was up to his ears in the worst crisis of his political life and that damage control was urgent, Obama presented an astutely candid response to the raillery of the reverend, dealing with matters of race and racism in America. But his March 18 speech was hardly without ambivalence, if not the taint of hypocrisy.
While stoutly condemning Rev. Wright for his boiling bigotry, Obama defended his avuncular leader because of his deep indebtedness to him for spiritual guidance and other religious reasons. Also because of the 30 years of good works by the pastor.
In the light of a long and close friendship with the latter, Obama had to backpedal from his facade of ignorance about what could hardly be a one-time burst of venom. Raised as a black man, despite a mother and her parents who were white, he surely was not oblivious to the injustice, anger, protest marches, riots, police brutality, and assassinations of the turbulent civil rights decades of the last century. His speech, therefore, was not without justification for giving some context to the racism in America that implicated whites no less than blacks.
Credit belongs to the senator for tackling the problem head-on promptly and honestly. He cannot be faulted for intimacy with the black culture of Chicago amidst a broken America and not be affected by it.
Sen. Clinton, despite being a child of Republicans, also came out of a radical culture. As a rebellious student, she soldiered in step with the anti-Vietnam War crusade of the ’60s, which was often as angry and violent as the black militants. But she chose to get educated, graduating at the top of her class at Wellesley and Yale’s School of Law.
Obama likewise opted for education over radicalism, after a callow experiment with drugs and some, allegedly, promiscuous dalliance, hardly out of the norm for undergrads. A Harvard degree in law won him the distinction of editing the Law Review.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also chose education, plus, like Rev. Wright, the ministry. But, unlike the latter, he chose another kind of radicalism, the radicalism of nonviolence over violence, of love over hate, of a more perfect union over divisiveness. And that must have impacted Obama far more than his minister’s damnation of American and his flagrant fabrication of our country’s evils.
Still, in spite of all the rationalizations, in spite of all the heartfelt tugs of affection for Rev. Wright, in spite of all the latter’s mentoring, one may question the wisdom of a senator with great ambition, with the greatest ambition, to maintain personal and emotional ties to a friend so rabid in his deracination of America. It hardly fits well with a non-cynic who aspires to unite and heal rather than divide and hate.
Shakespeare happens to be pertinent on the matter. The lovable, mischievous, quixotic, boastful, blustering, pretentious, cowardly, hypocritical, deceitful, gluttonous, devilish, joyous, pompous, witty, goodhearted, loquacious, hard-drinking buffoonish and obese sybarite, Falstaff (surely one of the greatest creations in all of literature!) is a fast friend, a bosom buddy of the young Prince Hal, heir to the throne of England and destined to be lionized as Henry V, a great warrior and king of a great nation. Faced with the awesome demands of duty to his country, he brazenly and abruptly breaks ALL ties and allegiances to the old tub of exuberant, joy-generating lard, the beloved and decadent companion of his carousing days of miscreant youth.
Obama is no Prince Hal. In his March 18 media-intensive speech, he made it decisively clear not only that he would not cut the ties that strongly bound him to Rev. Wright but presented a kind of apologia for his longtime loyal friend, focusing on the positives of his ministry as well as his service to Obama and his wife in their marriage and in the baptism of their children.
Was the senator’s commitment a fearless and courageous show of loyalty to a close friend or was it an inexpedient, if not a politically suicidal failure of the judgment he is so proud of? Perhaps a failure to assess the reaction, especially among uncommitted, or even committed, whites suddenly unexuberant about fidelity to what appears to be a preacher peddling the worst kind of racist bigotry.
Obama’s decision, right or wrong, bold or blundering, noble or ignoble, wise or witless, could be his Achilles heel in the great combat to come with Sen. John McCain.
No matter that Obama’s put-down of his minister’s “very offensive views,” and no matter that “this guy has built one of the finest churches in Chicago.” The wannabe president is still no Prince Hal.
— Saul Rosenthal
Terre Haute
Flashpoint
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