Wrights and wrongs

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright should leave the public stage.

I wasn’t prepared to write this — his basic critique of American imperialism and capitalism are not too far off base — but having absorbed his ego-driven performance on Monday morning, what else can I say.

Actually, Joan Walsh on Salon put it best in a Monday post:

He may be wounded, but this is a man of enormous self-regard, and he’s clearly trying to hurt Barack Obama. His national rehabilitation tour started fairly sympathetically with the Moyers conversation, but it’s devolved into self-pity and self-glorification ever since. His Sunday night talk to the NAACP was mostly silly, from the questionable science behind his insistence that black children are right-brained (creative) while white children are left-brained (logical and analytical) to his mocking the way white people talk, dance, clap, worship and sing. I understand and agree with Wright’s notion that “different is not deficient,” but mocking white people, including JFK and LBJ, doesn’t seem like the best way to get his point across (yes, he was talking to the NAACP, but he knew — and relished — that he had a national audience). At his Monday speech he insisted attacks on him were really an attack on the black church, a typically Wright-centric view of the world, while his security was reportedly provided by the Nation of Islam.

Wright, as Walsh points out, is a full-blown narcissist concerned only with his own reputation and apparently unconcerned with the issues he says he believes are important.

Both Bob Herbert and Eugene Robinson — two of the best columnists in the newspaper business, both of whom happen to be black, turned their rhetorical guns on the Rev. Wright and his outsized ego, criticizing him for raising himself up as a stand-in for the black church in America.

Here’s Herbert:

Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media — this reverend is never going away. He’s found himself a national platform, and he’s loving it.

It’s a twofer. Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived.

So there he was lecturing an audience at the National Press Club about everything from the black slave experience to the differences in sentencing for possession of crack and powdered cocaine.

All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.

This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why — if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks — does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency.

The answer, as Herbert points out, is that Wright wants this to be about Wright.

My guess is that Mr. Wright felt he’d been thrown under a bus by an ungrateful congregant who had benefited mightily from his association with the church and who should have rallied to his former pastor’s defense. What we’re witnessing now is Rev. Wright’s “I’ll show you!” tour.

And show he has. Wright has decided that not only is the Obama campaign a slap in his face, but he has conflated himself with the black church, as Robinson says.

I would never try to diminish the service he performed as pastor of his Chicago megachurch, and it’s obvious that he’s a man of great charisma and faith. But this media tour he’s conducting is doing a disservice that goes beyond any impact it might have on Obama’s presidential campaign.

The problem is that Wright insists on being seen as something he’s not: an archetypal representative of the African American church. In fact, he represents one twig of one branch of a very large tree.

It’s understandable, given how Wright has been treated, that he would want to attempt to set the record straight. No one would enjoy seeing his 36-year career reduced to a couple of radioactive sound bites. No preacher would want his entire philosophy to be assessed on the basis of a few rhetorical excesses committed in the heat of a passionate sermon. No former Marine would stomach having his love of country questioned by armchair patriots who have done far less to protect the United States from its enemies.

Given Wright’s long silence, I thought he had taken to heart Jesus’s admonition to turn the other cheek. Obviously, I was wrong.

I’m through with Wright not because he responded — in similar circumstances, I certainly couldn’t have kept silent — but because his response was so egocentric. We get it, Rev. Wright: You’re ready for your close-up.

What all this means for Barack Obama is difficult to say, but it has allowed Hillary Clinton to reframe the election on racial terms and set the stage for what is likely to be a gruesome general election campaign in which the ugly racial politics that have been an undercurrent of national Republican politics since the 1960s will once again be a major theme.

I wish it wasn’t so, but the cynic in me knows better.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.