Keeping us honest

Charles Krauthammer has some valid criticisms of Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright's church, today, that I think deserve a read, even if I think they do not fairly reflect the complexity of the situation.

A Brilliant Fraud

"This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?"

It's a valid question. God knows I would be concerned about exposing my children to such hate on a regular basis, especially on a Sunday morning.

This is why my family never went to a church like this one, I suppose. The Unity Church I attended my entire childhood was a little liberal church explicitly committed to the central principles of Jesus' teachings - love, compassion, forgiveness. The ones that everyone spends so much time running away from because they're harder to practice than to read about. I'm a soft atheist today, meaning I don't believe in God or Jesus as the messiah, as a technical matter, but I still take the teachings of Jesus and the Bible very seriously from a skeptical, independent-minded, critical, secular point-of-view. Because there is just too much in those teachings that make sense.

And God knows, from my own church experience, I just don't think I could ever expose my children to that kind of message every Sunday. It is anathema to everything that a decent religious experience would entail for me.

That is where I have a hard time defending Obama on this one. It is a strange position to be defending.

Having said that, I also take the virtue of loyalty very seriously. And I would never abandon a friend (I have given friends a rest, at times, when I've been emotionally exhausted, but I would never abandon a friend) because I didn't like their attitudes or their outlooks or if I disagreed with them.

I guess it is in this respect that I am very rooted in a liberal tradition. I believe in people in their capacity for self-correction, as E.J. Dionne put in his column today. I don't like E.J. hinting at an equivocation between Jeremiah Wright and Martin Luther King who had two very distinctly different messages. I've never approved of the equivocation of MLK and Malcolm X, who were two very different leaders, and explicitly so, if anyone would only listen to the two honestly, and one of whom, Martin Luther King, who I am completely clear, has a better message than the other, Malcolm X, who reflected the very kind hate that MLK was challenging in America, black and white.

But I do understand conservative issues with Jeremiah Wright. Because I have never equivocated the hatefulness of radicalism with the decency of liberalism the way most liberals do, and, as these conservatives sense are want to call bullshit on, when liberals do so for political advantage, having a hateful heavy to their goody-goody nice guy front.

And they are right. If Barack Obama is playing this game, being a nice guy front for a radical agenda, he and liberals who engage in this bullshit need to be called out on it. It is a big fat lie, a manipulation of the democratic process, the fodder for a dishonest debate, and an enormous contribution to everything that is wrong with the democratic process today. And conservatives, frankly, have every reason to be concerned about this switcharoo, because it has been played on them and the American and liberal democratic publics probably for as long as liberalism and conservativism as rival ideologies have existed. It is the reason that conservatives and former radicals like David Horowitz or Ronald Radosh switched sides in this rivalry. And it is a poison in the democratic discussion, I completely agree.

And the huge gap in the way that conservatives and liberals look at the race issues raised by this episode demonstrate just how cleanly ineffective the radical bullying on racial issues has been, in the last 50 years or so, to genuinely resolving the serious racial gaps that we often live with in America. And conservatives are right that these are gaps that needs radicals and African Americans to bridge as much as for conservatives and white Americans to be aware of serious racial issues in America.

I think Barack Obama was trying to do that, in that speech. But I also understand why conservatives view Barack as a typical liberal politician, as well, because many of the liberal themes he sounded - raging at outsourcing and blaming economic deprivation as the reason for black rage and hopelessness rather than the other way around - are ones that strike me as counterproductive and foolish themes, too, and ones that threaten values like free trade and treating corporations and businesspeople more fairly, that I care about, too.

Having said that, I didn't find Barack's speech offensive. To the contrary, I found his frankness on this most difficult issue of the heart really refreshing, if imperfect. I guess I don't expect perfection from anyone, including politicians (hence my sympathy for Elliot Spitzer), which is much of the reason that I am so skeptical that they can make more decisions for my life than they are really capable of doing either competently or infallibly.

I think I'm watching both conservatives and liberals gear up for an election fight, right now, and decision-time about what we are going to do with Iraq.

There is no need for an honest debate or discussion, with these folks, because they have already figured things out, apparently (And so convincingly that they don't even need to talk with those who disagree with them because what would they know, anyway, if they don't already agree with them? Some people are so fuckin' weak and lame).

And that's what bothers me with all of the consistently partisan reactions to these kinds of things, especially from conservatives, on this speech.

It's so fuckin' mindless. And it reflects a lack of appreciation for people as both fallible and individuals and part of a larger web of friendships, relationships, and connections in our lives.

Andrew Sullivan posts an excellent discussion of the reaction by conservatives with two other critically-minded thinkers that I highly recommend.

The Right's Reaction

And do you know who has had some of the most understanding and compassionate remarks on this whole affair?

Mike Huckabee. Can you believe that?

Here's what he had to say:

"[Y]ou can't hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. It's interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what ... Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable, years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say 'Well, I didn't mean to say it quite like that...

As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say 'That's a terrible statement!' ... I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I'm gonna be probably the only conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you — we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names...

We've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names; being told you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie; you have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant; you can't sit out there with everyone else, there's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office; here's where you sit on the bus .. . And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder, and resentment, and you have to just say, "I probably would, too. I probably would, too. And in fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."

This is why I like Christians who practice the love that Jesus preached. They're just more decent people to be around. And Mike is right in being consistent, here, and saying, to everyone who will jump all over any man, especially preachers, who I have agree are not the brightest lot, generally, and judge them only by their craziest statements and not by the totality of their lives and contributions, is not fair and doesn't reflect the totality of that human being and the good they have done along with the bad.

I am conflicted about this situation, because I have to agree that I would have a hard time taking my kids to the hateful sermons of either a Jeremiah Wright or a Jerry Falwell every Sunday.

Having said that, I think Obama's and Mike's instincts are right. We stick by people even when they think and say and do stupid things. Otherwise, what is the point? Of any of it, really. Why care about politics, at all, otherwise, except how it impacts your narrow, selfish interests?

I think they're right about that. And I appreciate them both opening up our democratic conversation to even some hateful motherfuckers, as much as I am tired of hatefulness dominating liberal democratic and American politics.

We open that more honest conversation with love, not with ostracism and hatefulness. That is more honest. And I appreciate people like Obama and Mike keeping us honest, even as I might disagree with their thinking or their politics.