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It's been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it's at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. "If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he'd one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago "base" in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver. It's a fairly cynical reading of the situation to think that Obama didn't publicly distance himself from a pastor the majority of Americans had never heard of simply because he wanted to stay in the good graces of "his South Side Chicago 'base.'" Frankly, I wonder to what base Hitchens is referring to. Are the poor blacks on Chicago's South Side suddenly a powerful bloc in the Democratic primary? Did they somehow help him win Iowa? There just seems to be little support for this particular explanation of why Obama addressed the Rev. Wright "issue" when he did.

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.) Except, apparently, having a pastor who says things that make white people uncomfortable.

Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu. And Barack Obama ignores her and won't pay her medical bills and kicks her puppies. It would be interesting to know whether her charismatic grandson made her aware that he was about to touch her with his grace and make her famous in this way. By sheer good fortune, she, too, could be a part of it all and serve her turn in the great enhancement. Again, this is such a cynical reading of the situation. Now, I'm a cynical guy. Maybe I'm being blinded by the fact that I actually support a political candidate for the first time ever (rather than finding one to settle on and vote for). I don't know. But somehow what Obama did- talk honestly about his grandmother and how some of her beliefs and actions illustrate points about the racial tension that defines our country and him personally- does not reek to me of political opportunism or of selling out his frail old granny. He needed to address the fact that racism still exists. What better way to do so than to tell the story of one of the most important people in his life, someone he loves? It condemns racism while allowing that not every person with certain prejudices is necessarily a bad person- they just have some honest thinking and self-improvement to do.

This flabbergasting process, made up of glibness and ruthlessness in equal proportions, rolls on unstoppably with a phalanx of reporters and men of the cloth as its accomplices. Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been—and were—applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. (In the Washington Post, for Good Friday last, the liberal Catholic apologist E.J. Dionne lamely attempted to stretch this very comparison.) But is it "inflammatory" to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it "controversial." It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. I disagree. I don't necessarily think that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it, but they certainly continue to ravage the black community because the white power structure allows it. I would not say many of the things that Rev. Wright has said, but I think he is right insofar as his point is that the power structure has no incentive to solve problems among out-groups. The status quo is working out just fine for the haves, so why would they worry about what is happening to the have-nots? And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood. I am so sick and tired of hearing about how blacks are making themselves out to be helpless victims- a cult of victimhood? Really?- whenever they point out that maybe the white people in charge of the country have something to do with the problems in certain parts of it. Hitchens should get together with Pat Buchannan to complain about how the uppity negroes today are just so gosh-darn ungrateful for everything that whitey has done for them since the blessing of slavery. Seriously- Pat Buchannan basically says that right here.

That same supposed message of his is also contradicted in a different way by trying to put Geraldine Ferraro on all fours with a thug like Obama's family "pastor." Ferraro may have sounded sour when she asserted that there can be political advantages to being black in the United States—and she said the selfsame thing about Jesse Jackson in 1984—but it's perfectly arguable that what she said is, in fact, true, and even if it isn't true, it's absurd to try and classify it as a racist remark. If it is arguably true, why doesn't Hitchens argue it? How anyone can assert that it is an advantage to be black while running for president is absolutely beyond me. Unless this suddenly became the case in the last three years- ignoring, for the moment, the fact that Ferraro said the same thing 23 years ago- one would expect there to have been a black president at some point in our nation's history. Are we really going to paint George Bush's election as some kind of underdog story? Did he really overcome the disadvantage of being white and against all odds become the leader of the Free World? No doubt Obama's slick people were looking for a revenge for Samantha Power (who, incidentally, ought never to have been let go for the useful and indeed audacious truths that she uttered in Britain), but their news-cycle solution was to cover their own queasy cowardice in that case by feigning outrage in the Ferraro matter. The comments were stupid. The reaction to them was real. The consequence, which you can already feel, is an inchoate resentment among many white voters who are damned if they will be called bigots by a man who associates with Jeremiah Wright. It's so hard to be white! So here we go with all that again. And this is the fresh, clean, new post-racial politics? There is no such thing as post-racial politics. Obama said as much in his speech on the subject. Race always has and always, for the foreseeable future, will inform more of the daily business of our country than most of us are prepared to admit.

Now, by way of which vent or orifice is this venom creeping back into our national bloodstream? Where is hatred and tribalism and ignorance most commonly incubated, and from which platform is it most commonly yelled? If you answered "the churches" and "the pulpits," you got both answers right. I agree. The Ku Klux Klan (originally a Protestant identity movement, as many people prefer to forget) and the Nation of Islam (a black sectarian mutation of Quranic teaching) may be weak these days, but bigotry of all sorts is freely available, and openly inculcated into children, by any otherwise unemployable dirtbag who can perform the easy feat of putting Reverend in front of his name. Are we really aobut to compare Rev Wright to the KKK? And this clerical vileness has now reached the point of disfiguring the campaigns of both leading candidates for our presidency. If you think Jeremiah Wright is gruesome, (I don't) wait until you get a load of the next Chicago "Reverend," one James Meeks, another South Side horror show with a special sideline in the baiting of homosexuals. I don't know anything about Meeks, but I can only assume that Hitchens's allegations that he is anti-homosexual are true. I certainly can't get behind that. And I really can't understand how a person can be cognizant of the oppression of one out-group (blacks) but encourage discrimination against another group of people. He, too, has been an Obama supporter, and his church has been an occasional recipient of Obama's patronage. Don't care. I refuse to hold Barack Obama responsible for everything he has ever head anyone say, provided he earnestly repudiates the offensive statements when asked about them. And perhaps he, too, can hope to be called "controversial" for his use of the term house nigger to describe those he doesn't like and for his view that it was "the Hollywood Jews" who brought us Brokeback Mountain. I don't care if he said "house nigger." It's a rhetorical tool. I don't find it offensive coming from a black man. "Hollywood Jews," on the other hand, sounds like lunatic conspiracy ravings, and I join Hitchens in denouncing it. Meanwhile, the Republican nominee adorns himself with two further reverends: one named John Hagee, who thinks that the pope is the Antichrist, and another named Rod Parsley, who has declared that the United States has a mission to obliterate Islam. And no one, but no one, calls McCain on it. Why? Let me tell you. Jeremiah Wright is black. Barack Obama is black. Or at least part black. It was easy enough for white folks to pat themselves on the back for being progressive enough to support a black presidential candidate when he did everything on their terms. As Joe Biden so racistly put it, Obama is clean and articulate. But then, from the scary ghetto of Chicago's South Side, came Rev. Wright. A man about as black as they come. Calling white people out for things they like to believe they aren't at all responsible for. All of a sudden, through his association with Wright, Obama became a whole lot more black. You say his church has a fiery preacher who talks provocatively about racial issues? You mean Obama might actually recognize that this country has oppressed blacks for hundreds of years? I thought he was one of us, but now he seems like one of them. It is hard for whites to come to terms with the realities of their country's discriminatory past and present. Obama initially provided an easy way for them to pretend that racism was dead. When he indirectly, through Wright, called them on it, they freaked out. Is it conceivable that such repellent dolts would be allowed into public life if they were not in tax-free clerical garb? I would here mention Pat Buchannan again, but certainly many of the most outspoken and hateful idiots in our country today are either religious leaders or religiously motivated laymen. How true it is that religion poisons everything. I like Hitchens when he says stuff like this. Why can't he sick to it?

And what a shame. I assume you all have your copies of The Audacity of Hope in paperback breviary form. Actually, I don't. I'm not sure whether or not I want to read it. I would have been more likely to pick it up before Obama became my guy in the presidential race, but reading it now would just seem like joining that whole "cult of personality" thing I keep hearing about. I'm still at least a little cynical. If you turn to the chapter entitled "Faith," beginning on Page 195, and read as far as Page 208, I think that even if you don't concur with my reading, you may suspect that I am onto something. In these pages, Sen. Obama is telling us that he doesn't really have any profound religious belief, but that in his early Chicago days he felt he needed to acquire some spiritual "street cred." I think religion is a crock. Have no use for god. But you better believe that when I was going to work on a daily basis in urban St. Louis I kept that to myself. I haven't read the passage, so I can't speak for Obama, but I know that I sometimes tacitly acknowledged religious beliefs I didn't hold in order to get along with the fervent believers I worked with on a daily basis. I think it's a shame that any one would ever have to do this, and an especially large shame that no one can run for president without affirming their belief in Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior Amen God Bless America, but it's a fact. If Obama felt that he needed to go to church to get along in the community in which he was working for change, then good for him for going to that length to accomplish his goals, whatever his religious beliefs. The most excruciatingly embarrassing endorsement of this same viewpoint came last week from Abigail Thernstrom at National Review Online. Overcome by "the speech" that the divine one I hate hate hate this characterization of Obama supporters as worshipers at his alter. It's stupid and insulting. had given in Philadelphia, she urged us to be understanding. "Obama's description of the parishioners in his church gave white listeners a glimpse of a world of faith (with 'raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor … dancing, clapping, screaming, and shouting') that has been the primary means of black survival and uplift." A glimpse, huh? What the hell next? A tribute to the African-American sense of rhythm? I don't understand what Hitchens is getting at here.

To have accepted Obama's smooth apologetics is to have lowered one's own pre-existing standards for what might constitute a post-racial or a post-racist future. I don't think he should have had to apologize. I reject the notion that this country is in any way post-racial or post-racist. It is to have put that quite sober and realistic hope, meanwhile, into untrustworthy and unscrupulous hands. And it is to have done this, furthermore, in the service of blind faith. Mark my words: This disappointment is only the first of many that are still to come. If addressing race honestly disappoints you, then I hope you are repeatedly and badly disappointed in the future.

I wish Hitchens had said more about religion's role in this whole fiasco. Instead, though, he decided to play the "See no racism, hear no racism, speak no racism" game. It is a frustrating habit of many well-off whites to pretend that our country does not have a racist present becuase it has gotten over its racist past. It is an even more frustrating habit of a smaller group of them (like Pat Buchannan) to basically pretend that even the racist past never happened. I think Hitchens is just trying to be contrarian in speaking out against Obama, but I wish he hadn't chosen such a predictable, status quo way of doing it.

# posted by Pat Mobley : 8:54 PM |