Jeremiah Wright: a man of truth, despised and rejected by racist Republican America

Pssst. Tired of boring old logical thinking? Wanna experience the thrill of an alternative reality?

Then read The Nation’s assessment of Jeremiah Wright. The article, by John Nichols, brings back the Nation’s greatest moment, in 1988, when it published an editorial saying that the fact that Tawana Brawley’s story to police—namely that a group of white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones had kidnapped her, raped her for days, and left her in a garbage bag smeared with feces and scrawled with racist slogans—had been revealed as a total fraud didn’t matter, because Brawley’s story expressed the true essence of race relationship in America.

Here’s a sample of the Nation on anti-white Wright:

As Wright has illustrated over the past several days, in a remarkable appearance Friday on PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal and in speeches to the Detroit NAACP and the National Press Club in Washington, he is the opposite of the caricature of an angry, America-hating false prophet that has been so crudely attached to him. Deeply grounded in biblical tradition, nuanced in his understanding of race relations and historically experienced in his assessments of America’s strengths and weaknesses, he has much to say to this country at this time.

Not all of what Wright says is comforting.

Nor are his views universally appealing or entirely unassailable.

But they are very much within the mainstream of American religious and political discourse.

The problem is not Jeremiah Wright.

The problem is a contemporary political culture that has come to rely on character assassination as an easy tool for reversing electoral misfortune—and a media that willingly invites manipulation.

Let’s not forget how Wright became an issue in the 2008 presidential race. Republican operatives, fretful about their party’s political fortunes, decided that the only way to weaken the candidacy of Wright’s longtime parishioner, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, was by suggesting the Democratic presidential front-runner was in the sway of an anti-American radical.

That end was achieved by separating out from long and thoughtful sermons regarding matters biblical and political seemingly offensive phrases and then inviting the Grand Old Party’s media echo chamber to repeat the sound bites until they became conventional “wisdom.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 30, 2008 02:20 AM | Send