Post 'Post-Racial Candidate'
Things get out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts on the
campaign trail.
By Mark Steyn
'I'm sure," said Barack Obama in that
sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac,
fries, and strawberry shake sound profound, "many of you have
heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you
strongly disagreed."
Well, yes. But not many of us
have heard remarks from our pastors, priests, or rabbis that are
stark, staring, out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts. (interestingly
all religion is a leap of faith which atheists as well as
alternative religions would cast as nuts!) Unlike Bill
Clinton, whose legions of "spiritual advisers" at the
height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps,
Senator Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult
life: the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the
president presumptive. (Here he is over
exaggerating Clinton's use of 'spiritual advisor's' and
under-estimating Obamas for dramatic effect.) The
Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of
the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that
went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for
the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The
government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright
knows the truth. "The government lied," he told his flock,
"about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against
people of color. The government lied."
Does he really
believe this? If
so, he's crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish,
certainly not for 20 years. (Here Mark
(in few words) appears to use a rhetorical question (where the
answer is now common knowledge) for the purpose of brushing off the
Reverend as overall
'Crazy' over one
of his beliefs as well as
casting off the thousands of his followers as insane and inferring
that Obama sat through 20 years of what Mark has brushed off as a
crazy person . The reality is that Obama claims never to have been
aware of the HIV conspiracy and upon hearing it has described it as
"off the wall". None the less, many people have 'crazy
ideas' but to brush a person off based on one could be considered
morally, socially and politically dangerous. Obama doesn't have to
agree with every persons ideas in order to be in their company or
listen to what they have to say. Does buying into one conspiracy
leave a man out of touch with reality in all other respects? (The
same could be said for buying into a particular religion)
Furthermore, should sane people avoid contact with 'insane' people?
Could it not be argued that by listening to diversity of opinion and
such 'insane ideas, one can cement or perhaps crystallise one's own
sane opinions and crucially maintain ones open-mindedness. Should
Mark not instead be trying to assess fairly the Reverend Wright
(avoiding casting outright labels
of 'crazy person' etc.) and perhaps
then begging the question of whether Obama has merit in retaining
his pastor of 20 years given that he holds a conspiracy theory which
Obama describes as downright 'off the wall'. The debate could then
move to asking whether Obama has legitimate reasoning in retaining
the pastor and if not 'Why?')
Or is
he just saying it? In which case, he's profoundly wicked.
(Again, the question is used as a
prop and a sensationalist one at that)
If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity
and drug use, you'll know that it's within your power to protect
yourself from the disease. If you're told
that it's just whitey's latest cunning plot to stick it to you,
well, hey, it's out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your
behavior. (Off the cauf remarks
like this even for commentary seem extremely unwise. Again he's
opened up a whole line of detailed argumentation without addressing
any of it in any meaningful way)
Before the
speech, Slate's Mickey Kaus advised Senator Obama (???)
to give us a Sister Souljah moment: "There are plenty of
potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock
births," he wrote. "But most of all the victim mentality
that tells African Americans (in the fashion of Rev. Wright's most
infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are
the evil actions of others, of other races."
(no reference given to specific
article.) Indeed. It makes no difference to white folks
when a black pastor inflicts kook genocide theories on his
congregation: The victims (the use
of the word victim seems ill suited. Does the 'mistake' of believing
something considered by most as "ludicrous" make you a
victim? Is the Reverend committing some kind of crime? In holding
and preaching his ideas?) are those in his audience who
make the mistake of believing him. The Reverend Wright has a hugely
popular church with over 8,000 members, and Senator Obama assures us
that his pastor does good work by "reaching out to those
suffering from HIV/AIDs." But maybe he wouldn't
have to quite so much (grammatical
error) "reaching out" to do and maybe there
wouldn't be quite so many black Americans "suffering from
HIV/AIDs" if the likes of Wright weren't peddling lunatic
conspiracy theories to his own community. (suggesting
that the Reverend could be inadvertently contributing to a higher
percentage of AID's sufferers in his community without referring to
any kind of research or evidence that shows a direct link in this
case or any other, seems extremely unwise. It could be argued from
his line of thinking that those with less critical minds become
victims to his style of writing where numerous explicit and implicit
opinions and assumptions are conveyed throughout his
articles.)
Nonetheless, last week, Barack
Obama told America: "I can no more disown him than I can disown
the black community."
What is the plain meaning of
that sentence? (It is unwise to try and
separate a sentence from the specific context and passages from
which it is given. Senator Obama was trying to convey his value
preference for a more holistic way of viewing people (that been
accepting and encompassing), perceived flaws and all. Thus, should
Mark be asking such a question? He goes on to use the question to
propel the second question:) That
the paranoid racist ravings of Jeremiah Wright are now part of the
established cultural discourse in African-American life and thus
must command our respect? (verges on a
rhetorical question) Let us take the senator at
his word (The sentence carries the
connotation that there may be times when he shouldn't be taken at
his word) when he says he chanced (???)
not to be present on AIDs Conspiracy Sunday, or God Damn America
Sunday, or U.S. of KKKA Sunday, or the Post-9/11
America-Had-It-Coming Memorial Service. A conventional pol would
have said he was shocked, shocked to discover Afrocentric black
liberation theology going on at his church. (It's
also a case that Senator Obama would not have had the choice of
distancing himself from it) But Obama did something far
more audacious (the use of the word
which is defined from daring to reckless is presumptuous and is a
detailed line of inquiry in itself): Instead of
distancing himself from his pastor, he attempted to close the gap
between Wright and the rest of the country, arguing, in effect, that
the guy is not just his crazy uncle
(has the effect of drawing close
connection between Obama and Wright) but America's,
too.
To do this, he promoted a false equivalence. (He
doesn't appear to have proven a false equivalence) "I
can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother," he
continued. "A woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed
again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves
anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of
black men who passed by her on the street." Well, according to
the way he tells it in his book, it was one specific black man on
her bus, and he wasn't merely "passing by." When the
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest
cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the
Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: "Greater love hath no
man than to lay down his friends for his life." In
Philadelphia, Senator Obama topped that: Greater love hath no man
than to lay down his gran'ma for his life. (good
point and well delivered) In the days that followed,
Obama's interviewers seemed grateful for the introduction of a less
complicated villain: Unlike the Reverend Wright, she doesn't want
God to damn America for being no better than al-Qaeda, but on the
other hand she did once express her apprehension about a black man
on the bus. It's surely only a matter of days before Keith Olbermann
on MSNBC names her his "Worst Person In The World." Asked
about the sin of racism beating within Gran'ma's breast, Obama said
on TV (what exactly was asked? A
quotation would be helpful here!!) that "she's a
typical white person."
Which doesn't sound like the sort
of thing the supposed "post-racial" candidate ought to be
saying, (good point) but
let that pass. How "typically white" is Obama's
grandmother? She is the woman who raised him — that's to say,
she brought up a black grandchild and loved him unconditionally.
Burning deep down inside, she may nurse a secret desire to be Simon
Legree or Bull Connor, but it doesn't seem very likely. She does
then, in her own flawed way, represent a post-racial America.
(more accurately, she may represent
the transition period to a post-racial America) But what
of her equivalent (as Obama's speech had it)? Is Jeremiah Wright a
"typical black person"? One would hope not. A century
and a half after the Civil War, two generations after the Civil
Rights Act, the Reverend Wright promotes victimization
theses more insane than anything promulgated at the height of
slavery (again, this
opens up a whole line of detailed enquiry to ascertain a conclusion)
or the Jim Crow era. You can understand why Obama is so anxious
to meet with President Ahmadinejad, a man who denies the last
Holocaust even as he plans the next one. Such a summit would be easy
listening after the more robust sermons of Jeremiah Wright.
But
America is not Ahmadinejad's Iran. Free societies live in truth
(infers that there is absolute and not
relative truth and assumes there is such thing as a 'free society'),
not in the fever swamps of Jeremiah Wright. The pastor is a
fraud, a crock, a mountebank — for, if this truly
were a country whose government invented a virus to kill black
people, why would they leave him walking around to expose the truth?
(Again he pitches his propaganda that
Jeremiah Wright's preaching increases the contraction of HIV in his
community. He does this in a rather cruel way and at this stage in
the article has effectively gone beyond the bounds of public
character defamation). It is Barack Obama's choice to
entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their
entire lives, but in Philadelphia the
senator attempted to
universalize his peculiar (personal
judment that the judgement is peculiar)
judgment — to
claim that, given America's history, it would be unreasonable to
expect black men of Jeremiah Wright's generation not to peddle
hateful and damaging lunacies. Isn't that — what's the word? —
racist? So much for the post-racial candidate. (It
could be counter-propositioned that Obama was placing men like
Jeremiah Wright in historical context by highlighting how the
cultural and political climate in which they grew up had a pervasive
influence on the ideas which such men hold (however flawed they
appear to us today). His pitch is that it would be divisive to
disown such men at a time when we need unity. This appears a
pragmatic judgement but it could also be an idealist assertion about
human values etc., etc.
© 2008 Mark Steyn
Copyright © 2006-2008 Shane McLoughlin. This article may not be resold or redistributed without prior written permission.
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