April 26, 2008
"War is immoral." -- General Curtis LeMay
"I think that I have been motivated by guilt, nothing else." -- Prof. Saburo Ienaga
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
-- Matthew 10:34
"Taxes takin' my whole damn check/junkies makin' me a nervous wreck/the price of food a goin' up/...was all that money I made las' year (for whitey on the moon). -- "Whitey on the Moon" Gil Scott Heron
"Gris gris man goin' cure all y'all's ills." -- Dr. John
"We must leave this planet if mankind is to survive." -- Dr. Stephen J. Hawking
CHICAGO HOLLER
Like a lot of Americans, I was angered by the words of Sen. Obama's minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. "Goddam America" was something you might expect from a graying Black Panther re-living the coke-fueled glory days in Oakland or LA or New York. But a minister of God from a mainstream Protestant denomination?
Then, of course, after the anger, the jokes. Because he really did sound like a graying Black Panther re-living the coke-fueled days of an imaginary revolution. Complete with tailored dashiki in kente cloth.
But, after watching Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers' NOW last night, the impression is more complex.
I certainly understand better where Sen. Obama gets his poise, his self-assurance. Rev. Wright is his political as well as spiritual father. Only once or twice did Rev. Wright lapse into the homiletics of ridicule that is often his pulpit style. A common style in fact. His criticism of anti-semitism seemed -- creepily -- more than a mocking of anti-semitism. And, of course, he believes that he is merely a proxy target for his congregant, Sen. Obama.
Certainly, as a law professor from Ave Maria Law School has observed, we would not be talking about Rev. Wright if Sen. Obama was not a member of his church.
And, Rev. Wright is a brilliant manipulator of history. Bill Moyers' showed an extended clip of Rev. Wright naming all the groups that America has abused, exploited, and murdered in the past two centuries. Native Americans are prominent. Although he doesn't mention Navajo codetalkers who served and died in the Pacific. The Japanese are also high on his list of American murder victims. Nagasaki and Hiroshima in particular. Yet, there is no mention of Unit 731, which performed medical experiments on American and British prisoners of war, including nurses. Surgery without anaesthesia. Starvation. Withholding penicilin. Experiments to test the limits of pain and the duration of human life under severe, and needless to say, unnecessary conditions.
I doubt that Rev. Wright would know who Prof. Saburo Ienaga. A Japanese history professor who spent his adult life into his eighties fighting to include Japanese atrocities in Japanese school books. A life often at odds with institutional Japan.
Rev. Wright also does not include in his jeremiad against America, the Nanking Massacre of Chinese by Japanese troops. And it is a safe wager that he hasn't talked to any survivors of the Japanese invastion of Singapore, Hong Kong, Burma, Malaysia, the Philipines. As an ex-Marine, surely Rev. Wright is familiar with the hundreds of Army wounded that Marines in Okinawa found decapitated, mutilated; some with their genitals severed and stuffed in their mouths.
But enough about people who have committed evil who aren't Americans.
As Rev. Wright spoke on tape, his congregation smiled and agreed and amened to his skillfully redacted if not patricularly nuanced version of American and world history.
They looked neither poor nor starving. They appeared satisfied with themselves and their world view. There was little Christian humility on display.
Mr. Moyers obviously meant for this to be a positive and "contextual" representation of a Wright sermon. He had already shown a clip of all the good things the Trinity Church does. Literacy and tutoring programs. Health education.
Black America, at least urban Black America, is severely isolated. Connected to itself but little else. I would like to believe that middle class Black Americans have a more nuanced view. But, if anything, the Black middle class contributes to this isolation by reinforcing the environment of conspiracy and carefully crafted history. Why would they do this?
Within Detroit's city limits, there isn't much of a middle class left. They have fled to the suburbs, especially historically Jewish suburbs such as Oak Park and Southfield. Every day they spend in those safe neighborhoods they refute the very idea of "racial solidarity." Their children are not at risk from drive by shootings; their neighborhoods are not under siege from drug dealers, gangsterism and prostitution. In fact, Southfield has recently opened a state of the art library. In Detroit libraries reduce hours or close; they don't open new ones. Middle class Black America's complicity in urban narrow-mindedness can be explained in part by a kind of Black middle class liberal guilt. A partner in destruction with white middle class liberal guilt.
For every piece of bad news that issues from Detroit, black suburbanites seem to be more smug, more complacent. But also annoyed and insulted if anyone else dares notice the death spiral of the city.
The inpenetrable nature of the Black American world view as displayed by Rev. Wright and his congregation, and encouraged by Bill Moyers, left me stunned by its cultural, historical, and religious insularity.
The Trinity Church's ethno-centric Christianity mirrors that of the nation-based orthodox churches of eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. But, with the understanding that a continent is made up of regions, cultures, separate languages and history. Rev. Wright insists that the history of the middle east is identical to that of Africa. Thus, in the beautiful stained-glass windows of his church, Christ and all the bishops and saints are dark-skinned. What does he think of a Islamic-based government in Khartoum, Sedan which persecutes dark-skinned African Christians in its southern provinces. Where is the solidarity, the common history, the shared values in that situation?
WHITEY ON THE MOON
A few days before Rev. Wright's interview with Bill Moyers, I received a link to American Thinker regarding Sen. Obama's presidential plans for NASA and space exploration.
His position paper describes an indefinite postponement of the Constellation program for a return to the moon. That program is also our next platform for servicing the international space station and for all near term manned flight after the shuttle is retired in 2010. There would be no Orion space capsule to take astronauts to the space station or the moon. No Ares rocket to lift Orion off the surface of the earth.
It is as if, Sen. Obama raised as a middle class American, had, like a lot of white middle class kids, taken to heart Gil Scott Heron's rap song, "Whitey on the Moon." Reading the lyrics tonight -- the song was a mainstain of underground radio when I was in college -- I was struck by the inherently conservative message despite its technophobic reactionaryism. He complains of high taxes, high food prices, high rent. It is something millions of American can connect with now as well as in the seventies. Not lost on readers today, is Mr. Scott Heron's recent, and apparently life long, bout with heroin addiction. If he had drug dealers in his old neighborhood, he was one reason why they were there. The probably did make him a "nervous wreck."
Of course, Sen. Obama is only the latest gris gris man to offer simple solutions to difficult problems. Especially health care delivery. His solution, though simple, won't be cheap. And, since it will be bureaucratic, it won't be simple either. And this scheme will mean higher taxes not lower. When confronted by Charles Gibson, the ABC News anchor with the fact that lowering capital gains taxes has historically meant greater economic activity and higher tax revenues, the Illinois senator persisted in his belief that people who make too much money must have their taxes raised.
Hence, his plan to gut the space program.
And also, his plan to do nothing about education but spend more money.
I shocked a friend the other night by calling this fuck you money. Millions of American children are already thrown into an expensive but unaccountable education system that does little but pass them on to ignorance and unemployment. Academic America, like Sen. Obama, will continue to refuse acknowledgement of failure.
And tens of millions of Americans will be dumped into a third rate, gold-plated health care system for which -- as in Canada and the UK -- there will never be enough money. Corporate America -- not appearing too bright these days -- only cares that their employees' health care is no longer their problem.
In the hermetic world of conspiracies and victim historicism; the world of Sen. Obama, Rev. Wright, and Bill Moyers, this is a win/win situation.
FORWARD INTO THE PAST
Recently, I listend to a global-warming questioner, Ian Murray, describe what the Greens want for the future. Essentially they want the past. Windmills have been around for centuries, he said. And, the reason we mine coal is because we cut down and burned all the wood. Coal, oil, nuclear power. These, he said, are more robust, more efficient, more productive. Simply, better.
Rev. Buzz Thomas in USA Today these week calls for more birth control, more abortions, and a declining population, if we are to save the earth. The modern day Malthusian refuses to die. He must be pleased that Black America has gone from 15% to 13% of the U.S. population and, that in Detroit, one third of all black pregnancies end in abortion. The city is definitely going Green.
It sends friends and colleagues into a cringe if you mention that we might not be so desperate for the desperate and poor of the hispanosphere if we had not aborted 30 to 40 million unborn babies since 1973. Roe v Wade is, I'm sure, seen as one of the Supreme Court's Greener decisions.
The Isaac Newton Chair of Physics professor Stephen J. Hawking has been saying recently that the survival of the human race requires that we get off planet as quickly and in as great numbers as possible. I'm sure his main concerns are climate change and nuclear war.
But, as Christ made clear over twenty centuries ago, there is no peace. And there never will be. The New York Times reporter John Burns said in an interview on Charlie Rose that America remains a force for stability in the world. Our carrier groups, our Marines and soldiers, our airmen, keep the sea lanes open. Provide humanitarian aid in disasters, even fight pirates off the coast of an unstable Somalia. This year, the British Royal Air Force commemorates its 90th anniversary. Prominent in this celebration is recognition of its role in humanitarian crises. Since 9/11, Australian forces have also brought stability to troubled island nations such as the Solomon Islands and Fiji.
It is a struggle without end. Despite Sen. Obama's belief that NASA must take a moratorium, a sabbatical from robuts exploration, there is no good time to do this difficult and courageous things. And there never will be.
As I have listened to America's elite over the years, and to their cultural and political castrati, I get this sense that they believe we are meant to sit forever on this little ball in a vast galaxy nursing our grievances.
President George Herbert Walker Bush once said he didn't quit get the "vision thing." He has company on the left.
Sam Macomb
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