The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
A Voice Crying in the American Wilderness:
In Defense of Jeremiah Wright
by Larry L. Dill
The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a "boss," an intriguer, an idealist, — all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain it. The type,
of course, varies according to time and place, from the West Indies in the sixteenth century to New England in the nineteenth, and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities like New Orleans or New York.
--from Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois, first published in 1909.
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the erstwhile pastor of
Senator Barack Obama, is an unlikely candidate to take
up the mantle of anti-imperialist, anti-corporate,
anti-militarist, social gadfly that belonged in the
last two presidential elections to Ralph Nader alone.
But left liberals who abjured Hillary Clinton for her
centrist positions even in the health care debate--her
refusal, for example, to advocate the single payer
system long successful in Canada, France, the United
Kingdom and many other European countries--
nevertheless ran headlong into the camp of Barack
Obama whose own health care plan, for example, is even
more timid than Clinton's.
I've been struggling for months with whether or not I
should consider myself a racist because I was not
rushing into Obama's camp myself as I had done when
Jesse Jackson ran twice for president. But even though
I could see Senator Clinton for what she was,
essentially,politically at least, just a female
version of her husband who was a highly successful
president but not always the best friend of the poor
and down trodden, I liked her. She was my choice.
Wistfully I watched Ralph Nader announce his own
candidacy one more time. The fourth I believe. He
appeared on Meet the Press to make his announcement.
It was an almost flawless articulation of the
anti-imperialist, anti-corporate, anti-militarist
position the left has hungered for for years in this
country.
And then he was promptly never heard from again.
He's still out there. Like me he has a website. His
vice-presidential running mate, Matt Gonzales, is ...running around,
Quoted this week in the San Francisco Weekly, speaking
at U.C. Berkeley, as saying "Obama saying he wants to
leave 150,000 private soldiers in Iraq is not leaving
Iraq. Leaving 60,000 troops in the region to carry out
targeted strikes against al-Qaeda is not leaving
Iraq."
But Nader's announcement that he was running again might as well
have been his concession speech. So I went back to
brooding over whether or not choosing a woman over a
black man when neither sufficiently represented my
social, political or philosophical views, made me a
racist.
Then along came Jeremiah Wright. And from the first
clip from one of his sermons when he was quoted as
saying "God damn America," for it's hubris and its
imperialism and its colonialism and its terrorism, I
knew right then that Jeremiah Wright would eventually
get the media coverage for speaking truth to power
that Ralph Nader had not been able to do since being
labeled a party crasher in the 2000 presidential
election. Why? Because Wright (a black minister) had
been the pastor of the left's new default golden boy,
Barack Obama, for the passed 20 years.
Barack Obama quickly sought to distance himself from
Wright in his much lauded Philadelphia address last
month on race. But he still called Wright a man who
had done much good in the world and that he could no
more disavow him than he could his own white
grandmother. Wright was silent for nearly a month but
came out to defend himself, rhetorical guns blazing,
on March 25 on Bill Moyer's Journal on PBS and then
went on to build his case before a Detroit Meeting of
the NAACP and the National Press Club in Washington.
His remarks at the latter were unrepentant and
incendiary, including defending his, some would say,
over the top claim that considering the history of
America's treatment of blacks, he would not be
surprised to find out that the US government had
invented AIDs to destroy black communities.
Considering the fact that conspiracy theories abound
on the predominantly white left that the George Bush
administration planned the 9/11 attacks, Wright's
opinion about AIDs doesn't seem quite so outrageous.
But it was more than Barack Obama could take and he
has since spoken out forcefully to distance himself
further from Wright, declaring himself outraged at
what he considers to be Wright's
more hyperbolic pronouncements. The Washington based
journalist Sally Quinn said this week on the Charlie
Rose Show on PBS that Wright (who is retiring after a
36 year career as the Pastor of the 6,000 member
Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago) was
Shakespearian in his actions (invoking by implication
I suppose the mad King Lear). She said that Obama's
natural father had abandoned him when he was two and
that Wright had become his spiritual father. Now,
dissed by the media and distanced from this burgeoning
superstar "son," Wright was trying to steal back some
of the limelight from Obama that he felt was his by
rights. She said Wright's treatment of Obama reminded
her of the time her own father upon hearing his son,
Quinn's brother, announce the publication of his new
book at the dinner table, declared, "I was thinking of
writing a book myself." Quinn's idea reflects the
prevailing media view that Wright is just an angry old
black man whose time to get off the stage has come but
he won't get off the stage.
I agree that the story is Shakespearian but I think
Wright is less like Lear than Obama is like Hamlet.
From the very beginning of his campaign for president,
long before New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd
became Hillary basher in chief by calling Hillary 'Obama
basher in chief,' Dowd was pointing out Obama's vaunted
civility as a character flaw. I don't see it as a
flaw, but I do see his reluctance to get mad and fight
with Clinton as a Shakesperian drama starring, as it
were, Hamlet and Lady Macbeth. Wright, on the other
hand, may, indeed be guilty of an Abrahamic
willingness to sacrifice his own son to please God.
Whether Obama's Hamlet is a conflicted man because he
is half black and half white or because, like Clinton,
he may be having to sacrifice some of his core beliefs
because he is a politician, is beyond my capacity to
judge. But there is no question but that through the
vicissitudes of fate (and the swift boating
researchers who wish to discredit his pastor, and
through guilt by association, Obama himself), The
Reverend Jeremiah Wright has brought the discussion of
race in America, and it's role in a critique of
American imperialism to the forefront in a way that
neither Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich,
Michael Moore, nor the completely ineffectual anti-war
movement in this country, nor even the two leading
Democratic candidates have been able to do. I say
thank you Jesus for the Souls of Black Preachers.
-- Larry L. Dill
Rabbit Rock , North Carolina
May 1, 2008
Also in the May, 2008 edition of the New Hope Journal:
Journals of Yesteryear:
From the Educational Writings of Larry L. Dill :
The complete text of "Pedagogy of the Depressed"
originally published in 1996 in the peer reviewed
academic journal Adult Basic Education.
Sightings:
Bill Moyers PBS interview with Jeremiah Wright.
Wright's National Press Club appearance.
Wright's NAACP speech.
Readings:
Walt Whitman: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
W.E.B. Dubois: Souls of Black Folk
Metamorphosis:
A new poem by Larry L. Dill
April 2008 New Hope Journal
Complete Site Index
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2008 by Larry L. Dill