The real problem
This article by Gary Kamiya addresses the issues of blind patriotism and race stirred up by Rev. Wright last week, in a historical context reminding us not to repeat history. Even calling out Dems poor showing on foreign policy, for not acting to mitigate the Arab/Islamaphobia, which will be a legacy of the Bush years. It also, very accurately, predicts McCain's inevitable continuation of Bush era fear tactics in courting voters.
Excerpt:
"Today, after five years of a catastrophic war driven by patriotic vengeance, it's still not acceptable to disturb the myth of eternal American innocence. As David Bromwich wrote in a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, "the uniformity of the presentation by the mass media after 2001, to the effect that the United States now faced threats arising from a fanaticism with religious roots unconnected to anything America had done or could do, betrayed a stupefying abdication of judgment." Stupefying indeed: Patriotism has proved to be a stronger opiate of the people than religion."
P.S. Where has all of the furor been with McCains pastor pal John Hagee who not only hates the gays and the liberals he even hates any other non-evangelical Christian?
2 comments:
Good article. I never heard Wright's speeches verbatim but his grievances sound about right to me.
i think the answer to your question, jeff, is that the media and others haven't spread the hagee story nearly as much as they have the wright story. your mentioning of him is the first i've heard, actually.
another issue at play, of course, is that wright is black. issues of what it means for a black person versus a white person to criticize the US are really on display here... after all, most if not all of the points wright makes, which can be seen in the youtube video your article links to, have been said by many many others, including chomsky, in the weeks immediately following sept 11th. wright, however, happens to be a black man with a presidential candidate in his congregation, not some academic removed from the political scene.
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