This is a proposition to any and all video artists out there in the Kos community.
With the repeated airplay of Rev. Wright's enthusiastic sermons, it is now time for a Greenwald/Fox Attacks! style video that puts together a greatest hits of Rabid Rightwing Christian Fundamentalist Lunatic vitriol. Fox has already been superimposing Hitler's voice and Obama's. But now we have Rev. Wright being pilloried for preaching what is in essence a liberal and activist Christian theology that also happens to be closely linked to the American Civil Rights Movement. If we can actually pry ourselves away from the issue of race for a moment, we might also see that what is being pilloried in the traditional media (and dominant parts of the liberal blogosphere) is a left-leaning activist Christian worldview.
Now, before folks get excited, some of what Wright has said is obviously not for the politically faint of heart. Obama himself has succeeded at distancing himself from the most extreme as well as the factually incorrect assertions by Rev. Wright. But, let's also be clear, if Falwell were black, his ravings would still be embraced by the American mainstream. In many ways, the Wright case demonstrates that while some of the vicious responses to Wright (and, by association, to Obama) are racist, the traditional media and the hand-wringing liberal set also appears keen on stamping out any genuine popular airing of cries for social justice.
So, what is needed is a viral video that presents a greatest hits of all the craziest, most hate-filled, non-reality-based rantings of the extreme Christian Right. Hell, they'll probably sell such a video!!! Then, it would be useful to put their barking across a split screen from Rev. Wright's impassioned if politically inconvenient calls for racial and class justice in America.
But let's face it, the first audience in need of such a viral video project is not necessarily "mainstream" America or "FoxNews" America or even "white" America but "liberal" America. If the chickens really have come home to roost, as Rev. Wright suggests, then I would argue that they have landed squarely on sites where two or three or more are gathered in the name of social justice.
Do we still hyperventilate and wring our hands about Obama's prospects when we know that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said:
"Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as His divine messianic force to be -- a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America: 'You are too arrogant! If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power"" [Martin Luther King Jr.: "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam," Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967]
or
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.... There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would praise you when you say, "Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark," but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children!" There is something wrong with that press...." [Martin Luther King Jr.: "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam," Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967]
or
"I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values....When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered...." [Martin Luther King Jr.: "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam," Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967]
These three quotations are buzzing about the internet today and they are a salutary reminder that truth can be difficult to ingest sometimes--and that it can come at different times from sometimes unlikely places.
This idea for a video of some of the worst hate speech in America might, when compared with some of the most impassioned and strongly worded calls for social justice, wake up some in the liberal blogosphere to the painful reality that the real enemy of reason and justice and freedom itself lurks not in Rev. Wright's church in Chicago but in plain sight--all around us--in the right wing hate speech that has become the de facto norm in many sectors of our society.