I know that this matter has been blogged about repeatedly before, but I need to get it off my chest. YES, this is another Wright diary. No, it's not about how it's going to effect Obama or his rejection of Wright or whatever. This was drummed up pre-Obama statement, and it's a sum up of my feelings on the whole dumb, dumb, dumb matter, taken and expanded upon from Glenn's post on the whole thing:
I want to quote a great mind and political genius as far as this Wright mess goes:
Yeah, about time for me to get a little drink of water. Figure this stuff is safe to drink? Huh? Actually I don't care if it's safe or not, I drink it anyway. You know why? Cause I'm an American and I expect a little cancer in my food and water. That's right, I'm a loyal American and I'm not happy unless I've let government and industry poison me a little bit every day. Let me have a few hundred thousand carcinogens here....Ahh, a little cancer never hurt anybody. Everybody needs a little cancer I think. It's good for you. Keeps you on you're toes. (more below the break)
I want to quote a great mind and political genius as far as this Wright mess goes:
Yeah, about time for me to get a little drink of water. Figure this stuff is safe to drink? Huh? Actually I don't care if it's safe or not, I drink it anyway. You know why? Cause I'm an American and I expect a little cancer in my food and water. That's right, I'm a loyal American and I'm not happy unless I've let government and industry poison me a little bit every day. Let me have a few hundred thousand carcinogens here.
Ahh, a little cancer never hurt anybody. Everybody needs a little cancer I think. It's good for you. Keeps you on you're toes.
- George Carlin
Now, what is the point of this quote, you may ask? Do I think that Wright is a cancer? No. Is his rhetoric a cancer? No, that's not either. Then surely, the deleterous effect he apparently is having on Obama's candidacy? Nope, that's not it either.
Then what is the point? What is the 'cancer' I speak of when I quote the great George Carlin? Simple. The cancer is the 800-lb. Gorilla in the room that the political elites, the media, and the more willfully ignorant of us continue to ignore. The ugly past we have, the ugly present we often endorse, and the ugly future this administration is sending us toward with its warmongering, toadyism, and belligerent defiance of common sense. Wright is no cancer, and he's no danger.
Say what you will of Wright's demeanor, his rhetoric, his style, his unapologetic nature. The one thing he's doing is something that very few people are willing to do, and even fewer are given any sort of audience for: exposing problems.
I don't care if you think he needs to be less "bombastic", as he is often described, often by himself in reference to all the coverage he's gotten. I don't care if you think he's outrageous. I've listened to the sermons, and the recent appearances in question, and found precious little that I found terribly ugly, racist, or un-American. He is doing something that we need to have done every so often: He's forcing us to drink the water, and reminding us of the cancer in there.
Even if he was outrageous and inflammatory, I am personally tired of being coddled and lied to in soft tones. I want truth, no matter how painful it is. Even if I'm angry now, it's better for me in the long run than if I consume the soothing tones of liars and politicians.
The less we know of some of the ugliness that's genuinely out there, the less protected we can be from it. Ignorance is not strength, no matter how some might want to run by the Orwell playbook of 1984.
I personally watched the Press Club appearance by Wright. I listened through his initial speech, and I listened to the Q&A afterward. And after all of it, after all of it, I was left with a feeling of not outrage, not shame, not dread for what this had done to our political discourse. No, my thoughts were summarized in two words:
"That's it?!"
The speech that I had been told would sink the Obama campaign, the same one which drew such outrage, the same one that Obama severed all his ties with Wright over, simply left me with a feeling of "What's the big freakin' deal?" I found so precious little to be terribly controversial, and what I was told WAS controversial, in the context of the speech I saw, sounded more sensible than at least any speech I've seen out of George Bush or John McCain.
This whole drummed outrage makes me mad, yes...but not at Wright. Not at Obama. No, my anger is saved for the insipid media that created a scandal out of nothing more but soundbites and clips, and a political discourse that fosters such hackery to the point that this speech, this distancing, this handwringing had to happen. Because it DIDN'T have to happen. It never SHOULD have happened, and that it did is disgusting and cancerous.
Again, I felt that Wright's appearance was little more than giving us a taste of the 'little cancer'. The stuff we need to swallow, if only to remind us it's there, and we need to immunize ourselves from the shames and hackery of our country's pasts and present, rather than ignore it. This is a discussion that needs to be had, yes, not for the reasons that McCain, the GOP, Hillary, the media, or even Obama might want. This is a discussion we need to have because we NEED to be made uncomfortable. We need to know what's wrong out there, and if it takes a firebrand to be made a target of sound bites and outrage, so be it.