UPDATE: 5/8/08 - I want very much to delete this diary; I no longer agree with myself in any way, shape, or form. The situation is far, far more complicated than I accounted for here (for starters, I didn't so much as touch on the media's hand in creating this disaster). The wounds to both men are deep and deeply personal and, as Bill Moyers said tonight in an interview on Democracy Now, both will likely go to their graves with them. That a disavowal was forced out of Barack Obama at all is an American disgrace, and few of us--least of all me, a daily cable news/CNN consumer--can say that we are not, at the very least, indirectly complicit. In good conscience, however, I think I'll have to leave it, if nothing else as a record of my own growing and learning process. I am not proud of it.
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Tuesday's events with respect to Sen. Obama and his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright have left me--and I suspect a minority of my fellow Obama supporters on this blog--feeling a more than a little bit troubled. Tonight (actually it's already early Wednesday morning) I'm still kinda flailing about in a stormy sea of conflicting emotions, so I guess right now I'd just like to just toss a couple of my mostly muddled thoughts out there, and then call it a (altogether poopy) night.
For starters, I think it's probably safe to say that no one, regardless of race (or gender or any other classification) would have a snowball's chance in hell of being elected president in 2008 America if he or she were maintaining ties with any person or group who has ever publicly doubted the perfect moral rectitude of the dominant white male culture of dog-eat-dog capitalism.
It's probably also safe to say that very few of us who live here escapes the dominant culture's 24/7 propaganda deluge. Cable TV and other mainstream media ceaselessly bombard the American public with images and attitudes in praise of excessive material acquisition brought to us courtesy the capitalistic, paternalistic, ruling elite. Thus it's not surprising that for many Americans--and I mean Americans of all classes, races and backgrounds--a culture of frenzied consumerism and the capitalism-on-steroids values that feeds it has not merely become "normalized," it is now virtually invisible: its values are internalized and acted out in our attitudes and behavior, but its ever-present presence is not felt.
Now bear with me while I try to take this a notch deeper. Rev. Wright has not merely wondered out loud about whether or not the dominant culture's morals and mores are really all they've been cracked up to be. He actually critically interrogated them, laying our national brutishness and hypocrisy bare for all those sleepy folks out there to hear and see. You don't need me to tell you that that kind of revolutionary rumbling--that faint timbre of 60s-ish radicalism--frightens the living sh*t out of most folks today, and it's a fear that transcends, infects, and trespasses beyond all race and class lines.
So, superficially the problem with Rev. Wright seemed to be pretty much a cut-and-dried racial thing: the voluble, polysyllabic black preacher on the TV frightening reserved white white viewers half to death. But when I dig a little deeper, it seems to me something else begins to take shape. It starts to look like maybe Obama's urgent "disownership" of Rev. Wright yesterday had perhaps more to do with his (or any politician's) political life and legitimacy hanging by a veritable thread depending upon his willingness to embrace and, in these post-9/11 days, trumpet from the very rooftops some rendition or other of "Love America or Leave it" whilst "renouncing and denouncing" anything that remotely smacks of that radical national self-criticism crap that was put to bed for good forty years ago along with such antique, anti-American sayings as "make love not war."
What I'm saying is that I'm not convinced that this this Rev. Wright-meets-the-bus business has to do with an effort as assuaging white fears as it does with the demand placed on all politicians these days by people from all walks of life--rich or poor, white, black or brown--to STFU with the introspection and assert your staunchest patriotism, which necessarily includes rah-rahing capitalism and its attendant white, ruling class, patriarchal values. Disowning Rev. Wright was necessary in order to quell a complex of ambiguous, "radicalist" fears the man evoked in just about everybody.
Now, in case I've not been clear, I'm still very disappointed with Obama's damage control tactics yesterday. But keeping all of the above in mind, I really am forced to ask myself: If Barack Obama is to have a prayer of becoming president--and I think we can all assume that that is what he very much desires to be--what else, realistically, could he have done about his Rev. Wright problem? Not much. There really was no alternative. So I "get" the utility of it and I acknowledge the very real constraints under which he must operate in order to fulfill a lifetime of much sweated-after goals and dreams and ambitions.
But just because I've managed, after a day of anguish, to regain my grip on the stark political realities he faces, does not mean I've returned, untroubled, to my unrestrained Obama advocacy of a few days ago. You see, I've discovered that the (uncharacteristic, for me) chilly pragmatism to which I've forced myself to yield in the case of the politically expedient dispatch of Rev. Wright actually cuts both ways: because now I'm also forced to reflect critically upon my (apparently preposterously naive) ideas about the actual relevance of national politics to the lives of ordinary folks like me. I have to question, and frankly doubt, the ability of any American president to effect meaningful change within an immutable, unchallengeable, establishment system that simply does not allow it. On the contrary, by its very nature it forces changes upon you. Of those seeking the presidency, it demands untenable, intolerable sacrifices of long-standing, complex friendships and community loyalties--and with them, it would seem to me, the divestiture of whatever might remain of one's idealism. By the time you arrive at the highest seat of power, really, what is left of you?
Finally--and this is probably the worst of it--I'm forced to entertain the possibility of politically calculated disingenuity on the part of a presidential candidate who, by his actions today, has shown himself to be a savvy politician, a hard-fighting competitor, and a would-be president who, should he be elected, will be no more likely to become a true agent of significant change than any other pol who's volunteered to play in this high stakes electability game that we hold in this country every four heartbreaking years.
And yet change is Obama's mantra, the very soul of his campaign.
Were it any other man (or woman), I'm pretty sure I'd have been aware of the usual blurring of the lines between rhetoric and reality, policy and puffery, that all political campaigns engage in harmlessly enough. But somehow or other, I fell for Obama's patter hook, line and sinker. I believed every word he said. I do not blame him for the (almost certainly passing) disillusionment that I'm feeling now. I succumbed to a fit of hero-worship and, I have to say, it was fun while it lasted < g>. Now I sit before my computer in the middle of the night quietly marveling at my dumbbell credulity. Evidently, I have more of a tendency than I thought to take deeply to heart the kind of butter 'em up (or fire 'em up) sentiments that, honestly, I would have sworn I'd have no problem deciphering as mere campaign sloganeering, whenever and from whomever I heard it.