A Stone's Throw Sunday Funnies

Election coverage goes on and on and on...it reminds me of the old Mad Magazine Spy cartoons of spies spying on spies who are spying on spies, etc., etc. Now, we have analysts analyzing analysts who are analyzing analysts, etc., etc.

Yet the story doesn't change much.

Obama improved in Pennsylvania over the past few weeks, thanks to focus and money. He came from being down some 20+% to lose by 9.4 %. Clinton won.

At this point, it's probably important to play out the remaining primaries to the bitter end, then add up the numbers, with "super delegates" declaring sometime in June, repairing the damages in July, and going into the Convention in late August with a united Democratic Party. But, thanks largely to the Republican candidate, John McCain, I wouldn't be too worried if the Democratic nominee was picked on the Convention floor.

Highlight of the day, however, came from Fox News. First they did an interview with Obama, the first in about two years. Chris Wallace (Mike Wallace's son) did the interview for Fox. Obama presumably agreed to the interview as part of a campaign push to win more support among white male blue collar workers.

The interview went far better than I expected. Questions were fair; answers good. Wallace touched upon, but did not dwell on, the three major flaps of the Obama campaign: Reverend Wright, the "bitter" comment, and the ex-Weatherman, Ayers.[See Note below on Ayers]. The interview was followed by 15 minutes of "analysis" by the "Usual Suspects": Brent Hume, Bill Kristol, Juan Williams and a woman commentator from NPR, whose name escapes me at the moment. All but Kristol were reasonably impressed by the interview. If Fox News is slowly and incrementally coming around to accept Obama, he's virtually got it all wrapped up.

Fox followed this interview, several hours later, with a live broadcast of the Reverend Wright's keynote address to a meeting of the Detroit Chapter of the NAACP.

The Reverend took the occasion to show his "nice side." The theme was: different doesn't mean deficient and differences between African American "learning" (right brain) and White/European learning (left brain). It was entertaining and there were ample subtleties in his remarks, but few of the fireworks for which Fox probably hoped.

OK...I'll make an attempt to explain Reverend Wright and why he doesn't bother me as much as may bother others...particularly all those guys in Pennsylvania who voted against Obama, who Obama himself referred to as "bitter."

I am not an expert on African-American history or culture, so most of what follows is simply guess-work and conjecture.

The Reverend likes to distinguish himself as a pastor and definitely not a politician. IMO, this shades the truth a bit. My own observation is that successful Black preachers are, in fact, excellent politicians and, generally, the first group of African Americans to be solicited by White politicians seeking votes in the Black community.

I trace this to the role of the African American Church (in its various denominations) in American history. I suspect that during slavery, while Blacks were not treated as "humans," but property, few slave owners, nominally themselves Christians, could not logically deny Christian Black Churches, even for their slaves, and allowed separate Black Church services.

As such, the Black Church became a central focus of slave culture and consequently became an organizing force for the Black slave community, providing ethnic leadership, preserving African heritage, etc., with a mix of entertainment, religion, cultural heritage, and politics. Perhaps, most of all, it was a place to "vent."

During the civil rights days (the fifties and sixties), it was primarily a coalition of the descendants of northern abolitionists, liberal northern Jews, enlightened White southerners and the Black Churches (together with the NAACP, CORE, and an assortment of other civil rights organizations) that brought about the voting drives and subsequent Civil Rights Act.

Many of the people in the civil rights movement moved into the anti-Vietnam War movement that followed. And, that movement had various elements of its own...some religious in nature (Peace, not War), some political in nature (SDS), and some neither (Make Love Not War...the Flower Children). And, while the divisions between these groups was often fierce, they came together in being anti-establishment, chiefly on the grounds of what they perceived as contradictions and hypocrisy in the society in which they lived.

One could make an argument that the polarization of American society began in the sixties, with a semi, for the most part non-violent, revolution. For those too young to remember Vietnam, today's differences between Clinton and Obama, and Democrats and Republicans, are minute compared to the sixties. Today's hard-core left wing of the Democratic Party came into being during this era: from the Civil Rights Marches to Anti-War Protests, which usually ended with mass arrests, often with violence, and occasionally with deaths.

One movement that emerged from this era was Black Power. Organizations such as the Symbonese Liberation Army and the Black Panthers, many based on an American version of Islam formed the basis of this sub-movement of the times and there was a sort of loose coalition between these strictly Black organizations and the more radical of the largely left wing and White anti-war groups.

What followed was a serious challenge to much of the African American Christian Church establishment, who were viewed by the Black Power extremists as "Uncle Tom's." In part to counter this challenge,many Black Christian Churches re-emphasized African cultural roots...i.e. you could still be a militant Black and remain a Christian.

Here my interpretation gets a bit sticky. The Civil Rights movement was perceived by many Black Americans has having achieved success for relatively few of its members - i.e. generally the Black leadership of the Civil Rights movement, many of whom were pastors of Black Christian Churches. In countering this Black community perspective and the challenge of the Black Muslim's, Christian African American Churches and pastors such as the Reverend Wright moved toward increasing militancy to hold the flock.

Wright is not a stupid person. Perhaps not brilliant; but not dumb. He served in the U.S. Marines; apparently speaks a number of languages; holds various degrees, including a PhD from somewhere, and obvious to a child of the sixties like myself, draws his criticism of America based on that era.

One of the lasting images of the Vietnam War is a small, naked child, maybe six years old, running down a street, screaming, after being burned supposedly by American napalm. I would guess it was this sort of image that Reverend Wright conjured up following 9/11, when he said "God Damn America." He doesn't hate us, he hates his perception of our history...from slavery to Vietnam, to what he perceives as White America's establishment actions that led to 9/11. He's every bit as "bitter" a man as any of those in White blue collar Pennsylvania.

THe United States, Western European Democracies and former communist countries are curiously the "exception" on the issue of separation of church and state. I suspect in MOST of the world, whether via Christian Catholicism in Latin America or Shinto Japan, or Islam there is far more unity between both religion and politics. The Reverend can no more turn his back on what he perceives our faults to be than an Islamic cleric could turn his back on our attempt to "secularize" Iraq. As both pastor and political leader within his community his "duty" is to speak his perceived truth, whether it offends us or not. Fortunately, for him, he lives in a country that respects his right to do so, if not his beliefs.

I think all of the above is basically what Obama means when he says: "He is from a different era." And, of course, one can understand a position even while disagreeing with it. Nor does one have to understand his perspective to respect his right to free speech.

I would hope that the Reverend appreciates at least that much of our society. I suspect that in Shaka's Zulu Kingdom of 19th Century Africa and in far too many countries today, he'd have lost his head.

Note: Next, my view of the recent history of the Democratic Party and the Obama Phenomena.

P.S. The Weathermen were a militant group that practiced a low grade of terrorism (if there is such a thing) in the late sixties and early seventies. It was a splinter group from the left wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They took their name from a line in Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."). They were anti-war, but also anti-capitalist and advocated a form of communism. They probably never numbered more than 100. They planted bombs, chiefly in government buildings and killed two policemen and a security guard in a Brinks armored car robbery. Three of them blew-up themselves in a botched bomb building exercise in Greenwich Village in 1970. There were two fractions within the group: those who wanted to blow people up and those who wanted to just blow-up buildings. The latter argued that while bombs were OK, they should take care NOT to kill anyone, but practice non-lethal terrorism.

All of this touched recently on the Obama campaign. The Weathermen broke up in the mid-seventies. Most of its members had left of their own accord or been captured, tried and sent to prison for long terms. One member, Bill Ayers, now teaches education at the University of Illinois Chicago campus and remains unrepentant (Charges were dropped against him after he turned himself in in 1980. He apparently was part of the non-lethal faction). Ayers and his also-former Weatherman spouse, Bernardine Dohrin are active in Democratic politics today in Chicago. In 1995, Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer had decided to run for Congress and took Obama around to various meetings (similar to fund-raising coffees) introducing him as her chosen successor. As part of these rounds, Palmer and Obama attended a meeting at the Ayers' home. Ayers and Obama also served on the same board of a Chicago foundation. The curious thing about Ayers is why were charges against him dropped?

I would contend that it would not be unusual for a young and up-coming Black politician coming out of the South Side of Chicago (the largest Black neighborhood in the country) to have the types of relationships Obama had with both Wright and Ayers, who were of the same "sixties generation."