[Sosfbay-discuss] Forget Alex Walker -- Read Gary Kamiya

[alexcathy at aol.com]

Forget Alex Walker. Who the hell is he, anyway? A failed
computer programmer! Instead, read Gary Kamiya's excellent essay posted
on www.salon.com today. Kamiya says almost everything I was trying to say in
my post last week, when everybody shot me down as a "troll" and a general madman.
Truth is truth, even if a madman says it.? Gary Kamiya makes the same point much better than me and since Mr. Kamiya
is executive editor and cofounder of the online magazine Salon.com, and
a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, unlike me, he
has a proper corporate license to express an opinion.? I have deleted my entire essay from the Green
Commons Web Site and substituted Gary Kamiya' because I think this so
important. Kamiya begins right away with the terrifying spectre of President John McCain.? Also note the powerful quote from Abraham Lincoln's Second
Inaugural Address which today's ignorant US "intellectuals" never
remember.













 





Posted on Salon, Tuesday, March 25, 2008. 



Rev. Jeremiah Wright Isn't the Problem 








The hysteria over Obama's former pastor's attacks on America shows we're still in thrall to knee-jerk patriotism. 






by Gary Kamiya











Maybe we really are doomed to elect John McCain, remain in Iraq
forever and nuke Iran. Nations that forget history may not be doomed to
repeat it, but those that never even recognize reality in the first
place definitely are. Last week's ridiculous uproar over Rev. Jeremiah
Wright's sermons proves yet again that America has still not come to
terms with the most rudimentary facts about race, 9/11 -- or itself. 

    








The great shock so many people claim to be feeling over Wright's
sermons is preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that
some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in
a racial never-never land. 

    


Wright has called the U.S. "the United States of White America,"
talks about the "oppression" of black people and says, "White America
got their wake-up call after 9/11." Gosh, who could have dreamed that
angry racial grievances and left-wing political views are sometimes
expressed in black churches? 










It's not surprising that the right is using Wright to paint Barack Obama as a closet Farrakhan, 
trying to let the air out of his trans-racial balloon by insinuating that he's a dogmatic race man. 
But beyond the fake shock and the all-too-familiar racial politics, what the whole episode reveals is how 
narrow the range of acceptable discourse remains in this country. 
This is especially true of anything having to do with patriotism or 9/11 -- which have become virtually interchangeable. 
Wright's unforgivable sin was that he violated our rigid code of national etiquette. 




. . .










Wright isn't the problem. Stupid patriotism is the problem.

    








We are now five years into a war that may outrank Vietnam as the most pointless and disastrous one in our history. 
George W. Bush and his neoconservative brain trust conceived that war, but they were only able to push it through 
because the American people, their political leaders and the mainstream media signed off on it. 
And they did so because they were in the grip of the fearful, vengeful, patriotic frenzy that swept the nation after 9/11. 
Without 9/11 and America's fateful reaction to it, there would be no Iraq war. 
Every day that the war drags on is yet another indictment of that self-righteous, 
unthinking "patriotism."

  


. . .










In fact, the same all-American flag-wavers who called loudest for war against Iraq are now denouncing 
Wright as a hate-monger and a traitor, and attacking Michelle Obama for saying that only recently has she had 
reason to feel proud of her country. They insist that anyone who is not permanently proud of the United States, 
whose patriotism isn't plastered on his or her face like the frozen smile of a beauty queen waving from a 
Fourth of July float, is beyond the pale. Never mind that the glorious results of their debased version of 
patriotism -- 4,000 American troops dead, a wrecked Iraq, and a greatly trengthened terrorist enemy -- 
are plain for all to see. 

    


. . .










Yes, Wright was angry, shrill and one-sided. But America would have been better off if his uncomfortable sermon 
had echoed through every church in the country after 9/11, instead of the patriotic, ahistorical pablum that did. 





That's strange, and depressing, is that all this has happened before -- and we've learned nothing. 
In the days after 9/11, the nation whipped itself up into an ecstasy of moral sanctimony. 
Among the few who dared to resist the groupthink was Susan Sontag, who in a brief New Yorker piece wrote, 
"The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel 
and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. 
The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. 
Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' 
or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' 
but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of 
specific American alliances and actions?" 

    


. . .










The taboo against any critical national self-examination has always
existed here. But 9/11 sealed it in blood and made it virtually
untouchable. Only a few academics, Middle East specialists and
outspoken journalists have dared to suggest that U.S. foreign policies
played a role in the 9/11 attacks. The Democrats, terrified of being
called unpatriotic and "weak on national security," won't go there.
Which is a big reason that the desperately needed national discussion
over how to deal with the Arab/Muslim world after Bush leaves office
still hasn't started.


    








Turkey has a notorious law, Article 301, that makes "insulting
Turkishness" a crime. We're a lot closer to this than we like to think.
In fact, we can expect John McCain's entire campaign to basically be an
American version of Article 301. 




. . .










The Prophetic Tradition










In 1630, Winthrop delivered a sermon to his fellow members of the Massachusetts Bay Company. 
The line that has gone down in history, oft cited by Ronald Reagan, is "wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill." 
But Reagan, eager to present America as perfect, omitted the passage that followed. 
Winthrop warned that if the community of Puritans dealt falsely with their God, they would be 
cursed "till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing." 

    


. . .










In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered near the end of the Civil
War, Abraham Lincoln issued an equally terrifying warning -- one also
largely erased from the national memory. "Fondly do we hope --
fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass
away," Lincoln said. But then he added, "Yet, if God wills that it
continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and
fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of
blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the
sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said
'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'"




. . .










I am not comparing Jeremiah Wright to these towering figures. My
point is that his angry claims that his nation has betrayed its
promises of racial equality and a just foreign policy are part of a
long and honorable prophetic tradition. It was not critics like Wright
who got us into the bloody mess we're in today. That honor belongs to
the flag-wavers, the patriots -- "the real Americans."



















 




URL: 
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/03/25/rev_jeremiah_wright/

























Gary
Kamiya is the executive editor and one of the founders of the online magazine
Salon.com, where he has written about politics, literature, the Middle East,
sports, music, art, race, travel, and film, among other subjects, and is a
regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review.
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