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More on the Wright stuff

By Michael J. Smith on Wednesday April 30, 2008 08:59 PM

The Times' Bob Herbert is deeply upset and embarrassed by one of his landsmen: >
The Pastor Casts a Shadow

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.

Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media — this reverend is never going away.

I hope to God that poor fretful Bob Herbert is finally right about one thing -- namely, that the pastor is not going away.

If there's to be any lasting positive legacy of the Obama candidacy, it's the emergence of people like Jeremiah Wright from their enforced invisibility.

In the neighborhoods and communities where Wright and his colleagues and predecessors have worked for decades -- we might even say, for a couple of centuries -- they've been anything but invisible. In fact, they've been indispensable. But in the social representation sold by the "corporate media" -- as Wright quite correctly calls them -- the Wrights are merely a curiosity when they're noticed at all.

That has all changed. Obama may or may not be toast after this brouhaha, and I for one couldn't care less, one way or the other. But the lasting legacy, let's hope, is that Jeremiah Wright and what he has to say are once again on the agenda.

Dr King and Malcolm put some of these topics on the table, back in the day. Then they got killed, and Malcolm was shoved into the footnotes of official history, while King suffered the equally dire fate of plaster sainthood.

Let's hear it for the return of the repressed, the latent becoming patent, the insistent ineluctability of the plain truth.

And if the truth makes Bob Herbert's head blow up -- along with the heads of every other dreary platitudinous wretch on that arid Sahara of an Op-Ed page -- then so much the better.

Comments (9)

Christopher:

I feel for Pastor Wright what others apparently have felt about Obama. I love him absolutely. He's my favorite person in the entire United States right now.

"I hope to God that poor fretful Bob Herbert is finally right about one thing -- namely, that the pastor is not going away.

If there's to be any lasting positive legacy of the Obama candidacy, it's the emergence of people like Jeremiah Wright from their enforced invisibility."

The thing is, the commentary class doesn't want this to happen, and the left and right are teaming up to make sure it doesn't come about. I'm watching the video of him answering questions at the Press Club, and it's like watching people try to sink a battleship by throwing pebbles at it.

But news commentators are a crafty bunch, and I'm sure they're cooking up some under-handed method for crushing our hopes and dreams.

And it seems like they might fail, which will make it hurt all the more when and if they succeed.

op:

oreo-bama is not now
and never has been
a member of the black nation

that being said up front

his attack on his adoptive father
jeremiah II
reminds me of
the snitch...the cat food
high yellow journalist snitch ...
the equal opportunity snitch ...
that nailed jesse jackson
to his
" hymie town " line

only this time it was the candidate
that betrayed


beaver barrack
i love the figure
father S

but
ob had no balls to bite

no real balls
balls generate real off spring
real balls produce
real rooted blood fated people
different people
both by blood and choice and
inescapable history

and now
he has no adoptive
black father

now he is a pure self creation
an ...elton john

now ob's has tried to "kill "
his adoptive black father
in cold blood

he may think he's free to go post race

well there's no post race politics

maybe post identity politics

post gender politics

but no post race politics
not here ....not yet


now else where a ways back
i've claimed
all bad things come to an end
some time
in this case apparently ...not yet

paradox
ob's with this sterile
man without a color attack
has given race
no ....nation
a new birth of freedom


all along
the poor self idloizing fool
took this fantasy product
certain whites have made of him
for a durable personal reality

well oby
its gone poof !!
poof! !!!!!

yet
another bubble pops eh ??

--------------

back in the nambo -ed
late 60's
times were different

those running for president
as a mirage of progressive clean hope
had to be white

had to be
a white white hope
a catholic in the land calvin scurged

a kennedy brother

now ....the mirage has to be black

yes black
not female ...black

but times are different in other ways too

believe me ob's won't get
the great final career move
rfk got made for him
by that
self produced figment
sirhan of san pedro
the self described
" palestinian commando"

no obs will lose
either in august or november
it don't matter much when
and then he'll just ... stick around
and around and around
slurp the Inc-ster's
potato soup

at best
he'll become a ... charcoaled McGovern
more likely a ....bill bradley
with flare


op:

glenn ford
notices this obama self prophecy

paraphrased:

if i lose it will be thru some political mistake of mine
along the way.......not my race

how delphic

it was a political mistake indeed
after his big speeech
in the city of brotherly love
instead of leaving wright
to go about
his apocooolyptic snizzle
letting him re invisible ize
after his warhol moment

ob's tried to stab him in the chest

okay
turn your back on him
like prince hal
at his ascension
turned his on falstaff
but
why public pillory ????

thankfully but fataly
u have now tied the rev
and the whole damn black nation
to your self ...till november

from here on out
you'll travel
as one big tumbling
toxic minstrel show
center stage u and the rev
in a human tractor pull

two counter pulling jack asses
straining to get away
from each other
but
forever tied
to the same foxy silk tether

u iz goin down baby ....down

op:

the black nation
is now paying the price
for its equal opportunity
zombies

those freaks out of nature
made in ivy university quota labs

the moca merit class

the mocha elite

web dubois had other notions

hell king had other notions
even jackson had other notions

this joshua generation
is a generation of sterile cats

op:

"I feel for Pastor Wright what others apparently have felt about Obama. I love him absolutely. He's my favorite person in the entire United States right now."

god bless u son....

but this is precisely
the kind of white projection
neither our struggle nor the black struggle
need

a magic spell casting ...negro

shit that unwanted
sadly juvenile
slobbering
over heros
of the black nation's liberation struggle
helped destroy the political coherence
of my booming generation
of "decent" pink --love in type --
gentle swine

i say
look unto your own nation's class kampf

we are inescapably
"of"
the monster race


Michael Hureaux:

Forsooth.

Nicholas Hart:

One of Bob's statements that really struck me as typical of liberal ignorance was this: "The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why — if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks — does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency."

Yea, if only we could elect a Black President (tm), all the injustices faced by minorities would disappear. All the evidence points toward a business-as-usual, pro-corporate, pro-war presidency from Mr. Obama. The amount of melanin in a candidate's skin (or makeup of X and Y chromosomes, for that matter) has little to do with the concrete policies he/she would enact.

Condoleezza Rice is one of the most powerful officials in the United States. With logic like Herbert's, she should be the salvation for America's downtrodden. But of course while New Orleans was drowning, Condi trod down to Fifth Avenue to buy some $2000 boots.

If Herbert and his liberal friends genuinely want to see redress for the grievances of the poor and working class, then they need to understand that it is going to take more than platitudes about "hope" coming from politicians in the pockets of corporate America.

Of course, advocating some sort of genuine progress and populism might cost people like Herbert their lucrative careers at the New York Times.

Donald:

I think Bob Herbert is black, which doesn't invalidate your point, Nicholas Hart.

Something that somehow hasn't made it into the mainstream press was that Martin Luther King was saying the same things about US foreign policy back in 1967 as Wright says in his sermons. And of course he was criticized for it, not just by the newspapers, but even, or so I've read, by other black "leaders". It would really mess up the storyline about Wright if people realized he and MLK had exactly the same views of US foreign policy.

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