Now that we all agree this passport nonsense is much ado about nothing, let's get back to Obama and Wright.
Bi-Polar Bear wrote:my mother was a bozoette in high school....and if I may correct myself... please everyone inflate your shoes.... not your noses... although you may if you like squeeze the wheeze.... many people find they like to...
I understand how a drug crazed psuedo hippie such as yourself might make the mistake of referencing inflating one's nose.
However, I did find, in younger days, that certain mushrooms made my feet bigger.
Finn dAbuzz wrote:Bi-Polar Bear wrote:my mother was a bozoette in high school....and if I may correct myself... please everyone inflate your shoes.... not your noses... although you may if you like squeeze the wheeze.... many people find they like to...
I understand how a drug crazed psuedo hippie such as yourself might make the mistake of referencing inflating one's nose.
However, I did find, in younger days, that certain mushrooms made my feet bigger.
I don't think I'm old enough to have had those sorts of "younger days."
Friday, Mar. 21 2008
Statement From The Analysis Corporation
WASHINGTON, March 21, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Late this morning, representatives of the Department of State informed The Analysis Corporation (TAC: 29.61, -0.94, -3.07%) for the first time that one of the individuals who had been detected inappropriately accessing passport files of prominent political figures was a TAC employee. The individual was working on contract at the Department of State.
This individual's actions were taken without the knowledge or direction of anyone at TAC and are wholly inconsistent with our professional and ethical standards.
TAC has an exemplary record of supporting the Department of State and other elements of the U.S. Government for close to two decades. We are fully cooperating with the Department of State in its investigation. Specifically, we have honored the Department's request to delay taking any administrative action related to the employment of the individual in order to give the Department's Office of the Inspector General the opportunity to conduct its investigation.
We deeply regret that the incident occurred and believe it is an isolated incident.
Analysis Corp.
About Us
TAC was founded in 1990 and acquired by SFA, Incheadquartered in Crofton, Md. as a wholly owned subsidiary in February 2003. One of TAC's first contracts was with the Department of State (DoS) to automate what was to become the Terrorist Watchlist. Over the last 16 years, the agencies and organizations at the forefront of our nation's security have relied on TAC for data-management systems, client support, and analytic services that have proved critical to mission success. Counterterrorism remains a critical emphasis. Today, TAC is providing counterterrorism support in most of the agencies within the Intelligence Community.
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SFA, Inc. delivers industry leading analysis, technologies and systems to support national security customers. Many defense, intelligence and homeland security agencies recognize SFA as a trusted provider. Our 40 year analysis, technology and systems pedigree and our ability to integrate and customize our solutions to client requirements has enabled the intelligence community, US Navy, US Army, US Coast Guard and many others to achieve and often exceed their mission goals.
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Outline: Terrorism is a concern facing many national governments worldwide. One of their key challenges is how best to identify and interdict known and suspected terrorists and groups that may pose a threat.
In 2004, a U.S. Government agency asked our specialist subsidiary to develop an IT architecture and infrastructure to collect, collate, analyse and store information in order to track the movement of terrorists. This system and its information is designed to be used across multiple government departments both nationally and internationally. Its implementation would enable our client to inhibit terrorist activities.
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With a career that has put him in just about every global hot spot on the map, few enter the executive hot seat with as many tried and tested skills as Hillen. From his time in the Army as a paratrooper and with Special Ops; to his role as head of the defense and intelligence business at AMS; and most recently a stint as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, Hillen is poised to make Global Strategies Group a name to watch in 2008.
Global Strategies is already turning heads as a unique breed offering high end, integrated national security solutions designed to strengthen national defenses, stabilize critical environments and assure worldwide commerce. The firm has played a key role in some of the most high profile international hot spots, for example laying the foundations for Afghanistan's first national elections and managing security and operations at Baghdad International Airport.
Frontline Interviews John Hillen.
He is a former Army captain and a former staff member of the Commission on National Security, a congressionally appointed independent committee set up to examine national security issues in the 21st century. He has been a defense policy adviser to the Bush 2000 campaign.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. John Hillen
Assistant Secretary, Political-Military Affairs
Term of Appointment: 10/11/2005 to 01/11/2007
John Hillen serves as the Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs. The bureau he heads is the principal link between the Departments of State and Defense. The Bureau provides policy direction in the areas of international security, security assistance, military operations, humanitarian assistance, and defense trade.
John Hillen, a former Assistant Secretary of State and decorated combat officer, is one of America's most notable authorities on global security challenges today. He is is the President of Global Strategies Group (USA), a company that delivers customized risk management, technology, business, and development solutions to clients around the world - focusing on solutions undertaken in austere or dangerous environments, post-conflict regions, or emerging markets.
As a decorated combat veteran and a former high ranking government official who has visited most of the world's combat zones and hot spots in the past few years, he is an authority on the war on terrorism and the challenges of working in destabilized regions. A former Army paratrooper and special operations officer, he was for many years an ABC news contributor and was frequently seen on Good Morning America, World News Tonight, Nightline, This Week, and other ABC News programs.
From 2005 - 2007, Hillen served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs in the Bush administration. In that capacity he was the senior State department official responsible for coordinating America's diplomatic strategy with its military operations. He was also responsible for overseeing the department's policies in the areas of international security, security assistance, military operations, weapons removal and abatement, and defense trade.
A self-described "true-blue conservative," with a contributing-editor position at the National Review to prove it, Hillen insists he's also a "committed internationalist" who could work in a Democratic or Republican administration.
His credentials could certainly cross the aisle: a Bronze Star from the Army for bravery in the Battle of 73 Easting in the Gulf War; a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Oxford; a pair of defense policy books (Blue Helmets and Future Visions for U.S. Defense Policy); an appointment on the bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission, charged by Congress with examining national security in the twenty-first century; a stint as a campaign speechwriter for then-governor George W. Bush; a short list of think-tank positions; and a long list of media appearances--ABC, PBS, NPR, The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs, to name a few.
...
In considering a move into government, Hillen says that he's less concerned with a job's title than with who his boss would be. "Colin Powell is still the most impressive person I've ever met," he says. Richard Armitage, Robert Zoellick, and Paul Wolfowitz are among others in government who command his confidence.
It's Wolfowitz's job--assistant secretary of defense--that Hillen ultimately wants. "I've trained my whole life for it," he says. "I've trained my whole life, body and soul."
About SRA International, Inc.
SRA is a leading provider of technology and strategic consulting services and solutions -- including systems design, development, and integration; and outsourcing and managed services -- to clients in national security, civil government, and health care and public health markets. The Company also delivers business solutions for contingency and disaster response planning, information assurance, business intelligence, environmental strategies, enterprise architecture, infrastructure management, and wireless integration.
Bi-Polar Bear wrote:my mother was a bozoette in high school....and if I may correct myself... please everyone inflate your shoes.... not your noses... although you may if you like squeeze the wheeze.... many people find they like to...
I understand how a drug crazed psuedo hippie such as yourself might make the mistake of referencing inflating one's nose.
However, I did find, in younger days, that certain mushrooms made my feet bigger.
Yes, let's skim over this long list of pertinent facts so no one will notice or look any further:
http://www.foxbusiness.com/article/statement-analysis-corporation_530315_1.html]
Yes, let's skim over this long list of pertinent facts so no one will notice or look any further:
<snip>
It is delicious only because Democratic jerks have hoped to make some real hay out of it and so when it becomes known that the perps are employees of a key Obama supporter, I can't help but grin with great satisfaction.
Butrflynet wrote:Yes, let's skim over this long list of pertinent facts so no one will notice or look any further:
http://www.foxbusiness.com/article/statement-analysis-corporation_530315_1.html]
Good grief, the brain cells you wasted on this post.
No matter who is responsible for the these privacy breaches, this is a non-issue.
Obama was not the only "victim." Democrats were not the only "victims."
There is nothing in a passport application that can't be discovered through numerous other legal sources.
Assuming there was a vast right-wing conspiracy associated with this thing, it can't be linked to McCain. As much as you and your friends might like it, Obama is not running against Bush.
Have you ever heard the expression "No harm, no foul?" It applies to Obama as well as Clinton and McCain.
This story has been tagged to Obama alone (while all three candidates had their privacy breached) because only Obama has reason to want a story, any story, to grab the headlines from the Wright flap.
Please give it up.
It is delicious only because Democratic jerks have hoped to make some real hay out of it and so when it becomes known that the perps are employees of a key Obama supporter, I can't help but grin with great satisfaction.
So what was the purpose of pasting the article linking Obama's advisor to the data breach if the whole thing is a non-issue?
The content of the file is not the issue, it is the unreported-uninvestigated act of unauthorized snooping of prioritized passport data files that is the issue.
Regarding nefarious guilt by long-term associations, the McCain/Bush relationship is just as viable and open to speculation and finger pointing as the Obama/Wright relationship. After all, George W did offer himself as an advisor to McCain too and we already know how good the Bush folk are at snooping into people's files. :wink:
Finn dAbuzz wrote:Butrflynet wrote:Yes, let's skim over this long list of pertinent facts so no one will notice or look any further:
http://www.foxbusiness.com/article/statement-analysis-corporation_530315_1.html]
Good grief, the brain cells you wasted on this post.
No matter who is responsible for the these privacy breaches, this is a non-issue.
Obama was not the only "victim." Democrats were not the only "victims."
There is nothing in a passport application that can't be discovered through numerous other legal sources.
Assuming there was a vast right-wing conspiracy associated with this thing, it can't be linked to McCain. As much as you and your friends might like it, Obama is not running against Bush.
Have you ever heard the expression "No harm, no foul?" It applies to Obama as well as Clinton and McCain.
This story has been tagged to Obama alone (while all three candidates had their privacy breached) because only Obama has reason to want a story, any story, to grab the headlines from the Wright flap.
Please give it up.
Yes, I know that all three of them had their files breached.
So what was the purpose of pasting the article linking Obama's advisor to the data breach if the whole thing is a non-issue?
See Tico's post directly above yours. The purpose was to point out how hilarious it is that only the Obama camp is making a big deal out of this non-issue.
The content of the file is not the issue, it is the unreported-uninvestigated act of unauthorized snooping of prioritized passport data files that is the issue.
Right. Perhaps it wasn't the product of low level employee ennui as I've suggested, but since it involved all three candidates (and probably more celebs) and there is no evidence that it was intended, in any way, as a political dirty trick, it is a non-issue. Yes, the fools who goofed around with these files should be fired but that's as far as any "investigation" is ever going to go.
Regarding nefarious guilt by long-term associations, the McCain/Bush relationship is just as viable and open to speculation and finger pointing as the Obama/Wright relationship. After all, George W did offer himself as an advisor to McCain too and we already know how good the Bush folk are at snooping into people's files. :wink:
This comment is precisely why the passport flap is so ridiculous. Only a political (you fill in the blank) might believe that the interest of the Obama campaign in this passport non-issue was not an attempt to divert attention from the Wright contraversy.
Attempting to compare, in any way, the Obama-Wright association with that of the McCain-Bush association is just really weak. Do I need to list all of the reasons the comparison is absurd. "Wink - Wink"
Butrflynet wrote:So what was the purpose of pasting the article linking Obama's advisor to the data breach if the whole thing is a non-issue?
Are you serious?
For the simple reason that certain Obama groupies were convinced that "Passportgate" was the biggest story of the century, implying wrongdoing by the Bush Administration to try and get dirt on Rockstar Obama. Well, it turns out the company that employs the snoopers is headed by Obama's confidante.
And it turns out that same company is one of the two companies that employed the snoopers. It turns out that the company is actually a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a company headed by a guy who is chomping at the bit for Wolfowitz's job after testing the waters with a stint as a Bush speech writer and Assistant Secretary in the State Department of the Bush Administration. Maybe he was just checking out which of them would be a better boss for him.
And hey, guess what? I pasted the list for the simple reason that the McCain faithful are satisfied to look no further now that an Obama supporter is mentioned.
Quote:The content of the file is not the issue, it is the unreported-uninvestigated act of unauthorized snooping of prioritized passport data files that is the issue.
What do you mean "unreported-uninvestigated"? Are you saying this matter was not reported? Are you saying it was not investigated? Are you suggesting the security safeguards that appear to have worked were insufficient? Or are you, yourself, trying to claim some nefarious role by the present administration? What exactly are you trying to claim here?
Well, let's see. Hillary's file was breached last summer and it was only now reported to her and is only now being investigated. Obama's file was breached three times in the last three months and is only now being reported to supervisors and department heads and reported to Obama. Oh, and somebody snooped McCain's file too. So, yeah, those security safeguards don't work very well if no one is paying attention or asking for regular reports about violations of them. Makes me wonder who else is snooping around in government data files that we don't know about because no one tasked with oversight is paying attention. Also makes me concerned for the safety of all the candidates and their families when their data is assigned priority safeguards to protect the data and it is still so easily breached and goes unreported to the department heads and the candidates for so long.
Quote:Regarding nefarious guilt by long-term associations, the McCain/Bush relationship is just as viable and open to speculation and finger pointing as the Obama/Wright relationship. After all, George W did offer himself as an advisor to McCain too and we already know how good the Bush folk are at snooping into people's files. :wink:
Well, it seems the Obamites are not reasonable people, and are still trying to may political hay of the story ... in which case, then perhaps we ought to re-focus on the role of Obama's adviser as the CEO of the company that did the snooping. Maybe there is some stink going on after all.
That is exactly what Wexler is wanting to do if he can get some cooperation from the Executive Branch. I hope we get some answers.
Finn dAbuzz wrote:
Quote:It is delicious only because Democratic jerks have hoped to make some real hay out of it and so when it becomes known that the perps are employees of a key Obama supporter, I can't help but grin with great satisfaction.
By the way, it was this comment that sent me off digging deeper. I wanted to learn more about who exactly that guy was and what his relationship to Obama and the State Department were, and followed the trail to peel back the layers. The breadcrumbs got interesting and it will indeed be captivating to watch which ever direction it goes.
Finn,
And the Obama/Wright flap is designed to do what, foster feelings of coombya and hand holding amongst the Democrats as we get closer to a presumptive nominee?
Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia:
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth
By Tim Wise
March 18, 2008
For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.
Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.
But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?
Well actually, no he didn't.
Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."
But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.
Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.
So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.
But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.
This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:
White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.
And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.
We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.
Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.
Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.
Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.
Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.
These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.
No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, if not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.
It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.
What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?
And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.
Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.
So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that **** every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.
Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.
He's Preaching to A Choir I've Left
By Jonetta Rose Barras
Sunday, March 23, 2008; B01
I've known preachers like the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., former pastor to Sen. Barack Obama. Like many of them, he no doubt sees his congregation as full of victims, and thinks that his words will inspire them to rise out of their victimhood. I understand that.
Once upon a time, I saw myself as a victim, too, destined to march in place. In the 1970s and '80s, as a clenched-fist-pumping black nationalist with my head wrapped in an elaborate gele, I reflected that self-concept in my speech. My words were as fiery as the Rev. Wright's. And more than a few times, I, too, damned America, loudly, for its treatment of blacks.
But I turned away from such rhetoric. Is it time that Wright and other ministers do, too?
African Americans differ on this question. "Some of these ministers are like some hip-hop artists," says E. Ethelbert Miller, an Afro-American studies expert. "Their language is not healing." Counters former civil rights leader Lawrence Guyot: "I am so proud of Rev. Wright, who speaks with unreserved passion, who accepts no quarter and gives no quarter. I'm glad the church is standing with him."
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The recent furor over the incendiary rhetoric of the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago pulled back a curtain on black America, sending many in the white commentariat into shock and outrage. But African Americans have been hearing words like Wright's in churches across the country for decades. And for many of us, the uproar over his comments only underlined the quiet culture war going on within our own community.
For a decade, tensions have been rising over questions ranging from what it means to be black, to whether there needs to be a new, post-civil rights meaning of racism, to what features of black America should be transmitted to the mainstream, to whether there even is such a thing as "black America" anymore. Many of these skirmishes have been relegated to our kitchens and living rooms. But they are increasingly being brought to the public square -- often because a white person, a Don Imus or a Michael Richards, commits some infraction or demonstrates cluelessness about African American culture and its unspoken boundaries.
Now the debate is over Wright -- instigated, as many blacks see it, by the media after the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton accused news organizations of insufficiently scrutinizing Obama. Reporters went trolling for stories and found Trinity Church and its controversial pastor -- and what may have been a Sunday dinner conversation in black households exploded onto the public stage.
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Concedes Miller: "Some people need to hear" Wright's words. "It's looking in the mirror to get a better self-concept."
In my years as a black nationalist, I often spelled America in my poems with a "k" -- sometimes three. I believed that organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan couldn't possibly have operated and prospered without permission, tacit or otherwise, and support from the U.S. government. It seemed logical to conclude that racism and injustice were fundamental, inherent elements of the United States -- of its government, its policies and its institutions.
In those days, I believed that I was in a serious battle for my future. My fiery words were part of an effort to persuade myself that I had the power to break out of the narrow confines created by segregation. And I sought to seduce others to join in the fight. We could not permit the discrimination we faced daily to beat us down.
I never met the Rev. Wright during this explosive period of my life. But I met and listened to others whose speeches were equally blistering and damning of the United States, its government and its economic system. I even flirted with the ideology of a black separatist group.
Obama doesn't share my heritage. But as a child of mixed-race parentage and culture, surely he, too, struggled for his place in a society that has not always been welcoming to mulattos. His white family loved him, but more than an ocean separated him from his black father and relatives. I know what it's like to long for a father, having never known my own. Perhaps Obama found a surrogate black family in Trinity Church.
"Obama had to go to a church" like Trinity, says Miller. "That was part of his homecoming, part of his self-discovery."
That other African Americans and I were able to overcome seemingly insurmountable hurdles is undeniably due, in part, to Wright-like prophetic speech. Like Negro spirituals, it helped us organize, motivate and empower ourselves.
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I came to this realization gradually. As I expanded my associations and experiences -- organizing in places such as San Francisco, Providence, R.I., Patterson, N.J. and Northeast Washington, meeting caring Hispanics, Asians and whites -- I came to know that we are all more alike than different. I saw that our dreams sat inside each other. All of us wanted a better America, not so much for ourselves as for our children, and their children. Achieving this meant that we had to get beyond our past segregated lives and work together, inspiring the best in ourselves -- not the bitterness and the biases.
This is Obama's message. "I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together," he said last week in a somber, historic address about race, racism and our country's future, presenting grievances on both sides: the pain and anger of blacks and the resentments of working- and middle-class whites.
Earlier, he had denounced Wright's words and dismissed the minister from his ceremonial campaign role. But in his speech he also made clear that he could no more distance himself from his former black pastor than he could from his white grandmother, both of whom are imperfect people.
I understand this sentiment. I have not removed myself from people in my community who continue to rely on Wright-speak. We simply engage in debates. But their numbers are diminishing. More and more African Americans are coming to understand what we have in common with other Americans. Whites, Hispanics and Asians seem to be going through similar metamorphoses. What else can account for the surprising support Obama has received among non-blacks?
And today, there is an entire generation of young people who know nothing of segregation, who see one another as individuals, not as symbols of a dark past. They do not look into white faces and see, as I once did, a burning cross, a white sheet and a vicious dog on a police officer's leash. This is the coalition pushing for a new America.
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Perhaps Obama's campaign -- with its call for unity and for transcending the negative characteristics of race -- is part of breaking with a painful past. Many of us, blacks as well as whites, hope so.
