There were moments of eloquence in Obama's speech, but I can't decide if solipsism or condescension accounts for his thinking that the very limited scandal surrounding his toxic pastor Jeremiah Wright is related to America's greater and permanent stain of slavery. It is an insult to blacks, not to mention the civil rights movement, to claim that vitriol, hysteria and demagogy are endemic to a community that has, quite without the help of raving religious charlatans, already given us two Secretaries of State and two Supreme Court Justices.
By this reading, we're expected to accept that a little bit of Jeremiah — who thinks the government invented the AIDS virus, that 9/11 was a homegrown catastrophe — resides in anyone made to ride in the back of a bus. Is this really the kind of message he wishes to broadcast? Obama also errs in comparing his preacher to members of his own family. He can't have controlled who his grandmother was, but no one forced him to join the Trinity Church twenty years ago, much less to remain a congregant when he discovered the kind of spirituality being hawked from its pulpit. (It was in 1984 that Wright traveled with Louis Farrakhan to meet Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator responsible for bankrolling "Black September," the hostage-takers at the Munich Olympics, and just two years shy of facilitating the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which many U.S. servicemen were killed.)
My own suspicion is that Obama only ever discovered this shambolic God that failed because, as a bright young atheist from Hawaii, he felt that a pew-pounding minority church was a convenient entree into local Chicago politics. The word for this is cynicism, or to put it in the mushy-headed language his supporters prefer, 'You are the idiots I've been waiting for.'
P.S. I had been thinking about the point Zbird makes below before I saw him make it. Consider this an addendum to the above:
It's not news that everyone contains contradictions and multitudes and has base moments.
"I am a racist," wrote Martin Amis once, accounting for the complicated psyche of his favorite poet and family friend Philip Larkin, then under mass literary indictment for what Larkin's biography and collected letters disclosed. "I am less racist than my father was, and my children will be less racist than I am." Good sense, in other words, is historical, rooted to what Peter Singer has called the ever-widening "moral circle" by which we grow more enlightened and humane as the centuries go by. Something like that.
Amis's point was refreshingly free of cant or homiletics, and it encompassed the kind of human frailty many believe Obama artfully addressed today. It also helped that Larkin had confined all of his racist, anti-Semitic filth to the realm of private correspondence — the poems, the stuff that mattered, were blessedly free of it, which shows that even bigots and reactionaries can exercise good judgment or aspire to be better than they are, or, if you like, than their generation has allowed them to be.
My problem with Obama's speech is that he is lowering the bar to the floor, apologizing not for a celebrated postwar poet of great depth and feeling, but for a vulgar merchant of populist sleaze. Jeremiah Wright was not caught committing his many betises in casual conversation or in the semi-exclusive confines of the neighborhood barbershop, or around the kitchen table. He was preaching them from a pulpit, before a large audience, loudly and repeatedly, for decades. Shall we say this is reflective of the broader black experience in America even at its most uninhibited or flippant? (One thinks here of Chris Rock's stand-up about the friendly-seeming old codger at work who calls his white colleagues "crackers" behind their backs but is the picture of servile minstrelsy to their faces.)
Let me phrase my grievance another way: If a Jewish candidate for high office attempted to convince me that a little bit of Meir Kahane resided in all of us, I'd condemn him roundly. Not in my name, big boy. And how dare you?
The high-minded response to this kind of discourse is to say that one is trafficking in "sweeping generalizations." The liberal-left pundits, all stricken with the vapors today by Obama's long and admittedly brilliant speech, have raced to credit him with loosing a deep, dark secret about some supposed racial collective conscious. Isn't this intrinsically presumptuous and offensive to those who would argue there is no such thing to begin with?
I know I'm expected to say here that I've no right to speak for insulted African-Americans because I'm not one myself. However, I don't think it is naive or callow to say that Obama's success thus far indicates that the country has indeed reached a point where it no longer has to think in such prefab, codified categories. If he becomes president, then he will not answer to a demographic, he will answer to all of us. And by that measure alone, he has failed me.