I’m a Dean Koontz fan and he quotes, in each of his novels, little snippits of prose/poetry from The Book of Counted Sorrows [for years, his readers hunted this book; turns out it is still in his head, awaiting completion.] Well, I’m counting sorrows today … and I had to dig around to find them, since chaos in general has us too spun up to focus too specifically.
Here are our topics:
The Burmese cyclone … where the Myanmar government reported death and disappearance to the tune of 13,000 … then raised it to 25,000 — but NGO’s and the like estimating a number more in the 50,000 range. Getting aid into this region is as problematic as getting reporters into Tibet … and for all the same reasons — and Laura Bush didn’t help.
Our returning soldiers, a staggering percentage of whom suffer PTSD, are being projected to commit suicide in startling numbers — over a million have been deployed in these last years; and little is being done to address their mental health issues. I’ve included a request for cast-off cell phones for soldiers, worth our consideration for those that much of the nation has forgotten.
World hunger has become epidemic and frightening — government policies, ours and others, have created a whirlwind complicated by global warming and wars. There a link to a giving opportunity included, even moderate amounts are welcomed. If you feel as though you’re already tightening your belt and can’t participate, remember — you get what you give.
I’ve also included articles about our current sabre rattling with Iran [if we had more in the national coffers, you KNOW we’d already have hit them.] This is indeed a sorrow and an assault on good sense and civil behavior. After that a couple of startling New World Order type snippits resonant with the old question — will Bush actually GO when he’s replaced? Iran continues to figure into that question, as does the military expectation. Dubby’s newly positioned Admiral Mullen is worried about changing presidents mid-stream … and the last bit, about who loses in spades during an epidemic, is what we would expect from the Bushies.
Finally, a few words about the campaign, with today the big day in NC and IN … I hope their weather’s better than mine. Voting will be tough enough, since:
1.1 Million Purged from Indiana Voter Registration Rolls
ID law could depress black turnout in IN
Hil has a slight edge in IN and a handicap in NC, although the Pub’s are smirking that the “fix is in” there for the redoubtable Ms. Clinton. [Oops - Mrs.] I read an article today where she said she’d come from behind in Indiana … odd, that was never my impression [and too close to DubSpeak to suit me … you know, the rube’s can’t remember from one day to another.] But that’s the standard dumbing-down of expectations; Olbermann had something to say about her constantly moving the goal posts, video here.
And I’ve got to say that Hillary constantly surprises me — not in a good way, sadly — but surprise she does. She vowed to smash OPEC the other day — I guess she DOES have an S on her chest … as well as testicles, too often mentioned lately, seems to me. We’ve HAD balls for 7 years — I’d prefer brains now … not to mention that the twisting of logic that requires us to look for male qualities in a female candidate just seems sad. And I quiver when she throws folks under the bus … like Krugman, who has shaped up as quite a vocal supporter in these last weeks. [I’d bet he was surprised too!] Righty pundit David Brooks outlined that in this snip about the ‘gas wars:”
Stephanopoulos asked her to name a single economist who thinks a tax-holiday plan would work, and the daughter of Wellesley and Yale took the chance to shove the geeks into their lockers: “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”
When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Paul Krugman, a Times columnist, has raised doubts about the plan, Clinton lumped Krugman in with the Bush administration and said she wasn’t going to listen to the people responsible for the last seven years.
Ultimately, I think nothing will be decided today and this time I’m going to do my best to avoid the news shows that give me momentary updates and PunditSpeak … we’ll find out soon enough if we’re gonna to pick a president we wanna have a beer with.
So, from our own Book of Counted Sorrows — what, and who, needs our prayers and support … of the day.
Jude
Aid workers fear Burma cyclone deaths will top 50,000
Kenneth Denby, in Rangoon
May 6, 2008
Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster whose scale invites comparison with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
The official death count after Cyclone Nargis is 15,000, and the Thai Foreign Minister says he has been told that 30,000 people are missing. But due to the incompleteness of the information from the stricken Irrawaddy delta, UN and charity workers in the city of Rangoon privately believe that the number will eventually be several times higher.
Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children told The Times: “I’d characterise it as unprecedented in the history of Myanmar and on an order of magnitude with the effect of the tsunami on individual countries. It might well be more dead than the tsunami caused in Sri Lanka.
“We are looking at 50,000 dead and millions homeless. The power is off, most people don’t have water. They are relying on wells, and getting it out of the Inle Lake which is not clean. There is a risk of disease - if people are living together in close proximity then an outbreak of diarrhoea is just a matter of time.”
The death toll in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004 was 31,000, second only to the 131,000 who died on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Eleven countries were affected.
Four days after the Burma cyclone, which struck the flat agricultural area south of Rangoon, there is wretchedly little hard information about the victims.
Seven townships have been designated as “priority one” disaster areas, because between 90 to 95 per cent of the buildings have been destroyed. “Anything less than 60 per cent destroyed is not being counted as a priority at this stage by the government, which gives some indication of the scale of the problem,” said Mr Kirkwood.
According to the Burmese Government’s figures at least 10,000 people have died in the town of Bogalay alone.
Foreign aid agencies have reported scenes of devastation, with corpses still littering the rice fields and desperate survivors without food or clean drinking water. They are either without shelter or crammed into whatever buildings remain standing.
Burma’s junta refused foreign aid after the 2004 tsunami, in which between 60 and 600 of its citizens are reported to have died, but this time the sheer scale of the slowly emerging disaster seems to have forced it to change its mind. “We will welcome help . . . from other countries because our people are in difficulty,” said Nyah Win, the Burmese Foreign Minister, in a rare television appearance.
Cyclone Nargis ripped across Burma’s agricultural heartland with violent winds that reached speeds of 120mph (193km/h), destroying buildings and fields, toppling trees and washing away roads in the vital rice-growing area of the Irrawaddy delta.
It flattened shanty towns and downed power and phone lines in the sprawling port city of Rangoon, Burma’s former capital and home to 5 million people.
It flattened shanty towns and downed power and phone lines in the sprawling port city of Rangoon, Burma’s former capital and home to five million people.
The price of staple foods such as rice, eggs, cabbages have doubled and even quadrupled in some areas.
Bernard Delpuech, a European Union aid official in Rangoon, said that the junta has sent three ships carrying food to the delta region, which is the rice production centre for Burma’s 53 million people. Nearly half the population live in the five disaster-hit states.
UN agencies have handed out what supplies they had from stockpiles in Burma, and are preparing to fly in further emergency food, shelter and medicines to prevent epidemics and starvation inflicting a second disaster.
Today private frustration was growing among aid organisations, however, that although the junta has publicly invited assistance, bureaucracy is impeding the granting of visas to allow foreign workers into the country. As delays drag on, living conditions for the victims is getting worse.
“The power is off, most people don’t have water. They are relying on wells, and getting it out of the Inle Lake which is not clean. There is a risk of disease - if people are living together in close proximity then an outbreak of diarrhoea is just a matter of time,” said Mr Kirkwood.
The generals – who have traditionally regarded overseas aid workers as spies – have turned down an offer from the US State Department of $250,000 (£125,000) in help and a disaster assistance team, suggesting that it remains selective about whom it accepts. The move prompted a rebuke from President Bush.
“The military junta must allow our disaster assessment teams into the country,” Mr Bush told reporters, adding he was prepared to make US naval assets available for search and rescue.
The generals lifted the state of emergency today in three of the five worst-affected states, and also in parts of Rangoon and Irrawaddy, and announced that there was no immediate food crisis in Burma.
“I think there was some damage to rice stored by private merchants and growers, but we have enough surplus for domestic sufficiency,” said Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan, the Burmese Information Minister, at a press conference in Rangoon.
The United Nations World Food Programme fears that the cyclone and flooding in two major rice growing areas could also affect food supply in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
The generals confirmed that a controversial referendum on Burma’s new constitution, part of its “roadmap to democracy”, will go ahead on May 10, although they conceded that it would have to be delayed by two weeks in Rangoon and Irrawaddy states until May 24.
he ruling provoked an outcry from opposition politicians, who say that all the country’s efforts should be focused on getting aid to the suffering, rather than delivering ballot boxes and conducting an election.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned Burmese opposition leader, has urged followers to boycott the referendum, saying that the draft constitution leaves power still in the hands of the military.
The junta has moved even further into the shadows in the last six months due to widespread outrage at its bloody crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in September.
The US and EU states have imposed economic sanctions. In the past, humanitarian aid programmes have also been limited because of fears that they would benefit the generals. ++
Sanders reported from Khartoum and Wilkinson from Rome. Special correspondent M. Karim Faiez in Kabul, Noha El-Hennawy of The Times’ Cairo Bureau and special correspondent Alex Renderos in Taltapanca contributed to this report.
Soldier suicides could trump war tolls: US health official
Raw Story
Monday May 5, 2008
Suicides and “psychological mortality” among US soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan could exceed battlefield deaths if their mental scars are left untreated, the head of the US Institute of Mental Health warned Monday.
Of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 18-20 percent — or around 300,000 — show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or both, said Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health.
An estimated 70 percent of those at-risk soldiers do not seek help from the Department of Defense or the Veterans Administration, he told a news conference launching the American Psychiatric Association’s 161st annual meeting here.
If “one just does the math”, then allowing PTSD or depression to go untreated in such numbers could result in “suicides and psychological mortality trumping combat deaths” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Insel warned.
More than 4,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003, and more than 400 in Afghanistan since the US led attacks there in 2001, of which some 290 were killed in action and the rest in on-combat deaths.
“It’s predicted that most soldiers — 70 percent — will not seek treatment through the DoD or VA,” Insel said at the meeting, at which the psychological impact of war is expected to top the agenda over the next four days.
Left untreated, PTSD and depression can lead to substance abuse, alcoholism or other life-threatening behaviors.
“It’s a gathering storm for the civilian and public health care sectors,” Insel said.
He urged public-sector mental health caregivers to recognize the symptoms of psychological troubles resulting from deployment to a war zone and be ready to provide adequate care for both soldiers and their families.
Other items on the agenda at the meeting, set to be attended by some 19,000 psychiatrists and mental health practitioners from around the world, include violence in schools, the psychology of extremism, and more light-hearted topics such as how music affects mood. ++
New phone? Donate your old one!
Cell Phones For Soldiers
Americans will replace an estimated 130 million cell phones this year. A 12-year-old and 13-year-old brother-and-sister pair from Massachusetts started an organization called Cell Phones For Soldiers for troops who were incurring huge cell phone charges to communicate with their families overseas. The organization has teamed up with AT&T, which gives free minutes to soldiers and also sends them cell phones and calling cards so that they can talk for free. You can mail in your phones from anywhere in the country. You can print a free prepaid postage label at the link: http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com/
(more…)
May 6th, 2008
It was another tedious and bombastic political weekend with the Republican talking points ringing in our ears — if you want to know what went wrong in this country, listen to them carefully; they drive the dialogue, color our every thought, titillate our every fear and obliterate [yes, I said it] every hope that we can rise above our rabble-consciousness to grab a larger vision of the commonwealth … a project which is absurd since we are, by and large, a liberal nation impatient to be about the business of change. Yet with BushNation suffering an approval rate of 28% we’re STILL defining ourselves by the Righty illusions and projections.
Buzz Flash, who has lost a number of supporters by favoring the Obama form of politics, used this ledeline for an article.
In the alice-in-wonderland world that has become presidential politics lately, it has come to this: Hillary Clinton, who has resided in a chauffeur-driven bubble for the past 20 years, is portraying herself as a man of the people. Barack Obama, raised by a single mother and who paid off his college loans just a few years ago, is the elite snob. And John McCain, married to a beer heiress, charges that Obama is “insensitive to the hopes and dreams and ambitions” of millions of Americans.
A true division in policy by the candidates got a lot of attention in the last days — the gas tax conversation. Over 150 economists gathered to punch holes in the “summer vacation” proposition, producing this ledeline from Hil’s camp: Economists Who Disagree With My Gas Plan Are Elite
And here’s McRib:
“I saw yesterday some additional comments that have been revealed by Pastor Wright,” McCain said. “One of them, comparing the United States Marine Corps with Roman legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our savior. I mean, being involved in that. It’s beyond belief. And then of course, saying that al Qaeda and the American flag were the same flags.”
That’s what 7 years of Bush have given us — an amplification of dumbed-down political expediencies and kick-ass nonsense about what behaviors are acceptable and which issues can be milked for votes. I worried, as you know, that a second term for Dubby would errantly create us in this mold; 7 years is the cycle period for every cell in our bodies, every 7 years we are “re-worked” and what is pouring into our heads from politics and culture defines that product. Yet — lo and behold — this time IT DIDN’T WORK AS USUAL. The pundits keep talking, proposing, projecting, telling us who’s politically dead and who’s potentially viable … and Americans are ignoring them like the false prophets they are.
In an article entitled “Why The Wright Story Stuck,” Steve Young quotes stand up comic Rick Overton, calling him “subtle as usual”:
“The Right Wing Smear Machine is loud and shiny, like an American hot rod. Made to be noticed, and coveted by morons. Designed by bitter, morally weak people FOR bitter, morally weak people. It gives them infantile and easy targets to deflect their own shortcomings onto. Why should we believe one single word from an entity that is wrong about everything else? Only a dull witted coward would think that Howard Dean’s scream is why he should not be President. The same applies to the treatment they give any high profile threat. The other kind of assassination, by a thousand paper cuts. There’s a reason they call a think-tank the ‘Skunk-works’. These are not humans in that room, regardless of how clever they are. The corporate media is an enemy to the human species. A cancer to man. They take the lowest form of us and lower them even more, making them into something not unlike the Orcs in LORD OF THE RINGS. A biped that cannot be reasoned with. Incapable of being taught, they can only be trained like a dog. An attack dog. But fox (No CAPS for them, they have lost the right to it) and the others are part of the machine that crushes good. It eats honesty and shits out vicious lies in it’s place. It hates love and loves hate. It is our TV and radio. It is funded by killers. They believe the worst news first. I pity them for the day when they see what they have helped to make so.
I can almost forgive a conservative for buying this garbage, but for a Democrat, a Liberal, a Progressive to buy the corporate line is to me, inexcusable. I have nothing but contempt for their betrayal. One side is not supposed to know, but the other is. Of the two groups, only one is the traitor - the morally lazy ‘Progressive.’ The other is the Enemy Combatant, in full uniform. Bottom line - Some people want Hillary, simply to put McCain in office. Others want her because they’re female as well (Hey, I’m bald, but I don’t want McCain in office). These are adolescent reasons for putting someone at the wheel of a nation. It says that we file our lax standards for our leadership under the convenient heading of ‘Pragmatism.’ I hate this process and what the Cancervatives have done to it with the Digressive’s help - (A classic bully and weakling scenario). We are social abuse victims, raped by our symbolic parents. The memory of it is slowly coming back to us. Too slowly for my taste.”
Slowly, yes — from day to day, and especially over the last couple of weeks, all this has taken on a painful resonance that has created angst for progressives, while McRib has been given latitude and lift with his crazy-talk. But let’s remember that we’ve been at this Dem race for just four months [feels like years] and we’ve shaken out a lot of information. When everything was moved up several months, we knew the affair would be protracted — at the time, I mentioned that the only “up-side” of that would be that we’d Really Really get to know these people.
Not that long ago, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were considered an “embarrassment of riches” — two sharp candidates with few deviations in policy. How would we decide, except by cult of personality? It turns out that cult of CHARACTER is what we’ve learned about in these long months — ours and theirs.
I watched Michele Obama on C-SPAN yesterday, giving a stump speech about her husbands character — it was, she said, his own camps responsibility to define him … not Hillary’s or the Rights. It was an impressive speech about who she knew him to be; she said this was hardly the first time, nor the last, that Obama would be attacked and used for cynical purpose nor was it the first, or last, time he would gracefully rise above it because THAT was his character. It punched up that moment for me when he calmly brushed his shoulders off after the PA loss. This is a man who has faced demons and moved one — who knows that tantrums and temper are not “tough” but childish, achieving nothing. And this calm confidence is so alien to our current perception of “politician” as to be revolutionary.
Rising to that next level is what this race is all about — because that’s what these TIMES are all about. We can either do this … or sink into the mire. And what’s fascinating to me is that with all this “unelectable” toxin pumping out like black smoke to make us fearful of losing to John Bush44, Obama’s numbers remain stable while Clinton’s tactics have backfired — she has become increasingly strident and desperate, and now declares that she will use her “nuclear option,” twisting the arms of her Super D’s in the Dem Party’s 30-member Rules and Bylaws Committee to allow the FL and MI votes to stand, as is.
Breaking the rules to draw in Michigan and Florida votes, and miring Barack in the “unelectable” me-me is Hillary’s last shot at achieving her dream — and you can’t take down a ‘phenomenon’ without playing very very dirty. A mainstream pundit and former Reagan employee, Richard Reeves wrote some truth here: Face it: “Electability” is just another way of saying Barack Obama is black.
And if Obama is unelectable, why is the Right working so hard for Hillary? Why did Rush declare “victory” in Pennsylvania and is already calling Illinois for her using his Ditto Heads? Could it be that they want to take the Clintons on but don’t want to deal with Obama? Six months ago we acknowledged that the Right would reenergize to turn out in droves to beat back another Clinton — now add those Obama people who might stay home [think hundreds of thousands of youngsters and various of the 98% of Afro-American demographic supporting Barack] if the Super-D’s hand her the nod.
Unelectable my ass! The kind of “hope” Obama talks about is not delusion … and when he speaks of the “promise of America” he’s not talking about the Me! Me! promise of the 1980’s, he’s talking about the We! promise of a new century. That resonates with old and young alike, desperate to find both credibility and ethical conduct in their candidate. He departed from the Rev. Wright not, he said, because he misunderstood what the Reverend was saying but that the Reverend had misunderstood who HE was and how he wanted to change that fiery old rhetoric into something new and workable. I … like you … don’t know if he can do it, but since he is the only one out there crying this possibility into the wilderness, I know what will happen if he doesn’t get a chance to try.
I’ve spoken before about my 9-year old grandson, Wyatt … an extraordinarily bright little bulb. He is following politics carefully, even though his family is not particularly political. His Dad doesn’t like Hillary, as many men don’t — his Mom has been largely undecided until recently. Wy watches the debates; he told his Mom that Barack “tells the truth, even when it’s hard.” He wants a sign for the yard, in his very Conservative neighborhood. Because Wy has been all about Star Wars since he was four, I sent him this Youtube the other day. Great fun — a Must Watch. [And I will remind him that Mrs. Clinton is not actually Darth Vader … that honor goes to Uncle Dick Cheney.]
So, there it is there — the little kid ‘gets it.’ He feels it. The young, especially the intuitive Indigo’s who have been encouraged to think for themselves, all have that antenna waving, pulling in the possibilities. Obama is their JFK … and this is a moment much like that one, when the unrest in the social fabric produces idealism of an extraordinary sort. Some might say that idealism died in Dallas — but mine has lasted me a lifetime, and brought me here to write this. The populism of Obama is not a ploy — it’s a lifestyle; and there are millions of citizens, told to ‘go shop’ for 7 years, waiting to join hands and try for something better. We are eager to ‘entertain angels’ — and find a hopeful future.
The articles and links below are divided into three categories, loosely; there are those that are political, those that are spiritual and the last few are about McCain, who looms larger in his delusion every day. But the thing about Obama articles that differentiate them from Hillary’s IS the spiritual … I hear nothing about how Hillary takes us into the New Paradigm, how she inspires and challenges us, how she moves the chess pieces onto another board entirely. That is the domain of Barack supporters — and that tells me, after four months … or four years or four lifetimes … everything I need to know.
As far as the Rev. Wright chronicles go, the Righty’s can continue to smack their lips with anticipation of pounding out a white supremacist message [what else is new?] but this IS the time for such a debate — actually using the stuff between our ears. There was every justification for liberation theology in the past centuries — Obama wants to take that to another level. We have to decide if we can allow that. We’ve forgotten that the Liberal pulpits of the early twentieth century entertained that same tactic to build a wide and embracing social consciousness. If racism, which is the politics of fear and repression, wins the national conversation over populism and a new class contract in this nation, then we deserve what we get — but that’s not what the numbers are telling us. That’s not what the progressive blogosphere is saying. And that’s not what my heart … and my young Jedi grandarlin’ … is telling me.
Here’s a collection of articles and links — all are informative, some are brilliant. Bill Moyers gives us a Must Read, there’s a Tom Hayden interview [and here’s a link to another piece of his telling us about the radical Hillary of the 60’s who hadn’t yet learned to triangulate to the middle; here’s another from Carl Bernstein talking about her guilt-by-association tactic.] You’ll find a rather remarkable post by Joe Andrew, a former heavy-weight Clintonista who has switched sides, a Frank Rich piece and [gasp!] even one from Tom Friedman. You do not have to hunt around if you want to know where the Progressives are going, today.
I do want to put in a last word about the one thing the Right AND the Left think so absurd about Rev. Wright’s sermon, and why they’ve branded him ‘wackadoodle.’ The AID’s claim. I am empathetic to this proposition — I have very little patience with the mythology that our own government wouldn’t hurt us. As a small child, my Mother, Great-grandmother and myself were subjected to biological experiments loosed on our community in a covert ’study’ … I still suffer the physical consequences. My Father was one of those sailor’s that discovered the first-hand fallout of radiation in the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands … I’m an only child because of it, my Mother miscarrying numerous times.
Here’s what InfoWars has to say about the HIV question:
“There is no doubt that AIDS erupted in the U.S. shortly after government-sponsored hepatitis B vaccine experiments (1978-1981) using gay men as guinea pigs. The epidemic was caused by the “introduction” of a new retrovirus (the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV for short); and the introduction of a new herpes-8 virus, the virus that causes Kaposi’s sarcoma, widely known as the “gay cancer” of AIDS. The taboo theory that AIDS is a man-made disease is largely based on research showing an intimate connection between government vaccine experiments and the outbreak of “the gay plague”"
And from CounterPunch, an article entitled The Search for Ethnic Weapons which tells us:
During the seven decades of the Cold War, the American power elite was much more interested in a genocide of “communists”, of whatever color, wherever they might be found. Many weapons which might further this purpose were researched, including, apparently, an HIV-like virus. Consider this: On June 9, 1969, Dr. Donald M. MacArthur, Deputy Director, Research and Engineering, Department of Defense, testified before Congress:
Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory [resistant] to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease. [Hearings before the House Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, “Department of Defense Appropriations for 1970.”]
Government is not now our friend — perhaps we can change that, perhaps not. But until we wake up on that level, there will be no progress. I propose a program; and I’ll draw on the program that’s the most familiar in our society. These are the original Twelve Steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous. You should open this to read all of them … they’re profound … but let’s just take the first one:
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Let’s admit that we are powerless in the face of the narcissism of American mythology, of “love-it-or-leave-it” rhetoric and nationalistic propaganda; let’s admit that our forefathers built this country on the bones of Native Americans and African slaves; let’s admit that our country has been involved in covert plunder and political misadventure for centuries; let’s admit that our sense of ‘exceptionalism’ is something that we should mature out of rather than enthusiastically embrace; let’s admit that even in the best of times, the government is not always ethical or humane, and is institutionally classist, racist and sexist; and let’s admit … for the sake of Iran, the Mideast and the world … that buoying our economy by pumping up the military-industrial-complex is yet another political expediency and short-term error that will give us another century like the last.
If we could just do that, as Rev. Wright can … and resolve to change it, as Barack Obama proposes we can — the shift of pure oxygen would blow away the last of the smoke and we could, finally, see both the forest AND the tree’s.
Jude
Was It Really What Jeremiah Wright Said, Or Was It Because He’s Black?
White preachers are given leeway in politics that Jeremiah Wright wasn’t.
Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal via PBS and Alternet
May 3, 2008
[Watch it here]
I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam: “Who’s telling the truth over there?”
“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.”
That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright.
In my conversation with him and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage.
More than 2,000 people have written me about him, and their opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American-hating radical,” one of my viewers wrote. Another called him a “nut case.”
Many more were sympathetic to him. Many asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to the shocking anger they saw at the National Press Club.
A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist.
Many black preachers I’ve known — scholarly, smart, and gentle in person — uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course, I’ve known many white preachers like that, too.
But where I grew up in the South, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed.
I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched.
Or if my great-great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a Constitution that proclaimed: “We, the people.”
Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Conner, and Jesse Helms.
Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic. That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances since my interview.
What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle — forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy.
Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences.
My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being.
But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. public health service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test.
Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide for yourself, but at least it helps me to understand the why of them.
In this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content.
So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who, for their own reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.
Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the warmongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins.
But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right.
After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.
Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America.
This is crazy and wrong — white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.
Which means it is all about race, isn’t it?
Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school.
What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship.
We’re often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this — this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our eyes.
Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race.
It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, “beware the terrible simplifiers.” ++
The All-White Elephant in the Room
BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.
FRANK RICH, NYT
May 4, 2008
What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.
Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.
Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.
Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”
Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.
Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s church.
That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his endorsement.”
I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.
Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens “coming home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks on America’s abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr. Wright blamed the attacks on America’s foreign policy.) Had that video re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.
None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.
When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat Robertson for an endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson’s greatest past insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, “The New World Order,” which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy theories about “European bankers” (who just happened to be named Warburg, Schiff and Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in. Nor was Mr. Giuliani ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies on the payroll at Giuliani Partners included a priest barred from the ministry by his Long Island diocese in 2002 following allegations of sexual abuse. Much as Mr. Wright officiated at the Obamas’ wedding, so this priest officiated at (one of) Mr. Giuliani’s. Did you even hear about it?
There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.
A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”
An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.
This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e., non-race-baiting) campaign and has gone so far as to criticize (ineffectually) North Carolina’s Republican Party for running a Wright-demonizing ad in that state’s current primary. Mr. McCain has been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his tour of “forgotten” America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he promised that “never again” would a federal recovery effort be botched on so grand a scale.
This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney’s dreams of his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Up to a point. Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time when the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans visit is more about the self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the recalibration of policy.
Mr. McCain took his party’s stingier line on Katrina aid and twice opposed an independent commission to investigate the failed government response. Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he called for “a conversation” about whether anyone should “rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” Whatever, whenever, never mind.
For all this primary season’s obsession with the single (and declining) demographic of white working-class men in Rust Belt states, America is changing rapidly across all racial, generational and ethnic lines. The Census Bureau announced last week that half the country’s population growth since 2000 is due to Hispanics, another group understandably alienated from the G.O.P.
Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin. ++
(more…)
May 5th, 2008
