There is, I think, something to this analysis at PowerLine, though the “something” isn’t quite what the authors think it is:
One of the several reasons why the mainstream media have consistently underestimated the significance of the Trinity/Wright/Pfleger story is that, to a considerable degree, conventional reporters and editors tend to agree with Rev. Wright’s critique of America. When Wright said, “God damn America,” reporters thought he’d gone a little too far but didn’t necessarily disagree with the underlying sentiment.
Obviously, I’m not onboard with the lunatic notion that American journalists somehow “hate America”. I’ve always been a little puzzled by what that expression could even refer to. Spalding Gray once said that he’d moved to Manhattan because “America” was too big to wrap his brain around—he wanted to live on an island off the coast of America. Which is more or less how I feel: Asking whether someone loves or hates “America” is a little bit like asking: “How do you feel about music?”
But it is true that, perhaps in part for that very reason, I didn’t find most of the YouTube clips of Jeremiah Wright pounding the pulpit especially upsetting, even though I certainly regarded some of them (the AIDS conspiracy-mongering, for instance) as more than a bit loony. That is to say, insofar as “pro-American” and “anti-American” seem like incoherent categories to me, when I hear someone say “God damn America,” my first thought is to ask what they really mean: What particular aspects of America or American policy do they intend to condemn?
I don’t know how many journalists out there share this view about “anti-Americanism,” but I expect that quite a lot of them approached Wright’s sermons with a certain clinical eye that brackets visceral reactions, for the same reason that properly trained male doctors don’t get aroused examining female patients. And once you dig in with that clinical eye, what do you see? Here’s the lead-in to that famous “God damn America”:
When it came to putting the citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters. Put them on auction blocks. Put them in cotton fields. Put them in inferior schools. Put them in substandard housing. Put them in scientific experiments. Put them in the lower paying jobs. Put them outside the equal protection of the law. Kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness.
The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law and then wants us to sing God Bless America. Naw, naw, naw. Not God Bless America. God Damn America! That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating us citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is Supreme.
As a historical matter, nothing in that first paragraph is especially contentious, even if we might want to say the list unfairly ignores whatever progress America has made on race. But what’s more important than whether we think the portrait is (on balance) fair is that it’s at least not an unfamiliar one. It’s the sort of view you’d encounter, if perhaps in more measured tones, if you’d ever done a handful of interviews soliciting people’s views on race in America. In other words, if you’re a journalist, whether or not you think this view is correct, it’s unlikely to strike you as especially novel or unusual. There are all sorts of views I regard as seriously wrong, perhaps even appalling, but which are sufficiently widespread that I have to conclude they’re not currently seen as beyond the pale, even if I might like them to be.
To sum up, then, we’ve got two factors at work. First, a journalist’s initial take on the sermon is likely to involve bracketing visceral reactions and trying to ferret out the underlying critique. Second, a journalist of any moderate experience is likely to recognize that underlying critique as almost tediously familiar, even if worded more angrily than usual. And it’s easy to forget that plenty of Americans don’t ever hear this sort of attack, and certainly not worded this way. So it’s not, per the PowerLine headline, that Wright’s sermon sounded right to us, I think, so much as it sounded boring.
9 responses so far ↓
1 southpaw // Jun 2, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I’d go so far as to say that this particular form of sophistication is more broadly based, and that not very many Americans are so completely unaware of the far left’s critique of foreign policy. In other words, it may be possible that some members of powerline’s audience hasn’t heard this before. Nevertheless, it’s pretty much certain that someone like John Hinderaker–educated at Dartmouth and Harvard Law–has heard this all before and does find it tediously familiar.
Hinderaker sees political advantage in this making a big deal out of it because the extremity of Wright’s expression makes it very difficult for more sober voices on the left to mount a limited defense of Wright’s underlying critique.
2 Kevin B. O'Reilly // Jun 2, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Well, for something that was so boring the news media (eventually) gave it a heck of a lot of attention. Pfleger’s view of Hillary shouldn’t shock anyone, least of all journalists, yet that’s been all over the TV the last couple of days. So, I guess I just don’t buy the premise that the news media’s been ignoring this stuff.
But let’s say we buy that, the reason then that Hagee’s comments on God creating the Holocaust so that Jews would go back to Israel is because … journalists didn’t find them tedious?
3 marc w. // Jun 2, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I think Kevin’s right; there’s no way most journalists here the clip and yawn.
I’d think most any journalist would hear the sweet, sweet sounds of controversy.
Does the lead-up to the sound bite soften it or contextualize it? Sure. Better then to cut it out.
Look, it’s not the sole province of conservative blogs to see and attempt to exploit something like this – political journalism these days often seems nothing more than the procession of ‘gotcha’ stories and reaction pieces to previous ‘gotchas.’ These stories seem to be highly prized by many in journalism… I do wonder if some of this due to some feeling that they’d dropped the ball on Trent Lott’s quote; they seem even more sensitive to gaffes/mis-statements/potentially embarrassing asides.
4 Dave F // Jun 3, 2008 at 8:22 am
We can agree American journalists don’t hate America (most of them, presumably, anyway), but building your argument around the “God damn America” bit is somewhat disingenuous.
Reading the whole text reveals the awfulness of Wright’s ravings. They are by turns ignorant and hysterical, or both simultaneously. His version of history is of the paranoid conspiracy kind.
5 Stephen // Jun 3, 2008 at 9:19 am
What gets me is that so many people call Wright a racist when he was actually preaching against racism. Sure he’s angry and a bit paranoid, but quite good at his craft.
I went and listened to some more of his sermons and enjoyed them. He’s a complex guy with some deep ideas, but he’s not a racist.
I also am constantly puzzled by the idea of loving or hating America. By themselves, they are absolutely meaningless ideas. And yet they seem to have so much meaning for so many.
White guy, agnostic, in the Deep South
6 kaleb // Jun 3, 2008 at 9:27 am
“His version of history is of the paranoid conspiracy kind.”
So is the version of those most loudly denouncing Wright. The McCarthyite, Vince Foster-obsessed, Secret-Muslim-opposing right wing lives in a paranoid worldview so widely shared that it’s made the political equivalent of a jump from cult fringe to respected institutional religion. Wright’s ravings are no more ignorant than those of Bill Kristol, though his sermons can be uglier in tone.
7 Eunha // Jun 3, 2008 at 9:29 am
I wonder how many members of the thinking press were taken by surprise by how quickly and fiercely the news caught on with the general public. The “popularity” of the news must have been, to some degree, unforeseen precisely because of the points you stress particularly in your conclusion. Scapegoating, projecting and displacing are words that can also explain how the Wright affair unfolded among the general public, while the media played rather effectively the role of making visible, as well as exacerbating (and exploiting), such an unfortunate development. I say unfortunate because, as you astutely point out, what on earth is it meant when the name “America” in invoked? Where lies (or hides) its referent? Does such a referent indeed exist before and after the imagined constitution of the nation? Is it territorial, geopolitical, historical, sociological, aesthetic, spiritual, etc? And if the composition of the referent proves as heterogeneous as to integrate all these multiple aspects, then, we’d better believe that our deployment of the term responds (or reacts) to equally diverse reasons and purposes. Perhaps “America” is the site where Continental and Analytical philosophy should declare truce, in that America is both a name and a problem that demand out constant and diligent grappling with it. It comprises sets of data susceptible to the (perhaps impatient) pragmatism of the analytical mind, but it evokes a world of realities that must be content with unspecific metaphors and symbolism rather than hermetic concepts. America (even Wright’s) is both a name and a “problem” reflective of a single unchanging truth: its (very fortunate) unfinalizability.
8 Jeffro // Jun 3, 2008 at 11:30 am
If you listen to the sermon you’ll see he was damning the American government, which most Americans, and especially our Conservative sisters and brothers, do regularly and vehemently.
9 Mark // Jun 3, 2008 at 11:32 am
Very perceptive post, Julian. I htink the broader issue is that there are many within the political landscape right now for whom flag, patriotism and symbolism are all that is left — their actions have been decidedly unpatriotic — stealing the 2000 election, leading us into a war on false pretenses, presiding over a corrupt, dishonest and incompetent administration, subverting the bind eye by which the criminal justice system is supposed to be operated for purely political reasons, outing covert intelleigence agents for political reasons, trashing many different decent people for political reasons, swfit-boating a war hero while giving draft dodgers a free pass, and all other manner of acts and treason — high crimes and misdemeanors if you will – that seem decidedly anti-American to me.
So what you do is point to the symbol – the flag, or a flag lapel pin, or a phrase like “God Bless America” — and you make those symbols sacrosanct, suggesting that words or acts calling those pristeen symbols into question or disrepute — regardless of what they really signify or are intended to mean — reflect a lack of loyalty or patriotism or fidelity to the values we cherish “as Americans” as if the symbols empbody some universal values that all Americans hold. When in fact, while sanctifying those symbols, the cultists who are subordinate theor own actions to those symbols and what they supposedly represent are acting in a way that is an affront to the real values that those symbols are supposed to represent — liberty, equality, justice, fairness, equity, respect and compassion.
I guess the media and the GOP both depend on an inattentive and intellectually lazy public to allow discourse at this warped level to continue in this way, relatively unchallenged. It makes all the sense in the world that Bush in an anti-intellectual, surrounded by people who accuse anybody who incorporates nuance into their thinking or words of being an “elitist.” It plays right to the wheelhouse of the inattentive and intellectually lazy. Time to stop listening to what they say, and start paying attention to what they do. And in the case of Wright, and his inflammatory comments, we are not at the point as a society where we can examine his words fairly and without emotion — too much political gain to be had from attacking them reflexively — and since the media has abidcated its role as a fourth estate which questions the conventional wisdom as imparted by those in power, in favor of serving their corporate masters, it is unlikely to change anytime soon.