Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Sat 26 Apr 2008 10:52 AM PDT
The Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Republican Party (funny how those two organizations seem to fit together) have succeeded in characterizing the Pastor Jeremiah Wright as the new American BoogeyMan. By managing to decontextualize a few sound bits from a sermon he gave after September 11, 2001, in a nutshell they have managed to label him, and by association Barak Obama, as the voice of [both] Black Hatred of White America and Islamic Terrorism. By comparisons some of Dr. Kings speeches which castigate the Union for its racial inequality, its genocide of American Indians, and enslavement of Africans may be a bit tamer.
In short, the political strategy pursued by Clinton and the Republicans is to have this man condemned by playing on the fears of White America and disrupt the message of hope and change of Obama (which one hopes not to be a cynical hope). Two disclosures, I certainly am not a fan of the Christian hell fire and damnation sermons, that go on in either the White or Black Churches. I do not have any illusions that an Obama presidency would be significantly different than previous democratic failures, but since he takes less blame for supporting the politics of empire over the past eight years, by default [he] gets my vote.
The alarming fact is that in the age of YouTube and FOX News that someone can edit and pervert one's words to the extent that nothing remains of the larger historical context in which they are embedded, and cause almost a whole nation to fear and hate a new boogeyman. This should be a concern of any nation which calls itself a democracy; the failure of history. Here is Rev. Wright from an interview on 4/25/08 with Bill Moyers:
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