The McCain campaign keeps bringing up William Ayers and Reverend Wright, saying Obama associates with America Haters, Terrorists, and the like. These allegations are spread against a background of little old ladies saying Obama is an Arab, and buffoons holding plush monkeys decorated with Obama stickers, lines of people shouting that Obama is Muslim, a terrorist, and the like. Put into the context of the noise of propaganda surrounding Obama in the Republican forum, I am tempted to discredit all of the stories I hear out of hand, but that isn’t what this column is about. This column is about finding facts, poking behind the stories, it’s about confronting false beliefs.
When things like this come up, we spend a lot of time with D words: Deny, deflect, debunk, defend, but I don’t like those words, they all make it look like spin, guilt and fear. I like to counter the argument, challenge the assumptions, and then throw it back.
Let’s look at Jeremiah Wright first.
Let’s put this into context. The south side of Chicago in the early 80’s was a ghetto. There’s no denying it. There weren’t many bright spots in the area, not for miles. It was an area where if you were White you may not make it back out alive. It was a Daley who made it this way, the father of the current mayor. His creation of housing projects on the south side created a segregated city, a wealthy white north side and a poor black south. Even today, the south side is primarily poor and black, but there are areas of gentrification, and newer housing projects are integrated into different traditionally white neighborhoods. I think it safe to say that this was an area where the civil rights movement hadn’t made much of a difference in the lives of the ordinary people.
When Barack Obama moved into town the first time in 1985, the south side was an area badly in need of community development with a mind on motivating people towards rising above poverty and crime. He chose to work as a community organizer here, and led the Developing Communities Project, where he helped along a job training program, a college prep tutoring program and a tenant’s rights association, among other things. Isn’t it funny how Republicans constantly speak bad of people who try to help education? McCain criticized that Obama wanted a new “overhead projector” for the Adler Planetarium in two debates even after harsh criticism the first time. If that’s the worst thing that Obama wanted to fund, well, McCain is really reaching here. Back to Wright, though.
Often the most vibrant of places in such a community is a church. In reality, if you want to develop community quickly, churches are some of the best places to do it. The Christian base of the Republican party can identify with this, what’s the first thing a Bible thumper asks when somebody new moves into the neighborhood? What church do you attend? Maybe this is a way of identifying trouble makers without doing a criminal background check, but I’d like to say that it is a way of making friends.
In an atmosphere of semi-official segregation, church leaders have been known to say incendiary things. McCain is no different in his attacks on Obama, and the conservative religious leaders are no different in preaching against the sin that they see in the world. In each case, the goal is trying to make a clear enemy to invigorate the faithful.
I think it disappointing that a religion of peace is made to be so inflammatory, but it happens on all sides. Martin Luther King preached some similarly incendiary sermons as Reverend Wright. I think it disappointing that any religious leader would say that any group of people are hated by God. It will only lead to violence and division. If only Reverend Wright had preached a ministry of self-development, accountability, charity, education, and responsibility we wouldn’t be hearing his name at all right now. He saw himself in the context of following in the footsteps of some heavy hitters in the civil rights movement, MLK, Jesse Jackson, and others, and his sermons were no less fiery than theirs.
If I contrasted this with other right wing conservative preachers, you’d find no less controversial speech. It’s not like other conservative Christians are known for being friendly to “those people”, i.e. gays, any racial ethnic groups, the pro-choice crowd, any Liberal, Catholics, and many more suffer from the same attacks depending on which church or denomination is being examined. I remember one instance of a preacher (I don’t remember which one, maybe somebody out there can tell me) saying on his nationally televised sermon that if a gay man approached him, he’d kill him and tell God he did it. I think that mainstream America finds this no less offensive. Going back even further, there is a long history of white Christians using their religion as an excuse for overt racial violence in America that continues to this day.
I’ll take Obama at his word that Reverend Wright was like an uncle that you have in the family but don’t always agree with. Many of us have a radical conservative relative that we tolerate in the same way. I know I do. Sometimes it all becomes background noise. I choose not to passively listen, filter and ignore, because that is encouragement. I like to challenge beliefs, that’s just a Johnny thing to do.
Reverend Wright’s church reached heights that very few businesses or church ministries do. It did a lot of great things for people and the area. In a nearly thirty year ministry there are high points and low points, we all have them. The fact that all of the searching through sermons and statements came up with a few controversial comments in this time tells me that they weren’t as common as the Republicans make them out to be.
In either context, and after considerable thought, I feel comfortable with Obama’s association with Pastor Wright. I’ve read the quotes, considered for some time, and it wasn’t until I gave it this thought that I really understood it, and living in Chicago all my life added to the perspective in this argument. If I didn’t know the area like I do, I wouldn’t have quite had the context to make that judgment.
I rather feel that Pastor Wright fell victim to The Spotlight.
The Spotlight is a phenomenon I like to study, but haven’t spoken about yet. It relates specifically to when people emerge from isolation, how do they perform. Pastor Wright did poorly, to be sure. When he had sudden notoriety due to his parishioner and friend Barack Obama, instead of focusing on the success of his ministry, and the positive messages he passed onto his congregation for so many years, The Spotlight got a hold of him, and it warped him. Rather than seeing the good that his parishioner was bringing about, he realized that it was his more incendiary comments that got him the attention, and so he was pushed further, in the hopes of getting more attention. In this case, The Spotlight pushed him more to the extreme, instead of more to the middle. Just like every issue, The Spotlight has a conservative side. Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh I’m sure didn’t start as abrasively conservative, they learned that the more radical and insulting they became, the more attention they got, and The Spotlight perverted them, too.
Let me introduce you to another new concept, Johnny’s Law of Social Newtonianism, which states every radical liberal belief has an equal and opposite radical conservative belief. There is a corollary, wherein the two philosophies repel each other, in that when one side makes a move further out into the outer reaches of their belief spectrum, somebody must make a similar action in the opposite direction, and there you see how we divide ourselves. I’m more of a middle path kind of person myself.
To put Johnny’s Law of Social Newtonianism into practice, let’s look at the people who are making Pastor Wright an issue. We know why they are digging through past sermons of Reverend Wright, they were looking for ammunition to use against their political opponent, in the hopes of not losing power, influence, and money.
I think that there is a conservative Christian assumption, however that Obama, and his Harvard and Columbia education could not in any way question his pastor’s sermon. In conservative churches, you learn not to question God or his chosen representatives, i.e. the guy up front spouting all the hate. To a conservative Christian, they are followers above all. Free thought is discouraged. Anybody who raised their hand in Bible class will know that. They are also overlooking that people go to church for community as well as the pastor, and for some people, one may be more important than the other. These arguments are a bit of a reflection on their own belief systems.
When I look at William Ayers, I also have to look at the context and the level of association.
First, who is William Ayers? He’s a Chicago area native who has a very unfortunate and questionable past. While in school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he got involved in a radical movement that was protesting America’s involvement in Viet Nam amid the Republican culture of fear created by Nixon. The movement became increasingly violent in its expression, and this resulted in them building bombs, planting and detonating them. There were several accidents with the manufacture of these bombs in which members of the movement were killed, including his girlfriend. Apparently they weren’t very good at making bombs. When the attention of these actions got to be too much, he went underground and lived for several years under an alias. In 1980, after the charges were dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct, he turned himself in, and has since lived as an educator in Chicago, his past sometimes coming back and hurting him.
As an educator, he has won awards from the city of Chicago, and after the Chicago school system won a grant, Obama met him on the board that was formed to handle the management of that money. This board included College Presidents and others, some of whom were Republicans, a rarity in a state known for the Democratic Machine.
Ayers held one event for Obama, a coffee at his own house to start a campaign for Obama, but not the Presidential campaign as McCain claimed during Wednesday’s debate.
We can’t speak for Ayers as to whether he atones for his past. I haven’t seen any statements by him that say he wished he had committed more acts or would do them again, as the Republicans claim. In terms of how Obama knew him, he wouldn’t have known if this was still present in Ayers’s life, or if his occupation of the past had just become a hobby.
So you have two lives being lived separately, one has a past that mostly ended in 1980. Fifteen years later, the two, in wholly different context had a short association. In terms of a political career, this association is barely a step up from a handshake. By looking at McCain’s history, he was far more embroiled with Charles Keating in 1985 than Obama was ever involved with Ayers.
According to the Republicans, the introduction to Ayers probably went something like this:
Somebody: Barack, I’d like to introduce you to Bill Ayers. He’s a radical activist homegrown terrorist bomber.
Barack: That’s interesting, you’re somebody I’d like to know. Maybe we could have a coffee at your house. You know I’m thinking of running for office, and a radical activist bomber is just who I’d like to associate with.
I’m guessing it went more like this:
Somebody: Barack, this is Bill. He’s an award winning educator.”
Barack: Hi Bill.
To contrast, I’m sure that Republicans don’t introduce Dick Cheney by saying: Hi, Gus, this is Dick. He’s the one who deliberately lied to and manipulated the nation, brought us to war with Iraq, killed 4,000 American soldiers and over 100,000 Iraqis, has us embroiled in spending billions every month to occupy an unfriendly foreign nation while simultaneously allowing the world’s most wanted man to slip away into the mountains of Pakistan, all so that his former company could make billions in no-bid reconstruction projects.
Like most people, I’m sure that Barack doesn’t do a criminal background check on everybody he meets. You couldn’t google a name in 1995, even if you thought that there was something in that handshake that gave you the feeling this guy was a radical activist bomber in his past. Wikipedia didn’t exist, and you know, these are things that you might not bring up in casual conversation. Of course, if you’re doing a background check on everybody you meet, you have too much free time on your hands, and there is probably an anti-paranoia prescription in your future.
If McCain needs mountain climbing equipment to get over this molehill, I can’t imagine how difficult some of the issues he might face as President could be for him, all war injuries aside.
The issue with the association with ACORN is that, as part of their efforts to mobilize communities towards home ownership, they try to get more people to register to vote. In the case of ACORN, many voters are poor, or immigrant, and so have a tendency to vote Democratic. The McCain allegation is that ACORN has been caught busing people to multiple polling places to register the same person in multiple places, or even states. These allegations have no proven merit as far as I’ve researched, and should be ignored.
Of course we need to follow this back to motivation. It all comes down to votes and power. Community organizers want to bring more power to the community, in particular when government is failing them. The Republicans already spent a good deal of face time at the RNC demonizing community organizers. ACORN falls under this umbrella. They found out Obama has a connection with ACORN, and so they make it out to be a fraudulent, evil, and corrupt organization so that it might reflect a little of that reputation on Obama. Of course, then ACORN produced pictures of John McCain at an ACORN sponsored rally, and we have to wonder how they can keep pursuing this angle before it falls in under its own integrity faults. Come to think of it, McCain did look pretty disdainful and bored in those pictures.
In the interest of equal time spent defending political candidates, I’d like to speak to the Christian minister from Kenya who prayed to save Sarah Palin from witches. In context, witchcraft is a common belief in Africa, though probably not the church in Wasilla, nor in any other church in America. I don’t think they even really believe in Salem anymore. In Africa, tribal traditions are still very strong, and folklore and superstition still claim lives and belief. There are consistent news of witch related events, reports of schools closed because of witchcraft, people killed because of witchcraft, and the list goes on and on.
I don’t like Sarah Palin. I don’t think she is fit to lead. I think she proved that in Wasilla, and I think that after all this election silliness, she will not get re-elected in Alaska. I think she is Bush style Republicanism on a microcosm scale. But I will defend her on this one. Here goes. I can’t speak for her, and she hardly speaks for herself, so we have to go to some creative interpretation.
What do we do when somebody from a foreign country says something that seems so backward it is embarrassing? We smile politely, excuse ourselves from the conversation and go laugh about it in the bathroom. We could hope that she would have stood up there, politely accepting the prayer for it’s spirit, but internally feeling that the visitor was out of touch with reality. Funny how that works.
I know this has been brought up by liberal media commentators, and to the credit of the Democratic party, it has received hardly an official mention. If Reverend Wright had been filmed ridding Obama of witches, they’d have dragged it out for months.
I don’t know of many American Christian sects that still believe in witchcraft, and this argument is no slight to my skeptic/paranormal friends, just again, an observation of context.
So to wrap this all up, I have to say that none of these allegations worry me. None of it sways my vote, but it did force me to make some logical arguments. I know I shouldn’t use logic in politics, but there you go again, pointing out the truth of things.
