THIS TROUBLESOME PRIEST

The line I mentioned in the previous post about conflicts having contexts is part of a scene in which I, as the character of a Marine communications and data specialist, am verbally attacked by my commanding officer for the fascination I have with history and facts.

A few lines before the context line he mocks my character’s atheism. A three line interchange then takes place which launches the argument.

I respond by saying, “With all due respect, sir, atheists make the best historians.”

This concept is easy enough for me to wrap my head around and connect with as the actor.

The second research paper I ever wrote was about King John of England. A king considered so bad by history that even though it has been eight hundred years since he reigned no other king of England since has had the same name. A king famously portrayed as evil in many of the legends of Robin Hood as well as in Shakespeare’s play, “King John”.

Prompted by a novel sympathetic to the infamous king entitled Myself As Witness and written by James Goldman, who also did a number on John’s legacy in his play “Lion In Winter”, I began my studies. I learned that even though John would never be considered a great king, he was also not an evil one. He wrecked his legacy forever when he feuded with the Pope and was excommunicated along with his country for awhile. The monks and priests, who were the major recorders of history in Western Europe at the time, retaliated by putting any act of John’s in the worst possible light and probably expunging any act he did that would be considered respectable from the record. No doubt, John might have benefited from a couple of atheist historians with a publisher who didn’t have an axe to grind.

Thus the image of King John and his resentful chroniclers usually involuntarily comes to mind when I speak the line.

My commander responds, “No, Deconstructionists make the best historians.”

“Deconstructionist” is one of those words I heard all the way through college and most of grad school, but which I never used since I had no idea what it meant. This is not to say that I didn’t nod understandingly whenever it was uttered always having the intention to look it up later.

I first surmised its meaning during my third year of grad school when a classmate of mine described a New York production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” she had recently seen as performed by a deconstructionist company.

I nodded.

She then went on to describe that the character of Solyony was portrayed as a television wheeled around the stage on a cart. On the screen was the head of the actor playing the character and every time he spoke, his words were so loud and distorted that they were unintelligible and annoying.

I nodded--Only this time, I finally understood the concept—at least as far as it pertained to theatre.

The director had chosen one aspect of Solyony and magnified it for his purposes. I happened to be playing the same character in a much more traditional version of the play at school. Due to this fact along with the fact that I had been studying the play and the playwright for the previous two years, I knew there were more layers to Solyony than just playing a function as a disruptive and annoying distraction in otherwise quiet, mirthful, or sentimental moments. But I also realized this was a valid over-simplification and that there were layers to be perceived from the way this company chose to interpret the character.

Not that any of this helps to make my present character understand what the commander is saying. The image of a squawking television on wheels gives me no insight into what makes a deconstructionist a perfect historian. This is all fine, however, since my next line is, “Sir, I’m not sure that even makes sense.”

I have since acquired an understanding of what the commander means. The first clue came from my director when he alluded to the line during a conversation regarding current events. He pointed out how news organizations take clips from speeches and other sound bytes and sometimes even rearrange them from their original order. The purpose for the editing is so that it will service the narrative the organization wants to tell. The director also pointed out how a clip on YouTube can lie dormant for months and then suddenly become popular and seem more current than the event or events it preceded.

Thus secular news people can behave as holy scribes of the Middle Ages, arranging events to fit their agendas. But rather than doing so for the purpose of revenge, they do so for the purpose of entertainment and ratings.

Thus, somewhat ironically, the 40 year career of a pastor can be boiled down into three clips totaling not more than a minute and a half in running time.
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As I have mentioned before I am a bit more wary of such events as the attack on Jeremiah Wright since the days when I watched Howard Dean “scream” encouragement to his supporters in Iowa in 2004 over and over and over again. In the case of Reverend Wright, I have to stop and ask myself if I’m actually offended by what he’s saying or are the reporters and pundits telling me that I am offended?

I’ve watched all three clips several times now and even though they are very short, I do perceive some clues as to what context from which they might have been lifted. These clues lead me to find that I am less inclined to be offended. They also incline me to dissect the clips to figure out if there was anything offensive to begin with or is the shock really more to do with his vehement delivery and the, out of the ordinary for an American clergyman, either traditional or traditional inspired African garb he is wearing.

The clip I was first introduced to, the one which seems to have as its main point of contention that Hillary Clinton has never been called a n----r, is the easiest for me to dispense with. It is a statement in and of itself that is so obvious that other than the use of the “N-word” it doesn’t even strike me as mildly offensive. In fact it seems kind of silly. I am aware that Wright is trying to make some point about how Barack Obama’s experience as an American is different from the other candidates and therefore he holds a connection with the parishioners that they do not and can never have.

My immediate response to the quote is… “Okay?”

I agree that Hillary Clinton has probably never been called that word. But unless Barack Obama looks very convincing in drag and ventures out in it at least as often as Rudy Giuliani, he has probably never been called several words that Hillary Clinton gets called and has been called for over 20 years on a daily basis. I am also willing to bet that at least half the people in the pews have been called some of those names as well.

Regardless of my present feelings toward Hillary Clinton, I am well aware that the over- calculating, seemingly mean-spirited entity that she has become is due in large part to such attacks. I am also certain it is the main reason why she still holds so much support among older women.

This statement when it stands on its own doesn’t meet my criteria for either being offensive or profound. Knowing what I know about Wright’s intellect, I would gather that his whole sermon probably had a greater theme than this.

The next clip is the one that is best known for his statement, “God Damn America” which he repeats three times.

If anything, I feel like this section suffers from one of my least favorite forms of rhetoric but also one for which I am sure I am guilty. One that is often found in emotion driven oratory. What I refer to is the choice of the speaker to reverse or invert a well-known saying such as “God Bless America.” In so doing, more often than not, the specificity of the speaker’s point is surrendered for rhetorical flourish.

A quick study of the words just prior to the thrice repeated refrain, words which referred to laws passed by the U.S. Government which could only have an adverse effect on poor black communities gives some credence to the overall point, which is, I infer, God may want to bless America but America is damning itself.

Just before this clip cuts, Wright announces that “it’s in the Bible.” This probably accounts for his choice of words. And he is right there are many instances in the Bible of rulers being warned or actually being brought down because they had abused the most poor and disenfranchised of their subjects.

This is also the clip that I thought included the reverend’s comments about the government introducing Acquired Immune Deficiency or AIDS into the black community. I haven’t been able to find verification that this is the same sermon where he said this but since I planned to write about it at this point, I’ll do so.

In no way do I believe that members of our government actively conspired to liquidate all homosexuals, drug users or impoverished minorities by infecting individuals with AIDS.

In every way do I believe that the members of our government with the most power ignored the epidemic for as long as they could, either because of political expediency or moral revulsion or both.

If I remember correctly from the book and film “And The Band Played On” the first cases of AIDS, which was then called GRID, started appearing within the United States in 1982. By 1985 suburban parents, such as mine, were warning their kids who were leaving for college, such as me, about this disease. This is an indication of how prevalent it had become in the mind of Americans. Even so, President Reagan had not even uttered the name of the disease in public until a news conference in October of that year when a reporter asked him his feelings about the death of Rock Hudson, who had once been a professional acquaintance of the president. (They were both actors in Hollywood at the same time).

Jump forward to 1992 and the Republican Convention. A convention I affectionately remember as “Hatefest ‘92”.

By this year, I was in my final year of grad school and had seen massive portions of the famous AIDS quilt in two places during my travels. Horrifying statistics and prognostications were being put forward about the future of the disease if major funding was not put into research. Even so the incumbent president and Republican nominee, George H.W. Bush, didn’t even mention anything about this major health crisis in his acceptance speech.

Do I believe that this is all part of some nefarious plan on the part of the U.S. government? No.

But a government whose historical legacy includes, Slavery, the 3/5’s compromise, The Trail of Tears, diseased blankets handed out to unsuspecting native-Americans, Wounded Knee, Jim Crow, Japanese/American internment camps, and the Tuskegee Experiment, must at some point accept that it must take on the burden of Caesar’s Wife in such matters and force itself to be transparent and reactionary when it’s people are dying regardless of the size of their voting block.

If not, such myths as the one Wright uttered will be embraced. Let me make it clear that I chose the word “myth” instead of “lie”. I include the following definition of myth which I read in the August 7, 2006 issue of NEWSWEEK:

“ As a term, myth is much misunderstood; hearing it, many people take the word to mean "lie," when in fact a myth is a story, a narrative, that explains individual and national realities--how a person or a country came to be, why certain things happen in the course of a life or of history, and what fate may have in store for us. Myths are a peculiar hybrid of truth and falsehood, resentments and ambitions, dreams and dread. We all have personal myths running through our heads, and some chapters would withstand fact checking while others would fail miserably.”

With that in mind I consider what Reverend Wright said about Aids is a myth. I can think of nobody who would disagree with the maxim that “no decision is still a decision.” Even so I agree with Senator Obama that such statements are divisive and aren’t really helpful with solving the problem. I find the statement inexact but not offensive.

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Now comes the clip from September 16, 2001. Had I been at Trinity United and heard these words alone, I probably would have been very hurt and I might very well have yelled out…

...if I had heard only those words.

While reviewing the clips on Youtube before I wrote this, I came across a ten minute version of the clip which included this “coming home to roost” statement. It turns out that the thesis for the entire sermon was a plea for peace. Wright was begging his parishioners and, by extension Americans to think before they acted. At one point he said that he was going to digress from the sermon to quote something he had heard former Reagan administration ambassador, Edward Peck say on T.V. He then launched into the statement which has been played over and over again on the news shows.

I glanced at my journal to get an idea of how I felt that weekend. I was living in New York then. My wife had been two blocks from the towers when they fell and for thirty minutes I had been under the impression that she had perished in the collapse. She ended up being fine. I had forgotten how completely, blindly angry I was on that following weekend. On Saturday, the 15th, my wife and I decided to attend a service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I had always wanted to go there and something about the idea of being someplace that was beautiful and still being built and would still be being built long after I died was comforting. Even so, I remember and find by what I wrote that I was very annoyed by the sermon given at the Cathedral that night. It was a plea for peace. The minister was begging us and, by extension, all Americans to think before we acted. Much softer in delivery than Wright’s but the same message.

It is an interesting side-note that my wife and I, after the service, ended up at the U.S.S. Maine Memorial at the bottom of Central Park. It was heartbreakingly beautiful that night with candles and written poems for the missing and dead and paper rolled out on the pavement for passersby to write on. I wrote the opening to the speech that Antony gives over Caesar’s body, the one that ends, “Let slip the dogs of war.” I stood up to look at the sculpted memorial and the possibility for future irony did not escape me. The explosion and sinking of the Maine in 1898 was the event which launched this country into the Spanish American War. The disaster was probably due to an accident with explosives onboard but the newspapers and government used it as the excuse to fight a war of conquest. I wondered if those who had decorated the memorial in its present adornment even knew about its inspiration.

The sermon that had annoyed me a couple of hours before now gave me pause.
So then I ask myself how I would have felt and thought if I had heard Reverend Wright say those words on September 9th, 2001 rather than the 16th. I probably would have nervously considered his point as valid. It becomes a question of timing and not offense.

So, finally, after considering all of these clips I find that I was only truly offended once and it had more to do with an action than a word.

Expertly dropped into the Hillary quote is a moment from an unrelated sermon where Wright says that Bill Clinton never helped Black people. In fact, he did to black people what he did to Monica. The reverend then simulates a sex act vaguely enough to resemble galloping on a horse to unknowing eyes. The audience claps and cheers in approbation.

This may very well be a personal issue but I feel like modern life is so bombarded with verbal and visual images of the male role in the sex act being an act of dominance or abuse that it becomes almost considered absolutely for those purposes. I would prefer if the pulpit of my church was at least one place where it is not portrayed as such. This is not to say that I am such a prude that I feel like matters of sex should not be addressed at all in church. It’s just that if my son had been beside me at that moment, I really would not want to explain to him later why it was not okay for our minister to behave that way. I would not have left the church for this but I would have informed the preacher that I think he lost control.

That moment aside, all these moments that I am told I should be offended by are not offensive at all. It then leads me to conclude that this overuse of the word “offensive” is yet another case of the English language being edited and relieved of needed specificity. In the same way that the word tragedy is often misused as a synonym for catastrophe, or myth for lie, or Al Qaeda for Shiite Extremist, it now seems that offensive is often misused as a synonym for provocative.

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In my early twenties I considered being a minister in the same denomination, essentially, as Reverend Wright. I even wrote and spoke four sermons. The advice I had gotten from all of the ordained ministers was to write my sermon in such a way as to provoke thought in the listeners. In the past, congregational churches thrived on dialogue between those in the pews and those in the pulpit. But television and radio and modern life had caused the religious service to become a more passive activity. It was important for the minister to provoke an unspoken dialogue with his parishioners by saying things that would force them to think rather than simply accept.
Couple this discipline with the advice of Fredrick Douglass to all civil rights leaders who came after him to always “Agitate, Agitate…Agitate”, and one has a clear idea of where Jeremiah Wright is coming from.

I have found nowhere where this man has advocated violence against any other group or race. No “final solution” to the white people problem. No call to burn giant icons in white people’s yards. All of his friends and colleagues in his denomination, which is 90% white, by the way, have nothing but absolute respect and admiration for him. His successes in his attempt to rebuild communities make it very clear that he is nothing but a credit and positive force in the world immediately around him.

I think it is an inability and a fear this collective culture of American society has. An inability and fear of arguing with any depth and substance about anything besides who should be thrown off the popular reality show at the given moment.

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I have been thinking a great deal about one of the transgressions that Jeremiah Wright lists in the Sept. 16th sermon. Whether these are Ambassador Peck’s words or his, he refers to the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as one of the thoughtless acts we perpetrated without ever “batting an eye.”

In my 41 years. I have witnessed the continued transformation of the popular view of this event. First, it was simply a stunning and sobering act that ended the bloodiest war in human history and established the U.S. as the greatest superpower on the face of the earth. Then the horrific consequences of the act, the casualties, radiation, Cold War, and possibilities for nuclear annihilation came into focus. Then the act was justified again by calculations of how many would have died if a conventional invasion of the home island of Japan had been the manner of closure. Then, by the time I was in college, I heard about reports which said that these calculations where greatly exaggerated. Now it has been boiled down to empirical statements such as Peck/Wright’s where the view of the entire incident gives one the image of hand rubbing, decrepit, villains committing acts of blithe annihilation. As we move further and further away from Hiroshima and Nagasaki the event seems to be pulled more and more out of context.

During my time from junior high through high school, the history class was always treated like a required but totally unnecessary subject. Out of those six years, I remember only two of my teachers being primarily trained in what they were teaching. The rest were athletic coaches assigned to the class so they could draw full time paychecks. Not a single one of them showed any interest in investigating historical events beyond the facts of what happened. A couple of them didn’t even care if we knew on what date certain events occurred. I can remember at least once a year, a student asking, “Why do we have to learn this stuff?” I can only remember one of these teachers even coming close to trying to answer the question and they answered with a sense of commiseration saying something about history being a blueprint and “we have to know where we have been to know where we are going.”

This one brief reference by Reverend Wright has opened has made me think a great deal as to how we should be completely overhauling the way we teach history in this country in a way that would encompass many other skills than simple fact retention.

As I mentioned above I have written research papers. Nothing shocking here. I am pretty certain that everyone who is reading this has written as many and probably more research material than I have. This is my point. Such an activity is a shared experience between most if not all American adults with a high school education. However, if the experience was like mine, the paper was written, handed in and after a few weeks returned with comments written in red in the margins and a grade scribbled across the top. Perhaps some of the comments were challenging questions which were to be responded to in a rewrite or simply posed as fodder for contemplation.

I don’t consider any of this bad. I certainly remember the experience as being extremely challenging. But when considering all I have written on this blog I begin to wonder if it is even close to enough.

Also I have observed that another shared experience I have with most people in this country, within twenty years of my age, is the study of three Shakespeare plays during high school. With some variance it seems that most students read “Romeo and Juliet” as freshmen, “Julius Caesar” as sophomores and either “Macbeth” or “Hamlet” or both as seniors. I have had many enjoyable conversations about these experiences; who read what role when the plays were read in class. How we did on the tests. Depending on our ages, which version of R&J did we see, the Zeffirelli or Luhrman and if we had to get signed parental permission to see either. Many times the discussions remained superficial, but also, many times discussions deepened regarding how the teacher approached the material or what discoveries were made through classroom discussion on the plays.

Over the last decade as I have occasionally toured schools with various projects, my experience has been that my liaisons are either excited young Arts and Humanities or English teachers who are becoming frustrated with the manner they are compelled to teach their subject matter, or burned out older teachers of the same subjects who are either preparing to quit teaching or ambivalently counting the days until retirement for the same reason. Their complaint is always the same that education is becoming more and more about regurgitating dictated facts and less and less about critical thought.

Nothing shocking here either. As I look back over my junior high and high school years, only three teachers through shear force of their wills, charm, and passion for the material were able to challenge their students to think beyond rote, past practical application, and into true creativity.

I’ll digress slightly and include their last names and subjects as an all too feeble homage: Mr. Bianchi—Biology, Mrs. Moore—English and Literature, and Mrs. Fowler—American Government.

This is not to say that the rest of my teachers were garbage. I really liked most of them, and depending on my love for the subject matter most of them were able to make space for me to challenge myself. The difference was that these three teachers, either through built up good will because of past positive results or because of unique imagination to find loopholes in the strictures of the curriculum, were able to be challenging without risking being too controversial.

That’s the problem: controversy is everywhere.

If the main objective of education for the young is to prepare them for life as an adult, then a major component of that goal should be preparation on how to deal with controversy. The best way to do that is to learn how to argue as an adult rather than the accepted practice now of the dismissal of those who disagree with you as being either insane or evil.

The decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has to be one of the four or five overwhelming historical legacies of the United States. It is also one of only a few such world changing events that ultimately ended up being decided upon by one person, Harry Truman. And one with an everyman life story at that.

Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if every Junior or Senior high school student in America was compelled to write a researched position paper on what they would have done if it would have been them who had to make that decision? Further, wouldn’t it be amazing if they were then put into groups with others who had both differing and similar conclusions to themselves and, under the guidance of instructors trained to conduct healthy disagreement on such a weighty topic were encouraged to discuss their conclusions? Rather than these instructors being forced to maintain impartiality there should be more than one in each group who also hold differing opinions so that they can make an example of how to behave and argue constructively.

Before anyone dismisses this notion because it is simply too dark a subject, let me point out that at 17 I remember getting my first recruitment calls from the military. I have been told by recruiters that such a practice is still common. Someone must think high school juniors and seniors are capable of making mature decisions about life and death.

I also am not saying that this should be the first time students should be exposed to constructive argument. They should be trained and prepared for this as an ultimate event.

There is a great amount of material written about what was going on at the time. There is also conjecture on what other decisions could have been made. Also plenty of evidence is written about the consequences of the event to our present day. Any or all of that could be used when writing the papers and presenting the arguments. There is so much material that I could see this being a topic dealt with every year. But I could also see the possibility of a need to rotate topics.

Mainly because I hate it when suggestions are made by someone who is unwilling to put themselves on the line I’ll include what my conclusion might end up being.

With all that I have learned so far about the event I would investigate the pros and cons of what would have happened if I would have evacuated Iwo Jima after its capture, put all high ranking P.O.W.’s on a ship at a safe distance for the island and then I would have detonated “little boy”, the Nagasaki bomb. I would then send the captives with photos of the devastation along with an ultimatum to their superiors. It would have read as follows:

“This war is over and you have lost. There is no shame in this. All members of your military have given all that can be expected of them. As the leader of my people I can not, in good conscience, ask them to continue to fight and die for a cause that is already decided. If it is, however, your decision to do so—to continue to fight and die, then I have no other recourse but to drop another bomb like the one detonated at Iwo Jima on one of your cities and continue to do so until you either surrender or perish.”

This is not a perfect decision. There were only two atomic bombs in the U.S. arsenal at the time and it would have taken many months to make more. I would have been bluffing somewhat.

There would also be those who would argue against dropping the bomb at all. Claiming it would have been better to invade and accept the losses which would probably not have been as awful as estimated.

I would argue that there was a string of precedents with names such as Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, where Japanese soldiers and civilians alike fought long after their cause was lost and, in so doing, wasted their own and many an Allied life.

It also comes to my mind that this notion of Americans not even “batting an eye” is unfair. I had three uncles serving in the south pacific, who might have been involved in an invasion of Japan. I would imagine they and their families back home were euphoric about being able to breathe again after four years of constant anxiety and dread rather than indifferent with eyes un-batted at the suffering of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I would also maintain that, a decision to drop such a bomb would be inconceivable if the decision was to be made in early 1942. But after four years of monolithic warfare, the threshold for wanton destruction had been lowered to such a point that such a decision might seem almost obvious.

I am certain that all of you reading this are already formulating rebuttals to my conclusion. Some are defending Truman’s ultimate decision. Some are questioning the use of the weapons at all. Some are coming up with variations of all three arguments.

Perfect.

In fact, the other night, I saw the opportunity to insert a brief debate on the subject during a conversation with some friends. Surprisingly, all joined in and information I was either not aware of or that I had forgotten was brought up. So much so that I would be forced to reconsider, research and possibly re-assess my conclusions.

The ultimate conclusions of these informed arguments are not near as important as the process. It is a process which prepares students to live in a world where controversial statements are made, and where the students are prepared to challenge them or agree with them only after careful study and consideration.

Since it was mainly U.S. Marines who fought those battles on those islands, and since my research on the play that I am in has taught me that most U.S. Marines have a strong sense of their own history and since the reverend Jeremiah Wright served his country as a U.S. Marine, I would imagine he knows much better than I do what went into the decision to drop the atomic bomb. I would also imagine that his statement along with many others he has made like it have less to do with how he views this country and more to do with how he knows others view it. When the context of his comments is taken into consideration, he seems to be warning and criticizing rather than condemning.

Even if these comments reflect exactly how he views this country I am certain that he has earned his opinions through careful study and consideration. His personal history indicates as much.

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In the four weeks since I began writing this I have watched Hillary Clinton show contempt for the electorate by pretending that she is the ultimate defender of the Democratic voters of Michigan and Florida. She pretends that she never agreed to the decision to not seat the delegates of those states because they scheduled their primaries too early. She did and she would care less about the two states if she were the one in the lead. If not for her cynical tactics, the voters of those two states would back the Democratic nominee readily but she is going to distort recent history.

In the four weeks since I began writing this I have watched John McCain conflate Sunni and Shiite extremists into one organization known as Al Qaeda. His reason seemingly is that Americans are too dense and racist to recognize the difference.

In the four weeks since I began writing this I have watched Barack Obama give a speech that respected the intelligence of the listener by confronting the racism in this country. Even so, I was saddened by his “condemning” of the words of his friend and pastor, Jeremiah Wright. I was saddened that in what was an otherwise brave and intelligent speech were a few placating comments to those who can’t see a difference between offense and provocation.

In this case I find myself disagreeing with all the media personnel I have heard and even with Obama himself. Jeremiah Wright is not his biggest weakness but may very well be one of his greatest assets. Maybe I should put it this way; in a country that truly valued education, substantive debate and empathy, Jeremiah Wright would be one of Barack Obama’s biggest assets.

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.”--Frederick Douglass

J.A.L.

(The later parts of this posting were inspired by conversations I had with Dr. Steven Benton while he was writing his dissertation, “ICHABOD’S CHILDREN: Anti-Intellectualism and the American Pedagogical Imagination.” It is also a celebration of the successful adjudication of that same document.)