Because on days like today--when the hours feel too short and the tasks seem never-ending--she happens to have this quote tagged onto her email signature....
We are living in a world gone mad, but not just mad in terms of war and chaos. There is a madness in this world that is the result of living too fast, forcing yourself to function without time to reflect upon the cause and effect of your choices and the quality of your relationships and the consequences of your actions. People live so scheduled, so pressured, so bound up in this nonsensical adoration of doing things faster and faster and faster among other superficial values that this adoration of speed has transferred to what they expect from their spiritual life, if you want to call what they have a spiritual life at all. A yoga class and a vegetarian diet is not a spiritual life, nor is therapy and learning about self-empowerment and how to get what you want in three easy lessons. What on earth does that have to do with the soul?
"Small comments are great indicators of what people really believe as opposed to what they say they believe and the following example, which is among the most common that I hear, positions the matter of faith as the last empowered option that people turn to. When a crisis occurs and everything "humanly possible" has been done to rectify or treat the problem or illness, people will always say, "All we can do now is pray". Prayer is seen as a last option or the tactic one turns to when the really effective things that they were counting on have failed. The statement is really a symbolic admission that says prayer is the caboose on the train of life for people and not the engine. If people truly understood the power of prayer and the power of grace, they would pray as their first step in every thing that they did and not as a last resort because everything else on the human level failed. But that is not how most people truly and authentically relate to the power of prayer it is not a real power for them, at least it is not as real as a power they can touch.
Caroline Myss
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Brethren Priestess & Ejoye Interview
Audrey’s Interview with
Emily Joye McGaughy
LOGOS May 2008
Ad: Thanks for talking with me today. First, I have to ask, what has stood out for you about doing the interviews for LOGOS for three years?
EJ: The way people’s personalities shape how the interview happens. How absolutely different the experience can be depending on who I’m interviewing. How my interviewing style has drastically transformed from when I started. Form, content—everything is different! I learned a lot along the way and tried to integrate those lessons in the way I went about the process each time.
Ad: As editor of LOGOS, I’ve found I have a special access into people, through the writing and art they submit to be edited and printed. Have you found that to be true of your interviews?
EJ: I wouldn’t say that I’ve had greater “access” but I do think that I’ve learned about the power of questions in directing where people go. There are some people who would allow my questions to take them wherever I wanted to go; there were people who had a very clear idea of where they wanted to go, and if my questioning didn’t fit with that they’d make it clear. The word “access” in your question is interesting because I think the level of access that I have to a person’s story can be determined before they even step into the room, in some cases, and in other cases, the level of access we have to each other develops based on the interaction itself. It’s largely dependent on the combination of persons in the room. It’s like dancing. And I think you can measure (maybe not completely) the person’s level of flexibility by watching the way they interact with questions posed to them.
Ad: What has been your most memorable interview?
EJ: With Professor Mayra Rivera Rivera, I asked her about the role of music in her life, she ended up answering the question by giving me the name of a song called “Leonora’s Love Theme” by Astor Piazzolla. I wrote it down and forgot about it. Six months ago I pulled that interview out, read it and bought the song on iTunes, just to see what it was like. Lucky for me, it was a beautiful song! I often reflect on that—the power of associating a person with a piece of art, phrase, historical moment—when I think about the interviewing process because those associations get set up when you sit down and ask people about their lives. The love I have for “Leonora’s Love Theme” gets associated with the great admiration and respect I have for Mayra, and the novelties of both build on each other, so that the song is in the room when I’m with Mayra, and Mayra is in the room when I’m with the song. Who knows if I ever would have heard about Astor Piazzolla without that interview? Now I’m intoxicated by his music on a regular basis! Interviews allow you to probe and make connections in deeply personal and contained ways. I love it.
Can I carry that somewhere?
When I extend that phenomenon of associative relating and the building of novelty into the realm of religion, I’m struck by how deeply such experiences can inform our understanding of resurrection and the way we keep things alive. Just like reading/hearing the prophecy of Jeremiah will always remind me of my undergrad bible professor, the Rev. Dr. Barry Sang, I will always remember Dr. Rivera and feel close to her every time I listen to Leonora’s Love Theme. Likewise, I will always remember Anna Blaedel and PSR when I hear Erik Satie and Yann Tiersen because she played their music in our Arch apartment almost everyday during my first year in seminary. There are tangible ways to connect and make meaning. We can find people by going into the things we have shared with them, no matter how near or far we may be at any given moment.
Ad: You mention that you may no longer be near some people, in part because you are graduating soon. What reflections do you have on your time here at PSR as you start looking at it as a past-tense experience?
EJ: I’ll start with regrets: I regret not taking more classes at CAL and other GTU schools. I regret not participating more fully in the worship life of this campus until my 2nd & 3rd years. I regret the way some of the broader patterns that I brought to seminary affected my time here, patterns that were harmful to other people. I think we all bring dense histories and patterns with us that, though we may give lip service to them in the classroom, we don’t always see because they play themselves out in largely unconscious or subconscious ways. So I have regret about the way misplaced silence and voice, overall lack of cultural competence (to use PSR’s phraseology) on my part—especially in Senior Seminar and the trip to Southeast Asia—played a role in my time at seminary.
Ad: Any fond memories?
EJ: The good news that is I have about 50 million more good memories than I have regrets – but I’ll try to keep it to a limit. My first year in OTNT while lecturing on Job, Jeffrey Kuan went on a tangent about how important it is for ministers to keep their mouths shut in pastoral care situations where life is crashing down in ways that aren’t explainable. When I was in Viet Nam, I was able to watch him put that theory into praxis with me, and it was a powerful testament to the way a person can live what they teach and teach what they live—and in that integration model for others what’s possible. He is a teacher with a capital T for me.
My experience doing worship with Adriene Thorne, Anna Blaedel, Richard Ward, Laura Engelken, and Gayle Basten during Lent was something I will never forget. I have loved talking The Wire and NBA basketball with Rev. Essex. (Go Lakers!) I would say that the other thing I want to lift up is the story circle Seminarians for Choice organized my second year. I was astounded by the level of honesty and the integrity of the witnessing in that room. I also have met people at/through PSR who incarnate God’s wisdom for me. Though the book learning, theory and research have been crucial to my development, encountering people like Marjorie Wilkes, Glenda Hope, Courtney Gulden, Wade Meyer and Michael Campos (just to name a few!) have played an equal if not bigger role in helping me understand what the love of God is all about.
Ad: What legacy would you hope you leave here? (Besides a considerable endowment to OIA, of course.)
EJ: Legacies are interesting. There’s a part of me that’s rebelling against answering that question because I know the way memory works. No one is ever remembered in the ways they would wish (I think Jesus is a prime example of that). The human memory and its lover, the imagination, are capable of all kinds of distortions. Sometimes people distort a person’s ordinariness to make them seem great; other times people distort ordinariness in order to demonize. It’s all about what you’re trying to remember and where you’re trying to go with that memory. We are constantly remembering things in order to move forward. The most important pericope of the entire biblical text for me is in Song of Solomon 8:6a-b: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is as strong as death, passion as fierce as the grave.” We want the strength of the people we love to accompany us along the way. Something I learned early in life, through the death of my father, is that bodies cannot always come along. Our memories are part of the love that is stronger than death—a love that the early church embodied by keeping Jesus alive among them. We can keep things alive, “hang on to the good of what was lived” (to quote Laura Engelken) among us by tangibly remembering it and keeping it current. What I hope for all of us who are graduating is to keep in mind that the memorialization process is as important as the content of the memory itself. Religion has done some beautifully brilliant and horrifically stupid stuff by acknowledging this or not.
Ad: To move away from the PSR world – what is your most important or meaningful distraction from seminary?
EJ: I have two: art and physical disciplines like exercise and Tai Chi.
Ad: Not the tv show, “The Wire?”
EJ: Let me clarify. Having things like “The Wire” (best television show of all time) and “The Sopranos” and Radiohead and the NBA playoffs (and I think sports are an art, let me be specific about that) to immerse myself in was critical to my survival during seminary. Such a huge part of my theology and life-work is making the body and relationality central in conversations about God, Earth and morality. Clearly that translates into me wanting integration of those things in my own life.
Ad: Closing question: Having been interviewed yourself now, what kind of an interviewee are you?
EJ: I feel as interested in the potential directions of the questions as in the possibilities for the answer. I also want to connect any of the personal dimensions to my answer to broader ideas and issues – that’s really important to me: to not stay stuck in Emily’s life but to see how Emily’s life intersects with other people, other relationships, other cultures - or doesn’t connect to those things and why. It’s such a different experience from this side!
I feel happy that you, Audrey, are asking the questions because I trust your intelligence and your ability to make things relevant. I’ve learned that about you over time, which I think greatly impacts the way I answer and my level of openness to the questions themselves (to quote Rilke). I desperately want my loved ones to know, and consider my answering a way to show them, that they were important to me and I am grateful to them for the ways they touched my seminary experience.
Emily Joye McGaughy
LOGOS May 2008
Ad: Thanks for talking with me today. First, I have to ask, what has stood out for you about doing the interviews for LOGOS for three years?
EJ: The way people’s personalities shape how the interview happens. How absolutely different the experience can be depending on who I’m interviewing. How my interviewing style has drastically transformed from when I started. Form, content—everything is different! I learned a lot along the way and tried to integrate those lessons in the way I went about the process each time.
Ad: As editor of LOGOS, I’ve found I have a special access into people, through the writing and art they submit to be edited and printed. Have you found that to be true of your interviews?
EJ: I wouldn’t say that I’ve had greater “access” but I do think that I’ve learned about the power of questions in directing where people go. There are some people who would allow my questions to take them wherever I wanted to go; there were people who had a very clear idea of where they wanted to go, and if my questioning didn’t fit with that they’d make it clear. The word “access” in your question is interesting because I think the level of access that I have to a person’s story can be determined before they even step into the room, in some cases, and in other cases, the level of access we have to each other develops based on the interaction itself. It’s largely dependent on the combination of persons in the room. It’s like dancing. And I think you can measure (maybe not completely) the person’s level of flexibility by watching the way they interact with questions posed to them.
Ad: What has been your most memorable interview?
EJ: With Professor Mayra Rivera Rivera, I asked her about the role of music in her life, she ended up answering the question by giving me the name of a song called “Leonora’s Love Theme” by Astor Piazzolla. I wrote it down and forgot about it. Six months ago I pulled that interview out, read it and bought the song on iTunes, just to see what it was like. Lucky for me, it was a beautiful song! I often reflect on that—the power of associating a person with a piece of art, phrase, historical moment—when I think about the interviewing process because those associations get set up when you sit down and ask people about their lives. The love I have for “Leonora’s Love Theme” gets associated with the great admiration and respect I have for Mayra, and the novelties of both build on each other, so that the song is in the room when I’m with Mayra, and Mayra is in the room when I’m with the song. Who knows if I ever would have heard about Astor Piazzolla without that interview? Now I’m intoxicated by his music on a regular basis! Interviews allow you to probe and make connections in deeply personal and contained ways. I love it.
Can I carry that somewhere?
When I extend that phenomenon of associative relating and the building of novelty into the realm of religion, I’m struck by how deeply such experiences can inform our understanding of resurrection and the way we keep things alive. Just like reading/hearing the prophecy of Jeremiah will always remind me of my undergrad bible professor, the Rev. Dr. Barry Sang, I will always remember Dr. Rivera and feel close to her every time I listen to Leonora’s Love Theme. Likewise, I will always remember Anna Blaedel and PSR when I hear Erik Satie and Yann Tiersen because she played their music in our Arch apartment almost everyday during my first year in seminary. There are tangible ways to connect and make meaning. We can find people by going into the things we have shared with them, no matter how near or far we may be at any given moment.
Ad: You mention that you may no longer be near some people, in part because you are graduating soon. What reflections do you have on your time here at PSR as you start looking at it as a past-tense experience?
EJ: I’ll start with regrets: I regret not taking more classes at CAL and other GTU schools. I regret not participating more fully in the worship life of this campus until my 2nd & 3rd years. I regret the way some of the broader patterns that I brought to seminary affected my time here, patterns that were harmful to other people. I think we all bring dense histories and patterns with us that, though we may give lip service to them in the classroom, we don’t always see because they play themselves out in largely unconscious or subconscious ways. So I have regret about the way misplaced silence and voice, overall lack of cultural competence (to use PSR’s phraseology) on my part—especially in Senior Seminar and the trip to Southeast Asia—played a role in my time at seminary.
Ad: Any fond memories?
EJ: The good news that is I have about 50 million more good memories than I have regrets – but I’ll try to keep it to a limit. My first year in OTNT while lecturing on Job, Jeffrey Kuan went on a tangent about how important it is for ministers to keep their mouths shut in pastoral care situations where life is crashing down in ways that aren’t explainable. When I was in Viet Nam, I was able to watch him put that theory into praxis with me, and it was a powerful testament to the way a person can live what they teach and teach what they live—and in that integration model for others what’s possible. He is a teacher with a capital T for me.
My experience doing worship with Adriene Thorne, Anna Blaedel, Richard Ward, Laura Engelken, and Gayle Basten during Lent was something I will never forget. I have loved talking The Wire and NBA basketball with Rev. Essex. (Go Lakers!) I would say that the other thing I want to lift up is the story circle Seminarians for Choice organized my second year. I was astounded by the level of honesty and the integrity of the witnessing in that room. I also have met people at/through PSR who incarnate God’s wisdom for me. Though the book learning, theory and research have been crucial to my development, encountering people like Marjorie Wilkes, Glenda Hope, Courtney Gulden, Wade Meyer and Michael Campos (just to name a few!) have played an equal if not bigger role in helping me understand what the love of God is all about.
Ad: What legacy would you hope you leave here? (Besides a considerable endowment to OIA, of course.)
EJ: Legacies are interesting. There’s a part of me that’s rebelling against answering that question because I know the way memory works. No one is ever remembered in the ways they would wish (I think Jesus is a prime example of that). The human memory and its lover, the imagination, are capable of all kinds of distortions. Sometimes people distort a person’s ordinariness to make them seem great; other times people distort ordinariness in order to demonize. It’s all about what you’re trying to remember and where you’re trying to go with that memory. We are constantly remembering things in order to move forward. The most important pericope of the entire biblical text for me is in Song of Solomon 8:6a-b: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is as strong as death, passion as fierce as the grave.” We want the strength of the people we love to accompany us along the way. Something I learned early in life, through the death of my father, is that bodies cannot always come along. Our memories are part of the love that is stronger than death—a love that the early church embodied by keeping Jesus alive among them. We can keep things alive, “hang on to the good of what was lived” (to quote Laura Engelken) among us by tangibly remembering it and keeping it current. What I hope for all of us who are graduating is to keep in mind that the memorialization process is as important as the content of the memory itself. Religion has done some beautifully brilliant and horrifically stupid stuff by acknowledging this or not.
Ad: To move away from the PSR world – what is your most important or meaningful distraction from seminary?
EJ: I have two: art and physical disciplines like exercise and Tai Chi.
Ad: Not the tv show, “The Wire?”
EJ: Let me clarify. Having things like “The Wire” (best television show of all time) and “The Sopranos” and Radiohead and the NBA playoffs (and I think sports are an art, let me be specific about that) to immerse myself in was critical to my survival during seminary. Such a huge part of my theology and life-work is making the body and relationality central in conversations about God, Earth and morality. Clearly that translates into me wanting integration of those things in my own life.
Ad: Closing question: Having been interviewed yourself now, what kind of an interviewee are you?
EJ: I feel as interested in the potential directions of the questions as in the possibilities for the answer. I also want to connect any of the personal dimensions to my answer to broader ideas and issues – that’s really important to me: to not stay stuck in Emily’s life but to see how Emily’s life intersects with other people, other relationships, other cultures - or doesn’t connect to those things and why. It’s such a different experience from this side!
I feel happy that you, Audrey, are asking the questions because I trust your intelligence and your ability to make things relevant. I’ve learned that about you over time, which I think greatly impacts the way I answer and my level of openness to the questions themselves (to quote Rilke). I desperately want my loved ones to know, and consider my answering a way to show them, that they were important to me and I am grateful to them for the ways they touched my seminary experience.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Procrastination
Okay. So here it is.
I don't want to do anything.
Perhaps the irritation of 'not getting things done' is easier to face than the pain of leaving a place I have been for 3 years. Perhaps. Unfortunately, dead lines are dead lines.
Are any of the rest of you experiencing this? What are you doing about it?
I feel like a slug...
I don't want to do anything.
Perhaps the irritation of 'not getting things done' is easier to face than the pain of leaving a place I have been for 3 years. Perhaps. Unfortunately, dead lines are dead lines.
Are any of the rest of you experiencing this? What are you doing about it?
I feel like a slug...
Saturday, May 3, 2008
General Know Noise Tidbits
1. The Celtics should win the NBA Playoffs based on talent alone. However, I am and always will be pulling for the Lakers. If either team wins, I will be happy.
2. Cal Tjader's "Soul Sauce." Get it. Listen and dance to it. Thanks to Ms. Marjorie Wilkes for putting me on. Hotness, for real.
3. Everyone, absolutely everyone, should read Stephen Moore's chapter in God's Gym entitled "Resurrection: Horrible Pain, Glorious Gain." Never before has any author explored the interface(s) of hypermasculinity, non-reflexive biblical exegesis, theology, and the religious/cultural production of the (fictitious) impenetrable male with such precision, depth, and self-effacing humor. Scholarship and satire at their finest.
4. I graduate in 22 days!!!
Can I get a virtual reality high 5?
Seriously...does anyone read my blog?? I get no fucking comments (except for the occasional drop from the Brethren Priestess: good look Audrey). What's the deal??
2. Cal Tjader's "Soul Sauce." Get it. Listen and dance to it. Thanks to Ms. Marjorie Wilkes for putting me on. Hotness, for real.
3. Everyone, absolutely everyone, should read Stephen Moore's chapter in God's Gym entitled "Resurrection: Horrible Pain, Glorious Gain." Never before has any author explored the interface(s) of hypermasculinity, non-reflexive biblical exegesis, theology, and the religious/cultural production of the (fictitious) impenetrable male with such precision, depth, and self-effacing humor. Scholarship and satire at their finest.
4. I graduate in 22 days!!!
Can I get a virtual reality high 5?
Seriously...does anyone read my blog?? I get no fucking comments (except for the occasional drop from the Brethren Priestess: good look Audrey). What's the deal??
Kashf
The composer abruptly lifts his head from what some might consider chicken scratch
(his most eloquent chord ever crafted during the most chaotic time of his life)
just in time to
Having planted the final row of chrysanthemums in her backyard, gleeful
to spend time with fingers and toes in dirt and on rock instead of twirling keys and wearing heels, the gardener gazes deeply into the black soil
just in time to
Silencing the chatter of left brain projects, projections and pipe dreams, a meditating devotee rocks her tail bone, straightens her spine and boisterously inhales
just in time to
A father, staring into the eyeballs of his newborn, tenderly touching something unbreakably soft (an extension of his own all-too-often denied body), gently traces the infant’s facial lines
just in time to
understand that none of this had to be.
(his most eloquent chord ever crafted during the most chaotic time of his life)
just in time to
Having planted the final row of chrysanthemums in her backyard, gleeful
to spend time with fingers and toes in dirt and on rock instead of twirling keys and wearing heels, the gardener gazes deeply into the black soil
just in time to
Silencing the chatter of left brain projects, projections and pipe dreams, a meditating devotee rocks her tail bone, straightens her spine and boisterously inhales
just in time to
A father, staring into the eyeballs of his newborn, tenderly touching something unbreakably soft (an extension of his own all-too-often denied body), gently traces the infant’s facial lines
just in time to
understand that none of this had to be.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Mythos
I have been wanting to write about the media spectacle surrounding Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama for weeks. My internet went down for a few days and during the time I could not go on-line a new wave of the "controversy" came onto the scene. I heard about the Moyers interview and National Press Club talk through word of mouth. In most of those conversations, people (including members of my family and denomination) said "he (Rev. Wright) went off the deep end" and/or "he just lost it, completely."
Then I made the unfortunate mistake of reading Maureen Dowd's column where she reads and likens Rev. Wright's "preying on Obama" at the NPC to classic hero-myths where a young (underdog) hero beats the odds only to find himself betrayed by his mentor/father figure right before claiming the throne. She concludes the article by suggesting that Obama should "kill monsters...knock off his father and assume the throne." From the first sentence of the article Dowd pulls on the socially-constructed "angry black man" motif to craft her argument wherein she calls Rev. Wright "narcissistic," "explosive," and "The Really Angry Black Man" (as opposed to Obama who she characterizes as the "Sort of Angry Black Man”). This kind of journalism is a prime example of intellectually coded white supremacy where the person holding the pen reiterates (through description) and conditions (through prescription) blatant racism. Red flag: anyone who draws on the (western canon of imperial/colonial literature) "classics" to frame a political discourse without reflecting on how those classics have infiltrated the mind-set and foreign policy--and thereby set up the very dynamics she is (kind of, but not really) critiquing--of America. She writes "The Illinois senator doesn’t pay attention to the mythic nature of campaigns." Clearly she doesn't pay attention to the media's complicity in maintaining the mythos of racial stereotyping, male aggression, and dog-eat-dog nature of politics.
All of this before I had even heard Rev. Wright's comments for myself. My internet came back to life a couple days ago. Since then I have seen the Moyer's interview and the NPC talk.
Before getting into my reflections on Rev. Wright's comments, I'd like to acknowledge that I have three sources of affinity that impact my interpretation of this discourse. First, I am a member of and in-care with the United Church of Christ. I am denominationally tied to Rev. Wright, Trinity United Church of Christ and the broader UCC--all of which have been under serious attack in the past month. Second, I am a liberation theologian. Though I do not limit the scope of my theological projects to liberation theology, it has and continues to be a fertile source for interpreting and thinking about G-d's relationship with humanity and all of creation. Many of Rev. Wright's comments on Moyer's and the NPC platform were geared toward educating the public about liberation theology's history and impact on/in Judeo-Christian religion in particular and the American Black Church in particular. That so many of the liberation trajectories within this theology were misinterpreted and misunderstood in the public square goes to show the divorce of the academic study of religion and the practice of religion in contemporary America. I am interested in closing the gap between the two.
Now, what struck me right off the bat is how quickly the NPC conversation digressed when the format went from lecture to Q&A. Whereas the Moyers interview went in several directions, provided Wright and Moyers space to explore topics in depth, the NPC Q&A session was like a 10th grader accosting the once-popular-now-hated source of rumors. "Did you say this?" "Did you say that? Because if you said this then we think that." Every single sound-bite, pop-fox trope employed in the weeks prior was thrown on the table. Here Rev. Wright had given an hour long talk about the history and survival strategies of the Black Church and all this media representative could do was stay within the confines of month-old accusations. Few, if any, of her questions related to the material he presented--material that was historically accurate, far reaching, biblically sound and brilliantly communicated. Her questions, body language and facial expressions could not have been more juvenile and offensive, which of course provoked a form of social mockery between Rev. Wright, the other media analysts in the room and Rev. Wright's supporters in the audience. Once again it is "proven" to us: people just cannot talk about race with sophistication and civility. What a useful refrain for those who have power investment in those conversations remaining harmfully chaotic. People have been citing the "craziness" of this media spectacle all week, but I find the placement of that craziness on Rev. Wright instead of on the framing of the interactions another instance of white supremacy and deep seated ignorance. Further, the obsessive media coverage of the event and the consequences of that event (primarily the split between Obama and Wright) have distracted the American public from more immediate, and dare I say life-threatening, issues. Bob Herbert, one of the most reliable journalists at the NYTimes (though he too has fallen into the Wright hateration trap) wrote on this systematic distraction quite well.
What I sense is at question, and for me at stake, in this entire circumstance is allegiance. I cannot help but think that Rev. Wright and Barack Obama found themselves at the fault line of two American tectonic plates: religion and politics. Facing each other, and in facing each other facing a mirror, these two had to sense the upcoming earthquake made possible by legal separation of church and state in a land where the people's hearts lack any such separation. Both Rev. Wright and Senator Obama came up close and personal with the implications of "serving God and country"--two things I think they both aspire to do. Rev. Wright said it very clearly: "after the election I will still be a pastor." In the end the pastor chose to keep his allegiance with God, not with the possibility for the first black president. What an excruciating decision. It does not strike me as coincidental that such a decision faces Barack's pastor, not Hillary's or McCain's. And what decision is left for Senator Obama? Giving up his pastor or his political career. What an excruciating decision. Is it any coincidence that the American public demands a black-on-black dismissal before it considers a black man electable?
In the end, they both made a choice based on allegiance. One could write a dissertation on the ethical implications of those allegiances and decisions, but while we wait for such a publication to inform our understanding, I think it’s crucial to notice how particularly narrow the options are for both. Most ironic of all: in a country where religion and politics consistently tango with each other to check and balance practical and ethical decision-making, we expect two public figures who represent the best of both to abandon one for the sake of the other. Perhaps it is our reluctance to admit the religious-political hybrid within—so destabilizing to our first amendment and sense of superior identity—that forces us to project our macrocosm anxiety onto an arbitrary (though strategically chosen) microcosm. But admitting anxiety isn’t a part of the American Mythos. And it certainly wouldn’t get you elected in a time of deep seated economic anxiety because then you’d actually be representing—not transcending—your people.
Underlying most of this discourse is what Alfred North Whitehead would call the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” We want strength and answers when we feel weak and anxious. We want stable identity categories so we can understand, classify, interpret and use what’s identified when it suits us. Unfortunately we are reaching for water trying to grasp a rope. If we really wanted “change” (to use Obama’s phrase) or “transformation” (to use Wright’s phrase), we would begin to pick apart the very desire to grasp and cling in moments of uncertainty. We would begin to see the arbitrary nature of classification systems and start to let the Other tell us their own story before we place our story on them. And we might let friends remain friends instead of igniting racial in-fighting to tighten our white supremacist hold on power.
Then I made the unfortunate mistake of reading Maureen Dowd's column where she reads and likens Rev. Wright's "preying on Obama" at the NPC to classic hero-myths where a young (underdog) hero beats the odds only to find himself betrayed by his mentor/father figure right before claiming the throne. She concludes the article by suggesting that Obama should "kill monsters...knock off his father and assume the throne." From the first sentence of the article Dowd pulls on the socially-constructed "angry black man" motif to craft her argument wherein she calls Rev. Wright "narcissistic," "explosive," and "The Really Angry Black Man" (as opposed to Obama who she characterizes as the "Sort of Angry Black Man”). This kind of journalism is a prime example of intellectually coded white supremacy where the person holding the pen reiterates (through description) and conditions (through prescription) blatant racism. Red flag: anyone who draws on the (western canon of imperial/colonial literature) "classics" to frame a political discourse without reflecting on how those classics have infiltrated the mind-set and foreign policy--and thereby set up the very dynamics she is (kind of, but not really) critiquing--of America. She writes "The Illinois senator doesn’t pay attention to the mythic nature of campaigns." Clearly she doesn't pay attention to the media's complicity in maintaining the mythos of racial stereotyping, male aggression, and dog-eat-dog nature of politics.
All of this before I had even heard Rev. Wright's comments for myself. My internet came back to life a couple days ago. Since then I have seen the Moyer's interview and the NPC talk.
Before getting into my reflections on Rev. Wright's comments, I'd like to acknowledge that I have three sources of affinity that impact my interpretation of this discourse. First, I am a member of and in-care with the United Church of Christ. I am denominationally tied to Rev. Wright, Trinity United Church of Christ and the broader UCC--all of which have been under serious attack in the past month. Second, I am a liberation theologian. Though I do not limit the scope of my theological projects to liberation theology, it has and continues to be a fertile source for interpreting and thinking about G-d's relationship with humanity and all of creation. Many of Rev. Wright's comments on Moyer's and the NPC platform were geared toward educating the public about liberation theology's history and impact on/in Judeo-Christian religion in particular and the American Black Church in particular. That so many of the liberation trajectories within this theology were misinterpreted and misunderstood in the public square goes to show the divorce of the academic study of religion and the practice of religion in contemporary America. I am interested in closing the gap between the two.
Now, what struck me right off the bat is how quickly the NPC conversation digressed when the format went from lecture to Q&A. Whereas the Moyers interview went in several directions, provided Wright and Moyers space to explore topics in depth, the NPC Q&A session was like a 10th grader accosting the once-popular-now-hated source of rumors. "Did you say this?" "Did you say that? Because if you said this then we think that." Every single sound-bite, pop-fox trope employed in the weeks prior was thrown on the table. Here Rev. Wright had given an hour long talk about the history and survival strategies of the Black Church and all this media representative could do was stay within the confines of month-old accusations. Few, if any, of her questions related to the material he presented--material that was historically accurate, far reaching, biblically sound and brilliantly communicated. Her questions, body language and facial expressions could not have been more juvenile and offensive, which of course provoked a form of social mockery between Rev. Wright, the other media analysts in the room and Rev. Wright's supporters in the audience. Once again it is "proven" to us: people just cannot talk about race with sophistication and civility. What a useful refrain for those who have power investment in those conversations remaining harmfully chaotic. People have been citing the "craziness" of this media spectacle all week, but I find the placement of that craziness on Rev. Wright instead of on the framing of the interactions another instance of white supremacy and deep seated ignorance. Further, the obsessive media coverage of the event and the consequences of that event (primarily the split between Obama and Wright) have distracted the American public from more immediate, and dare I say life-threatening, issues. Bob Herbert, one of the most reliable journalists at the NYTimes (though he too has fallen into the Wright hateration trap) wrote on this systematic distraction quite well.
What I sense is at question, and for me at stake, in this entire circumstance is allegiance. I cannot help but think that Rev. Wright and Barack Obama found themselves at the fault line of two American tectonic plates: religion and politics. Facing each other, and in facing each other facing a mirror, these two had to sense the upcoming earthquake made possible by legal separation of church and state in a land where the people's hearts lack any such separation. Both Rev. Wright and Senator Obama came up close and personal with the implications of "serving God and country"--two things I think they both aspire to do. Rev. Wright said it very clearly: "after the election I will still be a pastor." In the end the pastor chose to keep his allegiance with God, not with the possibility for the first black president. What an excruciating decision. It does not strike me as coincidental that such a decision faces Barack's pastor, not Hillary's or McCain's. And what decision is left for Senator Obama? Giving up his pastor or his political career. What an excruciating decision. Is it any coincidence that the American public demands a black-on-black dismissal before it considers a black man electable?
In the end, they both made a choice based on allegiance. One could write a dissertation on the ethical implications of those allegiances and decisions, but while we wait for such a publication to inform our understanding, I think it’s crucial to notice how particularly narrow the options are for both. Most ironic of all: in a country where religion and politics consistently tango with each other to check and balance practical and ethical decision-making, we expect two public figures who represent the best of both to abandon one for the sake of the other. Perhaps it is our reluctance to admit the religious-political hybrid within—so destabilizing to our first amendment and sense of superior identity—that forces us to project our macrocosm anxiety onto an arbitrary (though strategically chosen) microcosm. But admitting anxiety isn’t a part of the American Mythos. And it certainly wouldn’t get you elected in a time of deep seated economic anxiety because then you’d actually be representing—not transcending—your people.
Underlying most of this discourse is what Alfred North Whitehead would call the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” We want strength and answers when we feel weak and anxious. We want stable identity categories so we can understand, classify, interpret and use what’s identified when it suits us. Unfortunately we are reaching for water trying to grasp a rope. If we really wanted “change” (to use Obama’s phrase) or “transformation” (to use Wright’s phrase), we would begin to pick apart the very desire to grasp and cling in moments of uncertainty. We would begin to see the arbitrary nature of classification systems and start to let the Other tell us their own story before we place our story on them. And we might let friends remain friends instead of igniting racial in-fighting to tighten our white supremacist hold on power.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Naked Dancing
The panopticon phenomenon
functions in collaboration
with alphabet(s)
and
obsession(s) with identity.
A prison.
A language.
An old old idea.
A deadness, stifling unbounded possibilities.
There's courage in the philosophical move towards aesthetics,
having everything to do with imagination
and the timeless occurence of pleasure.
Fling off your clothes and turn some music on.
I'm tired of all this rambling about becoming.
functions in collaboration
with alphabet(s)
and
obsession(s) with identity.
A prison.
A language.
An old old idea.
A deadness, stifling unbounded possibilities.
There's courage in the philosophical move towards aesthetics,
having everything to do with imagination
and the timeless occurence of pleasure.
Fling off your clothes and turn some music on.
I'm tired of all this rambling about becoming.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Had to pass this on...
Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia:
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth
By Tim Wise
March 18, 2008
For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.
Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.
But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?
Well actually, no he didn't.
Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."
But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.
Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.
So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.
But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.
This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:
White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.
And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.
We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.
Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.
Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.
Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.
Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.
These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.
No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, if not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.
It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.
What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?
And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.
Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.
So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.
Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth
By Tim Wise
March 18, 2008
For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.
Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.
But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?
Well actually, no he didn't.
Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."
But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.
Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.
So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.
But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.
This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:
White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.
And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.
We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.
Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.
Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.
Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.
Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.
These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.
No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, if not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.
It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.
What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?
And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.
Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.
So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.
Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Aporia: The Sexed & the Text
"It is a question not of organization but of composition; not of development or differentiation but of movement and rest, speed and slowness. It is a question of elements and particles, which do or do not arrive fast enough to effect a passage, a becoming or jump on the same plane of pure immanence." (255) [...] "To the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there corresponds intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these intensities come from external parts or from the individual's own parts. Affects are becomings." (256)
--Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Just when I think the reading cannot get
any more relevant, her bleach blond dome ascends up the stairs
as I watch from behind the window, my morning
cup of coffee & book before me, her undomesticated, beautiful
bottle shape moving further away.
She is the one who modeled a warm bath
as I screamed out from the throws of a whirlpool.
She is the one I wrote poems about a year-ago this time:
call-and-response-sex, violin style.
Whispering, wanting, too quickly became nothing.
Now we throw monikers across the grass, embody an
amiable openness to one-an-other's(?) short-term,
on-the-surface needs. That's what friends do.
But I remember, in a sacramental way,
reaching deep and holding on, reaching out
and letting go; what it did to supplement
those mornings when she ironically summer-schooled me
on definite and indefinite articles; what it did
to complicate the adjudication process between
mommy mimesis and Butler's laboratory science;
how it effortlessly highlighted the commonality of water,
in both times and places, while softly suggesting
a difference in/of container. No brainer. Just retain(h)er.
From behind the window pain, I lift a breath
of unbounded, cathartic consecration for
the book before me, her body becoming me, the intensity yearning for poetry--
holy memory, growing ever clear and (somehow) imperceptible,
the further she moves away.
--Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Just when I think the reading cannot get
any more relevant, her bleach blond dome ascends up the stairs
as I watch from behind the window, my morning
cup of coffee & book before me, her undomesticated, beautiful
bottle shape moving further away.
She is the one who modeled a warm bath
as I screamed out from the throws of a whirlpool.
She is the one I wrote poems about a year-ago this time:
call-and-response-sex, violin style.
Whispering, wanting, too quickly became nothing.
Now we throw monikers across the grass, embody an
amiable openness to one-an-other's(?) short-term,
on-the-surface needs. That's what friends do.
But I remember, in a sacramental way,
reaching deep and holding on, reaching out
and letting go; what it did to supplement
those mornings when she ironically summer-schooled me
on definite and indefinite articles; what it did
to complicate the adjudication process between
mommy mimesis and Butler's laboratory science;
how it effortlessly highlighted the commonality of water,
in both times and places, while softly suggesting
a difference in/of container. No brainer. Just retain(h)er.
From behind the window pain, I lift a breath
of unbounded, cathartic consecration for
the book before me, her body becoming me, the intensity yearning for poetry--
holy memory, growing ever clear and (somehow) imperceptible,
the further she moves away.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
McFague my MF!
"...staying the course on any justice issue appears possible only by being grounded in a power and love beyond oneself."
Duh.
Duh.
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