UPDATED:  MAY 8, 2008 

“IS THE REVEREND WRIGHT WRONG?” 

So the Republican Right managed to go through over 30,000 recorded minutes of the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  They came up with a few minutes of supposedly outrageous statements by him that they draped around a few disembodied remarks by Sen. Barack Obama.  They then proceeded to string together one of the most watched non-pornographic cinema loops of all time.  (My, some Republican operatives do have a lot of time on their hands, don't they?) How so "most-watched?"  Because first, the Fox "News" Channel, as one might expect, has been playing and will play it endlessly, at all hours of the day and night.  More recently, and less expectedly, MSNBC, with even Keith Olbermann falling into the carefully set total-distraction trap, has piled on in the piling on.  During the week of April 28, for example, although I must confess I certainly didn’t watch every minute, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski seemed hardly to be able to find time for anything else other than the weather in their daily three hour “Morning Joe” romp.

Sen. Obama, for once a Democrat who does not spend all, or even most, of his time on defense, originally used the occasion to make a speech on race-relations and their history in this country. It was so magnificent, right up there with the FDR "nothing to fear but fear itself" (how relevant is that one now?) and "Four Freedoms" speeches, and JFK's religious freedom speech, that even such personages as Reagan hagiographer and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and education hard-rightist Abigail Thernstrom acknowledged its greatness.  

But of course F"N"C, O'RHannibaugh, etc. would have none of that. After all, the Republicans have nothing substantive to run on in November. Into the void, they would sooner or later have thrust the Nixonian "Southern Strategy" (read the political use of racism) that has been at the center of their electoral successes since 1968. The Wright excerpts have just given them an excuse to thrust it sooner.  Unfortunately, to a certain extent the Clinton campaign picked up that ball and ran with it too: “How could Sen. Obama have possibly, possibly mind you, stayed in that congregation for all of those years?”  Never mind, mind you, that that congregation is one of a mainstream US, predominately white, branch of Protestantism, The United Church of Christ, and Sen. Obama apparently did not hear the offending sermons, they being one tiny part of the Reverend’s total package of delivery.

But going beyond the guilt-by-association heaped upon Sen. Obama, the question does arise for persons other than F"N"C and MSNBC fans and fellow-travelers, just how outrageous were those statements, in the context of American politics and history? Well, let's start with the "9/11 was God's punishment" for all types of claimed U.S. outrages (a list which Rev. Wright expanded upon at great length in his appearance on “Bill Moyers Journal” [http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/transcript1.html]), from the institution of slavery to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since I don't accept that there is such a God, I reject such a claim out-of-hand. But gee, I recall the Revs. Falwell and Robertson making similar claims, right at the time too, except that their foci were the supposed national sins of homosexuality, abortion, and the like.

As long as one assumes that there is a God that would (and could) wreak such havoc as "punishment" for something or other (forgetting the question of his/her responsibility, as an omnipotent being, for the original insult), the disagreement with Rev. Wright there must be simply what the "punishment" is for, not whether God did it, or not, as the case may be.  However, I don't recall anyone, then or now, laying at the feet of the Georgites responsibility for the statements of Falwell/Robertson, and asking the President to explain his acceptance of support from those two (un)worthies. As for Rev. Wright's claim that he communicates directly with God, well Bush has done that too, on more than one occasion (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/044).

OK, OK, so that's the God's vengeance thing, done by advocates on both sides of the political aisle. But what about the drug thing, the claim that the U.S. government has been at least partially responsible for the epidemic of drug use amongst African-Americans? How outrageous is that? Consider the following, from the PBS "Frontline" series program of some years ago: (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/cia.html):  "A series of expose articles in the San Jose Mercury News by reporter Gary Webb told tales of a drug triangle during the 1980s that linked CIA officials in Central America, a San Francisco drug ring, and a Los Angeles drug dealer. According to the stories, the CIA and its operatives used crack cocaine -- sold via the Los Angeles African-American community -- to raise millions to support the agency's clandestine operations in Central America." Webb, who later a published a book on the subject, eventually lost his job at the paper and then died under mysterious circumstances.

The "Frontline" feature made no claims of proof for Webb's conclusions, but it made no claims of dis-proof either. Certainly, however, such beliefs are held by certain segments of the African-American community. And why not? The so-called "Drug War" itself is considered by many to be a racist enterprise (Jonas, S., "Why the Drug War Will Never End," chap. 7 in Inciardi, J.A., The Drug Legalization Debate, 2nd ed., Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999). According to the annual Federal government National Surveys on Drug Use, approximately 75% of illicit drug users are white. It happens that approximately 75% of those imprisoned for illicit-drug-related crimes are not (which contributes greatly to our dubious number one world ranking for persons imprisoned).

Finally, consider the Rev.'s claims (or was it simply a reflection of the belief held in certain segments of the African-American community?) that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus was hatched in a government lab and then purposely spread in the African-American community to produce the AIDS epidemic that exists there, primarily among intravenous drug users.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support that claim (and as one of the early developers of the modern understanding of how AIDS spreads I can speak to this one with some personal authority [Jonas, S., "Commentary: Dealing With the Drug Problem." Preventive Medicine, 23, 539-544, 1994]).

It is well-known that the epidemic first appeared in this country among promiscuous gay men. In fact, the same Revs. Falwell and Robertson who trumpeted 9/11 as a "punishment of God" were claiming in the 1980s that the epidemic was God's punishment for the gay lifestyle.  (That claim was implicitly echoed by President Reagan and his Attorney General Ed Meese, the still very active far-rightist, former chair of the Council on National Policy, the far-Right's highly secretive national policy coordinating body.  I don’t recall anyone coming down with the vengeance of God on them for saying what they said.)  However, the spread occurred because such gay men were subject to a wide variety of chronic infectious diseases that compromised their immune systems and made them susceptible to developing AIDS if infected with HIV.

Well, since the 1990s, AIDS has gradually spread among poor intravenous drugs users, white and non-white, who do not have access to sterile routes of injection and thus also contracted chronic infectious diseases. Republican drug policies, too often followed by Democrats too, have made access to sterile injection routes very difficult for such persons. There is no evidence that this was a purposely hatched plot.  However, the "Drug War," does treat the use of the "illicit" addictive drugs (but not the use of the two major addictive drug killers, alcohol and nicotine, which together kill over 50 times as many people annually as the "illicits" do) as crimes, not illnesses.  It has played an important role in the spread of AIDS in the African-American community because by keeping “illicit” drug use illegal, it promotes the use of infected-blood-contaminated needles, which spread AIDS. And then, older African-Americans may remember the "Tuskegee Project," in which older black men known to have syphilis (but they did not) were left purposely untreated by the U.S. Public Health Service (sic) "to see what untreated syphilis looked like."

So, not that Sen. Obama could directly use any of these arguments in dealing with the "Rev. Wright" phenomenon, nor should he, how wrong was Rev. Wright in mentioning such thoughts so obviously in passing? You be the judge. 

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This column is based in part on “Dr. J.'s Commentary: So Was the Reverend Wright Wrong?” published on BuzzFlash, 03/25/2008, http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/107.

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