The most interesting thing to me was that I did not find Wright's comments at all offensive. Even the aids thing is understandable if you factor in the Tuskegee experiments as background. Ah well, as I found out long ago when I went to bed having voted for Carter and thinking "no way that lunatic Reagan gets the majority of votes", and woke up the next day to a surprise, I am not exactly in the mainstream.

by Christopher Hayes in the Nation:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/hayes

Here is an excerpt:

Ultimately, though, this controversy, like so many in American life, is about race. It's telling that the issue of Wright's views have percolated among the right-wing fringes for months, but it was only with the discovery of a video, and the images and sounds of an angry black man decrying racial oppression in the cadences of the black church that the media staged a collective freakout. The problem politically for Obama is that his campaign is built on the promise of racial transcendence and healing old wounds, and here's his pastor picking at the scabs. Or, as a friend of mine put it, it turns out America's black friend has a black friend.

But it is only through the most debased and perverse logic of racial guilt by association, whereby every black politician has to denounce Louis Farrakhan, that the the political views of a candidate's spiritual mentor should have any truck whatsoever. If Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency is derailed by a few intemperate remarks that his retiring pastor gave to a church which did not even contain the senator in its pews, it leads one to think that Wright's skepticism about America's treatment of black Americans and a black presidential candidate is wholly justified. And if, of all things, it is his pastor's heated denunciation of American injustice that undoes the candidacy of an African American with a legitimate chance at the White House, any conscientious observer could be forgiven for thinking: God damn America indeed.

for what its worth, I think the war on drugs is insane too. I don't mind being reminded of that. And you have said many other things here I have read with interest. Keep it up.

to meet all you people in a big room. It would be fascinating: just think of the cast of characters. We could have bebop the celery man as the king of carnival.

Given the history of blacks in america (rayon fog gave us a small summary in his post earlier:

US history has in fact been hateful toward Black Americans and to do something as simple as recall American history toward Black Americans IS inflammatory at least.

___Kidnapping/Purchasing

___The Middle Passage

___Slavery

___Racism (came after slavery to justify the continuation of slavery out of Africa when whites were no longer slaved --a distinct and recognizable "skin color" became the target)

___Constitutional Definition of "less than human"

___Religious Isolation

___Jim Crow/Apartheid

___Grandfather Clause

___Educational Isolation

___Economic Isolation

___Paramour Rights

___Constitutional Acknowledgement of the "inherently inequitable" Black American experience

___etc.

does it not seem to you that one could be driven to speak of the us of kkk? In a moment of righteous indignation? I myself can remember the whites only water fountains and black people being forced to sit on the back of the bus (I grew up in New Orleans fifty some odd years ago). And I have met people that say and do such hateful things even today that it makes me want to weep. So that a man in a sermon might be driven to denounce such things in the strongest language possible? There's some pretty harsh stuff in the bible too denouncing injustice. I think if you look at Wright's whole sermon it is clear that he is excoriating the unjust power structure that has so twisted our American life. Respectfully, I don't understand why you can't see that.

for the link to the frog jesus. Always did like those amphibians.

God it that than which none greater can be conceived (or TTWNGCBC, for short), and as I can conceive of nothing greater than a frog for a messiah (thus short circuiting all human racial claims for the esteemed godling), I think I will claim Jesus to be in fact green.

If it is God, then it is TTWNGCBC.

If it is TTWNGCBC, then it is frog.

Therefore, if it is God, then God is a frog.

And:

If God is a frog, then God's son is a frog.

If God's son is a frog, the he is green.

Therefore, if God is a frog, then God's son is green.

And why, you ask, is a FROG TTWNGCBC? Just go look at one, and you will see.

Now we can all stop arguing.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=POTARsZ00AQ

is so damn complex, and we have such limits on our knowledge; and so many do not seem to want to face this honestly. We want the categories that will identify things for us so we can feel in control. And oh, we are not. Always the simple answers are given or demanded, and it is the long task to show people over and over again that reality is forever beyond our total mastery and that we must be patient with others and suspicious of ourselves and always ready to admit our errors. The long slow march into rationality in its deepest and fullest sense is so hard and tiring. I sense that someone like Obama, from the evidence of what he has written and said and lived, might be a partner in that enterprise. Reading his speech today slowly and carefully, I think I find evidence of a mind at work in the best sense of the word (which always involves an awareness of limits). I am suspiciously hopeful and carefully full of wonder.