Letters to the Editor
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THIS ARTICLE IS 100% on the MARK
Anyone who doesn't have the mental capacity to question themselves or their country is a true moron.
None of these flag waivers love their country. They have the same mindset as nazi's.
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@ Voltaire
Excellent points, Voltaire.
I'd only add that the curriculum you describe has a venerable history. It's called (as I'm sure you're aware) the liberal arts and it dates to the Roman republic.
They were called "liberal" because they were deemed the requisite education of a "liber," or "free man."
One who would be truly free, and fit to participate in self-government and the awesome responsibility of leadership should possess an education to facilitate such goals.
Critical thinking, empathy, an understanding of human nature in all its varieties, basic logic, the ability to contextualize one's own time and place, etc.
The ability to recognize that we are often faced with genuine dilemmas that resist facile resolutions is something that few possess, it seems to me.
But the real problem isn't that the populace is ill-educated--though it's a major problem--the real problem is that "journalists" themselves are just as ill-educated as those they would inform!
They have the sacred duty to act as teachers and instead they show themselves just as profoundly simple-minded as their audiences.
Imagine if physicians knew as little about medicine as their patients. I suspect people would recognize this as dangerous corruption.
What's sad is that we demand so little from those who ought to be able to discriminate the wheat from the chaffe when it comes productive discussion.
Sigh.
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Salon, you're trying too hard
You're supposed to at least pretend that you have some semblance of objectivity. But after a fistful of articles that all claim that (White) America is seriously deluded about the patriotic peace nuggets of Rev Wright it's pretty clear you're going to beat this dead horse with doctrinaire fervor, for just about forever.
The next time, or, better yet, find in the past, a candidate who openly embraced antiamericanism and won a national election, let me know. No one is saying that Obama and Wright aren't perfectly free, encouraged even, to hold whatever views they wish. They're saying that as a strategy that leads to the White House, "This is the first time I've been proud of my country" and "Kill Whitey" are not wise choices.
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Taliesan
You'd have to take that up with the Black and Colored South Africans themselves. They've made their peace with it. That angry Western Liberal Agitators have not, is more their own problem than anyone else's.
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Irrelevant
George Bushie's pastor is probably quite politically correct and uttering sweet niceties and look at the atrocities Bushie has perpetrated onto our formerly great nation.
Adolf Hitler's pastor was probably a good guy too.
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Good article Gary!
Great article in fact. I am so sick of this knee-jerk patriotism bull. It's so fake and phony. My good father has been a Bush supporter for many years, but he recently switched over and is supporting Obama. He called me up and said that he didn't get this Wright controversey - he also said that he believed, as you did, that Wright was largely correct in what he said! If my father thinks that, than so do many many people not on TV haranguing the guy (who is, by the way, a veteran of the military).
You indicate on the first page that the worst excesses are over, but are they? Remember how Obama took heat for not wearing a stupid flag pin?
Remember, that guy from the University of Colorado lost tenure because he said 9/11 was the chickens coming home to roost. Sure, it took the Colorado administration and right wing nuts, who are nuttier in Colorado than any state save California I think, years to drum up a good reason to fire him, but they did it. If the phony patriotism never died down, he would've kept his job.
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@ zootsuiter
No, I can't.
This is actually one of the things that pushed me into the Obama camp.
Originally I wasn't sure he was the real thing, that he was progressive enough, that he was substantive enough, etc. He seemed a decent fellow, but early on I didn't have any evidence he was a heavyweight.
It was the recognition, though, that he was quite literally putting his life on the line by running that made me give him the benefit of the doubt, that he really had something to contribute that he (and more importantly, his family) deemed worth the risk.
That kind of courage speaks volumes to me, and convinces me that Obama is not just interested in being president.
On the other hand, whatever you think of this quality, it's fairly transparent to me that Clinton really really wants to be president because she really really wants to be president. Not that she doesn't have a worthwhile (if middling) agenda, but she just seems driven more by ambition to me, which is troubling.
(That's a bit of a digression and I probably shouldn't have dragged Clinton into this, but that was my train of thought. The real point was that I agree with you, zootsuiter, thanks for your comment.)
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IT'S THE MEDIA, STUPID
Gary Kamiya’s post today, and Glenn Greenwald’s of yesterday both cite the media as “partially” to blame for the state of American politics today. I totally agree with Kamiya’s point about Wright’s sermons, that, taken in context, they’re not really that bad. The mainstream media is really to blame for the Wright fiasco: they took what had probably been running in the Right Wing Noise Machine blogosphere for a couple of weeks, and turned it into an incessant running of the same two snippets of two sermons, over and over and over.
I think the media is totally to blame for the state of American politics and political discourse today. What had been a thoughtful and insightful media, back in the days of the late 1950s and 1960s, has turned into the instant mush that now passes for media and news reporting. We never have really dealt with the change of the media from newsprint to television. The economics of news departments has gone from a public-service oriented enterprise, to a profit-is-king enterprise, with the predictable result that only sensational news gets published or televised.
I don’t have an answer for this, other than to support Barack Obama as a presidential candidate, in hopes that his “different” style will survive the RWNM onslaught of the last couple of weeks.