Obama’s very first service at Wright’s church was … controversial
By Mickey Kaus
On his radio show yesterday, Hugh Hewitt played excerpts of Barack Obama reading from his autobiography, Dreams of My http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3407 by Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
[The pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.
“The painting depicts a harpist,” Reverend Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountaintop. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.
It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3838‘ greed runs a world in need, aprtheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world! On which hope sits.”
And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpesville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. … Sounds … controversial! Keep in mind: a) Obama isn’t disapproving of this sermon. In the book he weeps at the end of it; b) Demonstrating that at least some blaming of “white greed” for the world’s sins–which Obama now criticizes– isn’t an exceptional topic for Rev. Wright in a few wacky sermons (“the five dumbest things”) that Obama may or may not have missed. It’s at the quotidian core of the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3951 philosophy that Obama says drew him to the church; c) Indeed, in his big March 18th race speech Obama reads the passage from his book that describes his emotional reaction to this very sermon (his “first service at Trinity”)–how it made “the story of a people” seem “black and more than black.” d) This is also the sermon that gave Obama the title of his next book, The Audacity of Hope. e) The “profound mistake” of this sermon is not that Wright “spoke as if our society was static”–Obama’s analysis on Feb. 18th. The problem is that “white folks’ greed” is not the main cause of a “world in need.”
I’m not saying voters shouldn’t cut Obama a lot of slack on Wright’s anti-white fulminations. But the Senator should have spoken up publicly against the semi-paranoid “white greed” explanation a long time ago, no? And he could show a little humility. Again, this wasn’t the occasion for him to be lecturing everyone else. …
http://www.slate.com/id/2187358/