I’m on a poetry listserve where some members object to posts having to do with politics. Many of us think that trying to separate poetry from politics is like trying to separate the yolk from the egg white with a fork without breaking the yolk. But eventually we reached a truce where those who wanted to post political messages would put the letters POL in the subject line so others could delete those messages unread.
POL
Certain members of my household (not Maisie) were jokily contemplating a Jeremiah Wright write-in vote, until this weekend. Now I just think Wright’s a jerk.
I’m not mad at him for what he says. What’s not pretty good politics is mere dumbass conspiracy stuff, who cares? Wright gets criticized as an extremist and for crazy paranoid theories, but nobody criticizes the Bush administration for being riddled with people who believe in the Rapture.
And I’m not mad at him for how he says it. Style’s insignificant. Actions are significant.
Wright’s a jerk for his very public airing of his opinions, including his opinions of Obama, right at this time. He seems to me like a father trying to undermine his son. I don’t care whether the father is ideologically right or wrong; if your son is trying to do something he believes in, even if you don’t believe in it, you don’t ruin it for him. You don’t intentionally cast your shadow into his spotlight.
Wright has a lot to answer for if McCain wins the election.
Hillary Clinton has far more to answer for if McCain wins the election.
Per your apology about not mixing politics and poetry: you might be interested in the Ross Gay/Ken Prufer exchange in the letters section of the new APR. They do both comment on and resist a true intertwining of politics and poetry. I almost missed my metro stop on my way to work this morning.
At first, I thought all of the above (Daisy’s comments) about Jeremiah Wright. But
then I thought maybe Jeremiah is taking one for the *team* in the African-American
slave tradition of Br’er Rabbit.
Since Obama initially refused to denounce Wright, and essentially left the fire burning,
maybe Wright decided to put on a show (and lawd knows he did) to force Obama into an
outright (ain’t never sitting in the front pew again) denouncement, thereby, invalidating
the slanderous ad campaign the republicans have planned for Obama in North Carolina
and the national campaign, if he’s able to wrestle the nomination away from Hillary,
using Wright as the whip to beat Obama with.
This trickster move, if it is one, also serves to hush Hillary on the subject. Jeremiah Wright
may turn out to be a modern day Br’er Rabbit. Yep, that’s how I’m going to look at it.
African proverb: “It’s trouble that makes the monkey chew on hot peppers.”
Wright has a lot to answer for? He’s a black man who refuses to be silenced by whites–those who have the privilege of dissenting without being called angry or un-American. I, like many Obama supporters, understand and respect Wright’s decision to have his say no matter how uncomfortably dangerous or politically unpalatable it may be.
If McCain wins, maybe all those who fear that a man like Obama could associate with a “jerk” like Wright will begin to fear what black people have always seen as most frightening in America: white arrogance.
Wright, too, is America…and America gets what it deserves.
“Refusing to be silenced by whites” isn’t the same as “holding a press conference & saying certifiably nutty things” — &, I’m sorry, I missed the part where the “whites” are conspiring to keep Wright quiet (quite a few of those “whites” are gleefully abetting his every senile public utterance).
The question is hardly whether Wright has a right to speak: it’s whether he’s stupid enough not to realize how much damage he’s doing to Obama. There are discrete problems here: one, it’s absurd that Obama’s being held responsible for what his idiot pastor says — Obama clearly doesn’t believe the nonsense that comes out of Wright’s mouth every time he opens it; two, the political reality is, alas, that Obama’s image is tarnished by Wright’s speeches, & Wright should be savvy enough to realize that — if he is that savvy, the only possible conclusion is that Wright doesn’t care whether Obama wins the nomination.
That said — & recognizing, again, that, like Obama’s innocuous remarks on rural voters & his passing association with the liberal academic Bill Ayers, what his pastor says is wholly unrelated to his qualifications as presidential nominee — to suggest that the U.S. government created AIDS to destroy the black community is not “uncomfortably dangerous or politically unpalatable.” It’s lunatic bullshit.