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Rod at
Dos Vidas. Photo by Thomas Kist from the 2006 Arjan Vlakveld film “Rod
McKuen: A Man Alone” for Netherlands Public Television. Photo ©2006,
2007 by Stanyan Audio Video Archives. All Rights Reserved.
A Thought for Today
All of us have an appointment with death;
I intend to be fashionably late for mine.
TO BEGIN WITH
As most of you know I love good writing. Maybe that’s because there
currently seems to be so little of it. In the next days and weeks I’ll
be calling your attention to, among others, recent works by Dan Neil of
the Los Angeles Times and various articles by Bruce Bellingham, our
editor at large. Today I’ve decided to feature an op-ed column by Frank
Rich that appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times.
WORTHREADING
THE ALL-WHITE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
By FRANK RICH
Published in The New York Times May 4, 2008
BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go
directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be
recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.
Photo by Fred R. Conrad
What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee,
lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes
at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand
raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee
explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s
because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his
view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the
Crusades to the Holocaust.
Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On
Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious
conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.
Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew
anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video —
far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before
the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple
religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity
Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a
laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.
Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally
has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not
blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that
God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins,
particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that
Katrina came.”
Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He
broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs,
“Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio
interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr.
McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it
as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.
Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any
more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give
Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin
case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20
years at Mr. Hagee’s church.
That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive
recipient of this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr.
McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to
drum up a pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings
may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell
us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled
up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce
him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the
urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told
George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any
“anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his
endorsement.”
I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr.
Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in
full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a
transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on
television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom
just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.
Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant
prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens
“coming home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised
exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks
on America’s abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr.
Wright blamed the attacks on America’s foreign policy.) Had that video
re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have
been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of
intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his
Liberty University in 2006.
None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright
right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long
relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is
also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and
political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that
verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double
standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their
most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely
they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same
yardstick.
When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat
Robertson for an endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson’s
greatest past insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, “The
New World Order,” which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy
theories about “European bankers” (who just happened to be named
Warburg, Schiff and Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in.
Nor was Mr. Giuliani ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies
on the payroll at Giuliani Partners included a priest barred from the
ministry by his Long Island diocese in 2002 following allegations of
sexual abuse. Much as Mr. Wright officiated at the Obamas’ wedding, so
this priest officiated at (one of) Mr. Giuliani’s. Did you even hear
about it?
There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at
play in too much of the news media and political establihment, but there
is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The
Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial
stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics
is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of
Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247
senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees
like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark
Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than
blacks
A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is
quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits
on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial
skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the
racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political
culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable
given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in
polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of
“political correctness” or “reverse racism.”
An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s
the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the
Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr.
McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious
smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.
This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e.,
non-race-baiting) campaign and has gone so far as to criticize
(ineffectually) North Carolina’s Republican Party for running a
Wright-demonizing ad in that state’s current primary. Mr. McCain has
been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his tour of “forgotten”
America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he promised that “never
again” would a federal recovery effort be botched on so grand a scale.
This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney’s
dreams of his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Up to a point. Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is
graded on a curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time
when the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President
Bush is an even greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr.
Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans visit is more about the
self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the
recalibration of policy.
Mr. McCain took his party’s stingier line on Katrina aid and twice
opposed an independent commission to investigate the failed government
response. Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he
called for “a conversation” about whether anyone should “rebuild it,
tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” Whatever, whenever, never mind.
For all this primary season’s obsession with the single (and declining)
demographic of white working-class men in Rust Belt states, America is
changing rapidly across all racial, generational and ethnic lines. The
Census Bureau announced last week that half the country’s population
growth since 2000 is due to Hispanics, another group understandably
alienated from the G.O.P.
Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a
white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any
coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by
Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid
conversation on race has yet to begin.
©Copyright 2008 by Frank Rich & The New York Times. All Rights Reserved
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