(TPJ 190)
by - Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
So the Republican Right managed to go through over 30,000 recorded
minutes of the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. They came up with a
few minutes of supposedly outrageous statements by him that they draped around
a few disembodied remarks by Sen. Barack Obama. They then proceeded to
string together one of the most watched non-pornographic cinema loops of all
time. (My, some Republican operatives do have a lot of time on their
hands, don't they?) How so "most-watched?" Because first, the
Fox "News" Channel, as one might expect, has been playing and will
play it endlessly, at all hours of the day and night. More recently, and
less expectedly, MSNBC, with even Keith Olbermann falling into the carefully
set total-distraction trap, has piled on in the piling on. During the
week of April 28, for example, although I must confess I certainly didn’t watch
every minute, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski seemed hardly to be able to
find time for anything else other than the weather in their daily three hour
“Morning Joe” romp.
Sen. Obama, for once a Democrat who does not spend all, or even most, of his
time on defense, originally used the occasion to make a speech on
race-relations and their history in this country. It was so magnificent, right
up there with the FDR "nothing to fear but fear itself" (how relevant
is that one now?) and "Four Freedoms" speeches, and JFK's religious
freedom speech, that even such personages as Reagan hagiographer and Wall
Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and education hard-rightist Abigail
Thernstrom acknowledged its greatness.
But of course F"N"C, O'RHannibaugh, etc. would have none
of that. After all, the Republicans have nothing substantive to run on in
November. Into the void, they would sooner or later have thrust the Nixonian
"Southern Strategy" (read the political use of racism) that has been
at the center of their electoral successes since 1968. The Wright excerpts have
just given them an excuse to thrust it sooner. Unfortunately, to a
certain extent the Clinton campaign picked up that ball and ran with it too:
“How could Sen. Obama have possibly, possibly mind you, stayed in that
congregation for all of those years?” Never mind, mind you, that that
congregation is one of a mainstream US, predominately white, branch of
Protestantism, The United Church of Christ, and Sen. Obama apparently did not
hear the offending sermons, they being one tiny part of the Reverend’s total
package of delivery.
But going beyond the guilt-by-association heaped upon Sen. Obama, the question
does arise for persons other than F"N"C and MSNBC fans and
fellow-travelers, just how outrageous were those statements, in the context of
American politics and history? Well, let's start with the "9/11 was God's
punishment" for all types of claimed U.S. outrages (a list which Rev.
Wright expanded upon at great length in his appearance on “Bill Moyers Journal”
[http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/transcript1.html]), from the
institution of slavery to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since
I don't accept that there is such a God, I reject such a claim out-of-hand. But
gee, I recall the Revs. Falwell and Robertson making similar claims, right at
the time too, except that their foci were the supposed national sins of
homosexuality, abortion, and the like.
As long as one assumes that there is a God that would (and could) wreak such
havoc as "punishment" for something or other (forgetting the question
of his/her responsibility, as an omnipotent being, for the original insult),
the disagreement with Rev. Wright there must be simply what the
"punishment" is for, not whether God did it, or not, as the case may
be. However, I don't recall anyone, then or now, laying at the feet of
the Georgites responsibility for the statements of Falwell/Robertson, and
asking the President to explain his acceptance of support from those two (un)worthies.
As for Rev. Wright's claim that he communicates directly with God, well Bush
has done that too, on more than one occasion (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/044).
OK, OK, so that's the God's vengeance thing, done by advocates on both sides of
the political aisle. But what about the drug thing, the claim that the U.S.
government has been at least partially responsible for the epidemic of drug use
amongst African-Americans? How outrageous is that? Consider the following, from
the PBS
"Frontline" series program of some years ago: (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/cia.html):
"A series of expose articles in the San Jose Mercury News by
reporter Gary Webb told tales of a drug triangle during the 1980s that linked
CIA officials in Central America, a San Francisco drug ring, and a Los Angeles
drug dealer. According to the stories, the CIA and its operatives used crack
cocaine -- sold via the Los Angeles African-American community -- to raise
millions to support the agency's clandestine operations in Central
America." Webb, who later a published a book on the subject, eventually
lost his job at the paper and then died under mysterious circumstances.
The "Frontline" feature made no claims of proof for Webb's
conclusions, but it made no claims of dis-proof either. Certainly, however,
such beliefs are held by certain segments of the African-American community.
And why not? The so-called "Drug War" itself is considered by many to
be a racist enterprise (Jonas, S., "Why the Drug War Will Never End,"
chap. 7 in Inciardi, J.A., The Drug Legalization Debate, 2nd ed., Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999). According to the annual Federal government
National Surveys on Drug Use, approximately 75% of illicit drug users are
white. It happens that approximately 75% of those imprisoned for
illicit-drug-related crimes are not (which contributes greatly to our dubious
number one world ranking for persons imprisoned).
Finally, consider the Rev.'s claims (or was it simply a reflection of the
belief held in certain segments of the African-American community?) that the
Human Immunodeficiency Virus was hatched in a government lab and then purposely
spread in the African-American community to produce the AIDS epidemic that
exists there, primarily among intravenous drug users.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support that claim (and as one of
the early developers of the modern understanding of how AIDS spreads I can
speak to this one with some personal authority [Jonas, S., "Commentary:
Dealing With the Drug Problem." Preventive Medicine, 23, 539-544, 1994]).
It is well-known that the epidemic first appeared in this country
among promiscuous gay men. In fact, the same Revs. Falwell and Robertson who
trumpeted 9/11 as a "punishment of God" were claiming in the 1980s
that the epidemic was God's punishment for the gay lifestyle. (That claim
was implicitly echoed by President Reagan and his Attorney General Ed Meese,
the still very active far-rightist, former chair of the Council on National
Policy, the far-Right's highly secretive national policy coordinating body.
I don’t recall anyone coming down with the vengeance of God on them for
saying what they said.) However, the spread occurred because such gay men
were subject to a wide variety of chronic infectious diseases that compromised
their immune systems and made them susceptible to developing AIDS if infected
with HIV.
Well, since the 1990s, AIDS has gradually spread among poor intravenous drugs
users, white and non-white, who do not have access to sterile routes of
injection and thus also contracted chronic infectious diseases. Republican drug
policies, too often followed by Democrats too, have made access to sterile
injection routes very difficult for such persons. There is no evidence that
this was a purposely hatched plot. However, the "Drug War,"
does treat the use of the "illicit" addictive drugs (but not the use
of the two major addictive drug killers, alcohol and nicotine, which together
kill over 50 times as many people annually as the "illicits" do) as
crimes, not illnesses. It has played an important role in the spread of
AIDS in the African-American community because by keeping “illicit” drug use
illegal, it promotes the use of infected-blood-contaminated needles, which
spread AIDS. And then, older African-Americans may remember the "Tuskegee
Project," in which older black men known to have syphilis (but they did
not) were left purposely untreated by the U.S. Public Health Service (sic)
"to see what untreated syphilis looked like."
So, not that Sen. Obama could directly use any of these arguments in dealing
with the "Rev. Wright" phenomenon, nor should he, how wrong was Rev.
Wright in mentioning such thoughts so obviously in passing? You be the
judge.
______
This column is based in part on “Dr. J.'s Commentary: So Was the
Reverend Wright Wrong?” published on BuzzFlash,
03/25/2008, http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/107.