I find Tikkun (and the Network of Spiritual Progressives) thoughtful and insightful - well worth contemplating. This is an email I've received and can, therefore, post in its entirety. It's a perspective I find valuable.
Note from Rabbi Michael Lerner:
I'm sending you Eli Zaretsky's valuable analysis of the current dispute about Wright and some of the deeper issues that are now coming to the surface in the Obama campaign. I think it is an important piece, although in some minor respects I disagree with it, or at least disagree with some of what was left out. So I would like to add the following points:
1. It's important to note that Wright defended Minister Farrakhan again yesterday at the National Press Club talk. Farrakhan's anti-white and anti-Semitic discourse has been challenged over and over again, so it seems quite incredible that an intelligent minister like Wright could not understand and fully internalize how dangerous such talk is, not only to the Obama campaign but to any hopes of reconciliation between Blacks and Whites in this society.
2. I don't think it is fair to blame Hillary for this wound. And I don't think Zaretsky is giving adequate attention to the strong misogyny which persists in our society. To suggest or imply that women have the psychology of the "ruling class" misses the degree to which patriarchy and oppression of women continues, even while that oppression gets misused by some upper class women to advance their narrow materialistic, power-oriented, or selfish agendas.
3. It still remains completely unfair to blame Obama for Wright, particularly after his strong statement on Tuesday, April 29th, rejecting and critiquing what Wright has said and insisting that neither he nor his campaign have anything in common with . Zaretsky talks about the circus clown that Wright has become-but that circus was created by the media. The media persistently refuses to inform the American public about the actual policy issues in the campaign, and instead insists that "the issues" concern the nuances of how each candidate is talking about the other, or nuances of their personal lives, or now, of former spiritual advisors.
So much as I think Zaretsky's points here are quite important, I think that the real culprit in all of this is the media and its systematic distortions of the political process in the U.S. We are in the midst of a war in which over a million have been killed and millions left homeless, many of them wounded or even scarred for the rest of their lives. We are facing the 21st century possibility of an end to human life on our planet either through nuclear war or most likely through environmental crisis. We have an economy that is collapsing around us. We are in a world in which twenty to thirty thousand people are dying of malnutrition-related diseases every day.. It is in this reality that we face major choices about who understands all this and who has the vision and the courage to provide us a path toward peace, environmental sanity, economic well-being, and a world in which kindness and generosity replaces violence and hatefulness. In the midst of all this, the media has switched the attention to the nut-case rantings of an otherwise quite intelligent preacher whose recent teachings are distorted and rejected by the candidate on whom they seek to pin responsibility.
This entire reality is so crazy and so destructive that we need to speak out in anger at the distortions the US media have fostered by focusing away from the discussions so badly needed in the U.S. today. And since this point would appear to be self-serving if made by Obama, then certainly it should be made by spiritual progressives and other rational people who haven't themselves gotten so caught up in the fun of mutual destruction that the media loves to foster as entertainment parading as news. Can't we just say "no" to this kind of stupid and quite evil media and refuse to let our attention be switched in this manipulated way?
Eli Zaretsky has written for Tikkun magazine and been on our editorial advisory board since we began in 1986, and his insights have always been useful in provoking important debates in our Tikkun/NSP communities. None of what he or i say here is to imply an endorsement of any of the candidates in this race-each of them has so far done their best to avoid making these kind of diversions the center of their messages, and the media has instead made it appear that all they are doing is talking about how bad each other is. It's not true of Obama, Clinton or McCain - but it is true of the media. We at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, as non-profit 501 c-3 organizations, are prohibited from endorsing any of the candidates, or any of the other recently suggested replacements for the current crop of Democratic Party candidates like Jimmy Carter or Al Gore. But we are not prohibited from seeing that the real source of the circus is the clowns who claim to be journalists and news analysts. -Rabbi Michael Lerner
Your comments are always welcome. RabbiLerner@tikkun.org
The Wright Eruption by Eli Zaretsky
It's all over for Obama unless he pulls off another miracle in the next few days. Hillary inflicted a wound, but it would never have been fatal without the Wright eruption. The two together can cost Obama Indiana, possibly North Carolina and thereby the nomination. Obama presented himself as a unifier, as the first person in a long time who affirmed universalism, who wanted to take the country back to its last true moment of self-knowledge, the civil rights movement.
That goal has fallen victim to the two great axes of the cultural revolution of the sixties, race and gender, the two great identity groups within the Democratic Party, the two great forms of the victim mentality, critically different as they are, the two forms of division that universalism must encompass. On the racial side, Wright is Obama's unconscious. Obama is the ego, Wright is the id; they cannot be separated. Obama is more serious than any white politician. Wright, by contrast, is a clown; a self-demeaning buffoon that every white in America, and every black, fears lays behind the mask of whiteness that middle class blacks routinely wear. He is every middle class black's nightmare, and secret love as well.
News commentators noted that at the National Press Club there was "inexplicable" laughter, for example when Wright was asked about patriotism. The laughter was the predominantly white audience egging Wright on (even though the audience was mostly Obama supporters). The audience recognized in Wright the classic Sambo/Jim Crow type-the entertainer who is being laughed at when he thinks he is being laughed with. Like all such ancient forms of minstrelsy, the Wright performance included letting the honkies in on some supposed secrets of black culture, like "the dozens," and the black man's sensitivity to having his mother attacked. Oh Lord! The opening scene of Ellison's Invisible Man takes place in the deep South:
two black youths forced to fight each other to exhaustion the amusement of the jeering white crowd. That is what we saw at the National Press Club: Wright basking in Obama's light, whose reflection Wright took as shined at him, letting America know what a fraud these Harvard "Negroes" are and that the real, down-home, honky-hating nigger was what America had to deal with. "
In yo' face honky; I want to fuck your mother!"
The background to Wright's performance was the non-stop whispering of the Clinton campaign: the repeated refrain, taking a million different forms,
you are not going to nominate a black man??!! Still, the Democratic Party would never have taken the nomination away from Obama because some rural Pennsylvanians whose great-grandfathers owned Obama's great-grandfather didn't like blacks, but they can and will take it away for the Wright eruption. Not only do the unconscious dynamics work toward this end, but the episode speaks to the core issue that Obama placed at the center of the primaries: experience vs. judgment. The man that Obama chose as his "spiritual advisor," the man who married him, the man who baptized his children, the pastor he listened to every Sunday turns out to be a classic black clown. Obama trusted a grandiose narcissist who believes that his own idiotic ravings are more important than the election of the first black President. He risked his campaign to defend Wright, saying he could no more renounce him than renounce his own grandmother. Wright then stabbed in the back. How can anyone now trust Obama to deal one-to-one with such figures as Ahmadinejad. Obama admittedly lacks experience, but this episode proves that he lacks judgment even more keenly.
Still, none of this would have been so important had Hillary not laid the ground work. Just as Wright represents an eruption from the deepest well-springs of black history, so the driving force behind Hillary's post-Iowa campaign has been the solidarity of women, the widespread conviction that Hillary was the victim of sexism and that someone entitled to a prize had been unfairly cut back, deprived, restricted, and by a man. While the Clintons are geniuses at simultaneously obfuscating and guiding the media, and while Hillary ran on a thousand issues, the underlying drive of her campaign - the emotional force, as well as the money - came from white women's sense of injustice. On that basis, everything Clinton did post-Iowa has been devoted to one thing: tearing Obama down, demeaning him, showing that what looked like a Barack Obama - strong, transcendent, fair - was actually a Jeremiah Wright - narcissistic, grandiose, mean-spirited. Until Monday, Obama withstood what was essentially an attempt at
racialized emasculation, but the Wright eruption ends that.
Like the Wright eruption against universalism and "assimilation,"
the prior Clinton eruption was based on a victim psychology, but otherwise the two were very different. The feminist psychology that underlay the Clinton campaign, a psychology whose main spokespeople were Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, was a psychology of entitlement, a rage at being simultaneously idealized and thwarted.
The Clinton campaign rode the wave of righteousness and anger, carefully titrated for maximum political effect. The Wright eruption came straight from the id, unmediated by any strategists. Wright comes out of the humiliation and self-abasement that accompanied four hundred years of slavery. His behavior is self-destructive in a way that the Clinton eruption was not. We see here, finally, how false all attempts since the sixties to equate analogize racism and sexism are. There are certainly similarities, for example, from the point of view of equality before the law, but
one is the psychology of an underclass, the other the psychology of a ruling class, and nothing in this campaign has changed that one iota.Eli Zaretsky
It's a perspective worth regarding. Whether I (or you?) agree or not.
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