Monroe Anderson

Right-wing mouths words of mass deception

 

    I have seen the enemy and heard it too. It's the right-wing smear and fear echo machine. Its politics of personal destruction are just getting started. You saw it in North Carolina and Mississippi too. You heard it right out of President Bush's mouth last week in Israel and at home as well with John McCain  "appeasement" echo. Here's my latest ebonyjet.com post.

Swiftboating the Presidency
The rabid right made mincemeat out of John Kerry’s war record. Expect more of the same dirty tricks during this election campaign.
05/19/2008
By Monroe Anderson

The number 527 may not mean much to you, but this should: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They were the rightwing group that, along with the help of the rest of the Republican echo chamber, turned John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War hero, into something akin to a national disgrace. It didn’t matter that Kerry was awarded two purple hearts and that his opponent, George W. Bush, was a frat boy who used his daddy’s political connections to get a safe and sound assignment in the National Guard and Vice President John Cheney was a draft dodger—the swift boaters were successful in turning a Big Lie into their Grand Truth.

Listen up and watch out. The Republican Party and its right-wing smear machine is about to play the dirty dozens on Barack Obama.

It has no choice. The Republican brand is ruined.  The party’s presumptive presidential nominee, John McCain, is fine for a stroll down memory lane but will be hard pressed to run a fair race on Bush’s shattered and tattered eight-year record. So the radical right will do what it does during good times and bad: A sleight of hand trick through word of mouth.

The GOP will attempt to divert us from the real issues that have real consequences by cracking on Obama, on matters that mean nothing, with charges that aren’t true.

It’s going to talk about his white momma. It’s going to rant about his former minister. It’s going to steadily signify that he’s either a Muslim or a cult Christian but definitely not a true red-blooded American.

It’s going to make way too much out of far too little. The right-wing echo chamber will label Barack as too liberal, too green, too lightweight, too lucky, too black, too white, too intelligent, too aloof, too soft, too young, too natty, too cool, too elite, too rock star and too good to be true. It’s all going to be too ugly for words.

The Bush legacy leaves the Republicans with one foot over a cliff and the other on an oil slick. America’s 43rd president, who will go down in history as the worst ever, has popularity ratings that reflect his two-term performance. We’re in a recession and world opinion of our nation is in a free fall.  Many Americans now find themselves forced to choose between gasoline and groceries. Many more want the Iraqi occupation, which has lasted longer than World War II, to end.

Painfully aware that this is not their year and that they are poised to lose the presidency and suffer greater loses on Capitol Hill, Republicans are scrounging around in their bag of dirty tricks, out to win ugly. Blogs, such as Rightwing Nuthouse, Ankle Biting Pundits and Red State, are furiously posting their conservative blather while the usual perpetrators, Fox Cable News and radical rightwing radio, are broadcasting ideological talking points for the party faithful.

Twenty years ago, when George H.W. Bush was running to become president number 41, the Republicans destroyed the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer, Michael Dukakis, with the now infamous Willie Horton political ad. A convicted murderer who had been released on a 48-hour furlough from a Massachusetts prison while Dukakis was governor, Horton went on to pistol-whip and cut up Clifford Barnes. When Barnes' financee later arrived at his Maryland home, the escaped prisoner raped her twice.  His black face was plastered all over the attack ad sympathetic to daddy Bush, making him the poster child for why America needed a Republican returning to the White House.

Of course, the Horton ad was before talk radio, Cyberspace or the 24/7 news cycle. It was before YouTube or the 527 organizations.

This presidential election promises some sort of sequel. One of the early indicators was the Rev. Wright attack ad aired during the North Carolina primary. Floyd Brown, the creator of the Horton attack ad, also created the one that ran in North Carolina, featuring Wright’s “God damn America” soundbite. Brown has also formed a 527 organization called Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America, to slime Obama any way it can.

There’s also the truth-challenged video entitled “A Viral Portrait of Barack Hussein Obama” now creeping through cyberspace.

“Let’s connect the dots. With the assistance of Dr. Cone, Rev. Wright and other divisive figures Barack Obama has been discipled in a racist, Marxist, quasi-Christian, anti-Semitic ideology for over 20 years,” says creator/narrator Lome Baxter in the video, as he begins his summation of why America shouldn’t even consider Obama as its leader.“ After that much indoctrination, is it surprising that he won’t wear an American flag?  Is it surprising that he won’t put his hand over his heart during the national anthem? Is it surprising that his wife has never been proud of America until it looked like her husband had a shot at beating Hillary?”

Hillary has been beaten. The radical right blog, stophernow.com has morphed into stophimnow.com. It’s Barack’s turn to take the incoming sludge slung by the slanderous radical right.

Remember to warn yo’ momma to hold her nose and cover her eyes.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Check out his blog at monroeanderson.typepad.com

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not on Hardball with right-wing talk show host Kevin James

   

    I have a friend who is white, very rich and obscenely conservative. Once or twice a year we meet for a holiday dinner at his sister’s house where he and I are an appreciable portion of the entertainment when our political debate inevitably kicks off.                 Although most of the dinner guests are liberal, in his mind, he almost always wins because his approach is to shout—fast and furious--right-wing platitudes.
    My friend is not uninformed, just doctrinaire. But his approach to discussing all things political are straight from the right's play book: Logic or real facts be damned. I say real facts because this generation’s crop of conservatives navigates within an arena of gerrymandered facts that they spit out mindlessly.
    One of the gears in the right-wing echo machine is “experts” that research, not to discover truth, but to find facts that support a predictably backwards world view.  One of those conservative experts, Kevin James, was exposed for the ignoramus he actually is by Chris Matthews on Hardball.  James is a talk show host on KRLA-AM, “Intelligent, Conservative Talk Radio.”  If James is representative of his Los Angeles station's stable of gab jocks, then KRLA's talk is about as intelligent as Fox Cable’s news is “fair and balanced.”
    James was screaming on Hardball in support of President Bush’s disingenuous, poorly disguised political charge that Barack Obama is an appeaser for the “evil-doers.” Attempting to elevate the debate above typical conservative code-wording and name-calling, Matthews asked James what did Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Britain in the 1930s do. “It’s appeasement,” James said, parroting Bush’s words.
    Matthews repeatedly tries to get the blow hard James to provide some historical facts behind his right-wing jingoism. The radio talk show host couldn’t do it. As it turns out, James had no clue that Chamberlain had signed the Munich Agreement, conceding a portion of Czechoslovakia to Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime. He had no clue as to what appeasement meant in the historical context President Bush was misusing it in. Matthews had to turn to Mark Green of Air America for some historical perspective.
    And to think James gets paid to pollute the airways with his ignorance.
    Here’s the Hardball exchange. You’ll find it amusing if you’re progressive, depressing if you’re not.

Grand nanny governance: The CTA offs GTA

    Chicago may be the nanny-government capitol of the nation. Its mayor, Richard M. Daley, has pledged to have high-tech surveillance cameras on every corner in the city within the next eight years. Its 50-member city council passed legislation forbidding restaurants to sell foie gras because a majority of its aldermen doesn’t like the way ducks are force-fed to fatten up their livers.
    The latest nanny-notion the Windy City has acted on is gaming. I’m not referring to the gaming Republican spin-meister Frank Luntz came up with when he pimped the word to change the image of Las Vegas gambling. No, I’m talking about computer and Internet gaming.
    As it turns out, the Chicago Transit Authority recently removed a series of Grand Theft Auto IV ads from the city’s bus shelters. The city didn’t want to be promoting a game that features simulated sex, car theft and drive-by shootings—especially after a news report by the local Fox station speculated that an ugly rash of violence in Chicago maybe somehow related to the game’s release—or not.

    " ...the CTA can do what they want, the game has enough publicity without the CTA ads. I've seen real violence, sexuality and drug use while riding the CTA. Maybe they shouldn't worry about protecting their riders from virtual violence and worry more about reality.”

    Grand Theft Auto IV may be good, but I can’t imagine it’s that good. I just can’t imagine a video game being so compelling that it would drive hordes of young people away from their computers and out on the streets to car jack and shoot up the toddling town.
    But first, a disclaimer: I’ve never played the game. In fact, I don’t play computer games at all because I’m fearful that I’ll become addicted to them and waste all my time with the Sims instead of investing it in real life. So who am I to say what evil lurks in computer games.
    Fortunately for me, I have an expert in the family. My 24-year-old son, Scott Anderson, is a game developer. Before he moved to Arizona last year to work on “Stargate Worlds,” an upcoming massively multiplayer online role playing game, he was a devoted and regular CTA customer. And, if memory serves me right, the Grand Theft Auto series is one of his favs.
    Who better to call on than someone who is well acquainted with both the CTA and the GTA? I emailed doubly knowledgeable son to ask what he thought.
    Scott, who is working overtime to help Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment finish the game by its year’s-end deadline, didn’t waste a lot of words sharing his opinion on the wisdom of the CTA offing the GTA IV ads from its bus shelters.
    “It's an odd choice, but the CTA can do what they want, the game has enough publicity without the CTA ads. I've seen real violence, sexuality and drug use while riding the CTA,” Scott wrote back about the game which made $310 million in its first week of release. “Maybe they shouldn't worry about protecting their riders from virtual violence and worry more about reality.”
    In the meantime, Take-Two Interactive, the creators of GTA 4, is suing the Chicago Transit Authority for violating a $300,000 deal they’d struck with the city.
    The Chicago mob is alive and well and living in the suburbs. Maybe, instead of spending a lot time in the court, Take-Two Interactive ought to have their people have a sit-down with a couple of real-life hit men.
    After kneecapping a Chicago pol or two, they might be able to get the city leaders to understand the difference between what’s pretend and what’s the real deal.

Mother's Day is everyday

    My mother, Norma Jean Anderson, was still alive when I wrote this Mother’s Day piece about her three years ago. At the time, I was editor of the briefly resurrected Savoy Magazine and also wrote a column, "Monroe’s Doctrine," for each issue.  This ran in the April/May 2005 issue.

MOTHER’S DAY MEMORIES
BY MONROE ANDERSON

    The first time I gave my mother one of those humorous Mother’s Day cards, I quickly got the message: Mother’s Day is not funny. She quietly laid the card aside, smelled the flowers I’d given her and thanked me for the pretty floral house robe she’d tried on and was admiring as she looked in the mirror.
    From that Mother’s Day on, I made it a practice of giving her one of those sweet and sentiment Hallmark cards. After opening it, she’d beam, “That’s so beautiful.” Then she’d show off the card and read the worlds aloud for everyone in the family.
    This past Mother’s Day was not the same. For my mother, it was just another day. Her days all slip one into the next with her not knowing if it’s Sunday or Wednesday or Friday. She’s not even sure if it is spring or fall.

MY MOTHER HAS ALZHEIMER’S
    Not that she is alone. By all accounts being reported in the media, so does Rosa Parks. Alzheimer’s has become a silent epidemic in the black community. A study released earlier this year estimates that the prevalence of the disease rangers from 14 percent to almost 100 percent higher among blacks than whites.
    For my mother, it’s hereditary. As a preschooler, I remember watching my grandmother caring for her “senile” mother, Nana, who was 89. A generation later, I watched my mother care for my “senile” grandmother, Elizabeth, who died at 96. For my mother, my sister Liz has been doing the caretaking.
    My mother’s Alzheimer’s has progressed to the point where the past and the present easily entangle. She sometimes confuses me with two other men who she’s loved and are important in her life. Sometimes I’m her brother, Scott, who’s been dead for more than a decade. Sometimes I’m my father, Monroe, who has been dead for nearly a quarter of a century. In those cases, I’m called on to remember an incident that occurred or relatives who died before I was born.
    When I visit with her, we still talk as we always have. But these days our talks no longer connect. A couple of months ago, she proudly told me, “I’m going to give the valedictorian speech at my high school graduation tomorrow.”
    Several of her teachers complimented her, she matter-of-factly reported, for being such a good student. I nodded in agreement, fully knowing that Norma Jean Anderson graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1943—six months after she secretly eloped and married my father, Monroe.
    Before I could say anything she was back in the moment. Back to being the loving, caring mother whose memory I cherish. She wanted to know if I was hungry. Should she cook something for me to eat?
    I told her I was fine as we sat in the cafeteria of the nursing home. She was eating mystery meant with mashed potatoes. It may have been nutritious but it was definitely not appetizing.
    There was a time when she knew that the nursing home was not the place she wanted to be. She begged my sister and me to never send her to one. We tried to honor her wishes. But after years of watching in horror as our mother descended into the valley of stripped memory and dense dementia, we could no longer keep her in the home she’d raised us in. She had begun to wander out of the house into the streets looking for great-grandchildren she imagined were crying out for help.
    So my sister put our mother in the same nursing home, in the same Alzheimer’s ward, where our mother’s sister was housed.
    I periodically tell myself that it may be a good thing that my mother’s memory is failing. There is so much tragedy that she’d rather not remember.
    Her father died when she was just 11 years old. Six of her eight brothers and sisters died, almost all from tuberculosis, before she was grown. After my father died, at age 61, from a sudden heart attack, she went into a depression. Then her mother died, followed shortly afterwards with the death of her only surviving brother. Her youngest child, my brother, was beaten senseless. After three months in a coma, he died at age 39. I watched as each of these losses took their toll on her.
    I think about Mother’s Days of many years past. When my father, brother and grandmother were all there at the dining room table, trying to get her to relax and let others serve her on her day. She had on interest in going out to some fancy restaurant to celebrate her day. Of course, she wouldn’t think of it. She was just happy to have all of us in her life and to be in all of our lives.
    I look back on those days with sweet memories and bitter regrets. There was so much I took for granted back then. There were so many things I should have said that I didn’t. And now, as I try to say those things to my mother, she usually does not hear nor understand them.
    So I come away from each visit depressed at seeing her in her illness and comforted in the realization that, for me, thanks to my loving memories, every day is Mother’s Day.

Right-wing smear machine revving up to see how low it can go

 

    Now that Hillary Clinton has become a dead woman walking, the radical right is revving up its fear and smear machine for double duty in targeting Barack Obama.
    One of its early volleys was the Rev. Wright attack ad during the North Carolina primary. Another one that’s now being blasted through the creepiest corners of the far right reaches of cyberspace is a truth-challenged video entitled “A Viral Portrait of Barack Hussein Obama.”
    This little missile of misinformation is a sickly mix of swift-boat-and-Willie Horton-style bad, old-fashioned Republican mudslinging.
    “Let’s connect the dots. With the assistance of Dr. Cone, Rev. Wright and other divisive figures Barack Obama has been discipled in a racist, Marxist, quasi-Christian, anti-Semitic ideology for over 20 years,” says creator/narrator Lome Baxter as he begins his summation of why America shouldn’t even consider Obama as its leader. “After that much indoctrination, is it surprising that he won’t wear an American flag?  Is it surprising that he won’t put his hand over his heart during the national anthem? Is it surprising that his wife has never been proud of America until it looked like her husband had a shot at beating Hillary?”
    This is a just a sneak preview.  Compared to what's coming, the Bhillary tactics were mere spit balls.  So put on your hip boots, raincoats and caps and protective eye-gear folks because not only will stuff happen, it’s about to hit the fan.

    Warning: do not watch Baxter's video on a full stomach--unless you are bulimic.

 

Can Obama disprove his guilt by association?

    Barack Obama burst on the national scene four years ago during the Democratic National Convention. His personal history and vision on race was fresh and appealing to millions in America.
    That’s pretty much where he’s been and what he’s represented until six weeks or so ago when viral videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright themselves burst on the national scene. Obama responded to the “shocking, stunning” words of his former pastor by giving one of the most profound speeches ever given on race in America. Even most of the detractors of the Democratic Party frontrunner praised the brilliance of his speech but then….they argued, he needed to do more.
    Obama needed to not only denounce what the man said, he needed to denounce the man. A few days ago, after Rev. Wright came out of his self-imposed public exile and elaborated on his “stunning and shocking” words, Obama did just that.
    Well, as it turns out, that’s still not enough for Obama’s detractors. They want him to explain why he stayed in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ for so long. Why Rev. Wright remained his pastor for so long. In effect, they want him to prove the unneccesary.
    When my post, Wright Here, Wright Now, went up on the ebonyjet.com website, there were plenty of comments. One from a reader who identified himself as Andy Shep—after several exchanges between him and me—concludes, “Mainstream America is not going to embrace the anger that Wright has made visible. If they feel that in his heart Obama resents them, or would appoint people to higher office who resent them, they will not vote for him.”
    Our ebonyjet back and forth is below.  But first, I’d like to present a Vimeo video entitled, White People, Get Over Yourselves. In the viral video, Dan Charnas, a young white man, says, “In America, black people have always endured white peoples’ negative, prejudiced opinions about them.”
    Charnas later says, “America is run by an undereducated, white majority. Black people have just had to deal with it.”
    Check out the video, and then read the prevailing mainstream America opinion as it appeared on ebonyjet.com.

White People, Get Over Yourselves from Dantrification on Vimeo.

Andy Shep says:
anyone who believes that AIDS was invented by the government to kill black men hates people who look like me. It is not in my best interests to vote for someone who hates me. There are those of you who know better and have stayed silent, because of that men like Wright don't even know how inflammatory they are. You can believe all white men to be racists and murderers and you can become president, I don't think you can do both. Obama has not denounced Wright enough.
05.01.08 at 10:20 PM

Monroe Anderson says:
AndyShep: The bar seems to keep moving on Obama's denunciation of Rev. Wright. What would be enough? Have you any suggestions? Or, would God Damn Rev. Wright satisfy you?
05.02.08 at 3:03 PM

Any Shep says:
Obama's problem is the timing of his comments distancing himself from Wright seem to coincide with bad polling data. White people see it as a political move. An eloquent speech that addressed what Wright said, why Wright may have said it, and why he was wrong could turn the negative into a positive. There is White resentment over Black anger if he addresses it he can win by a landslide. Many still believe he privately agrees with Wright, including Wright, and he's known him for 20 years.
05.02.08 at 7:43 PM

Monroe Anderson says:
Any Shep, let me see if I understand this correctly. Whites resent it that blacks are angry because, after all these years, there is still racial discrimination, economic inequity and white privilege in America?
05.02.08 at 8:27 PM

Andy Shep says:
Wright is just a product of anger, and because of his anger he can't move forward and won't let anyone else move forward either. Wright was not angry alone. Mainstream America is not going to embrace the anger that Wright has made visible. If they feel that in his heart Obama resents them, or would appoint people to higher office who resent them, they will not vote for him. You can live in the problem or live in the solution.

    I invite you to comment on what Dan Charnas, Andy Shep or I had to say right here on this blog or comment on the ebonyjet.website on my exchange with Shep.

Obama may become America's seventh black president

 


        Now that Bill Clinton has forever demolished the curious notion that he was the first black president, it may be that there actually were six black commander-in-chiefs before him.
    Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower may have all had black ancestors, according to a report in the North Star News.
    The newspaper quotes black historians who researched the ancestry of our presidents. Early on in American history, the “one-drop rule” was instituted. That meant if one drop of Negro blood could be traced back in a person’s ancestry, then no matter how white they looked, no matter how white they had been raised, no matter what, they were black.
    Of course, the reality was just the opposition. Enslaved African women were getting equal doses of white blood for their offspring when their white slave masters and overseers routinely raped them. Those half-white children were born into slavery and were in turn impregnated by white masters and overseers. The offspring of the mulattoes and their white masters were called quadroons. Another white master dip in that genetic pool a generation later produced octoroons.  Somewhere along that racial recession, those kind of black people started becoming white. They escaped the plantation, moved elsewhere and blended into the dominant white society.
    Following that historical racial development, according to the North Star News, one historian says Dwight Eisenhower's mother, Ida Elizabeth Stover Eisenhower, was black.
    The painting above by my wife, artist Joyce Owens, is of Louise Evans, a former slave from North Carolina who was interviewed and photographed during the WPA era. You wouldn’t know the woman was black to look at her. There are many more of you out there. Applying the one-drop rule, a fourth of all Americans who think they are white may, in fact, be black.
    Now back to our white/black presidents. Here’s how the April-May 2008 North Star News begins:

Barack Obama May Become The Seventh
Not The First, Black President

If Sen. Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination for preside nt and goes on to win the White House, he would be the seventh, not the first black man to occupy the oval office, according to three black historians whose work to uncover the racial backgrounds of U.S. presidents has been largely ignored until now.
          Black male historians have written extensively that Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower had black ancestors. These historians are Joel A. Rodgers, Dr. Leroy Vaughn, and Dr. Auset Bakhufu.
          Black historians, however, were not the first to write about the five presidents' racially mixed families. White historians and political opponents also wrote about the men's black ancestors, but the books were either destroyed, went out of print or are hard to find.
          A common theme associated with the earlier black presidents is that they all passed for white, sometimes destroying family photographs and letters, to hide their racial backgrounds.
          Sen. Obama cannot obviously pass for white because of his dark skin color. Obama makes it clear he is the son of a Kenyan economist and white female anthropologist.
          Interracial relationships between black women and white men explain the racial backgrounds of some of the presidents, but not all.
          Sexual relationships between black men and white women have produced offspring. Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh's president, was the son of a black man and an Irish woman, according to historians.
          Interracial relationships between black men and Native American women also produced racially mixed offspring.
          Rodgers, who died in 1966, wrote the book The Five Black Presidents, and Dr. Vaughn devotes a chapter to the five black presidents in his Black People and Their Place in World History. Rogers and Vaughn agree Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding and Coolidge had black ancestors.
          Dr. Auset Bakhufu, author of The Six Black Presidents' Black Blood: White Masks includes Eisenhower.
          Despite author Toni Morrison's 1998 New Yorker magazine article that claims Bill Clinton is the nation's first black president because of his womanizing and frequenting McDonald's restaurants, Clinton is not listed.

    To read the rest of the article at northstarnews.com, click here.

Wright's soundtrack, Nina Simone's and Sam Cooke's songs

    No doubt about it, Barack Obama was forced to kick his former pastor under the bus. I understand. You can't run for Cheerleader-in-Chief of America while your spiritual mentor is out front and center badmouthing the nation.
     Then there's this reality: the world of American politics, where bumper sticker wisdom and sound bite dialog reign supreme, is not a comfortable place for the truth to reside.
    And make no mistake about it: there was a bunch of truth telling in what Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been saying. I saw it and heard it during his speech and Q and A Monday. But the vast majority of Americans and my fellow journalists saw a train wreck.  I didn't. I saw a Soul Train of a lecture and sermon with a payload of truth, intelligence and common sense.       
    I ended up into a back and forth e-mail debate about Wright's performance at the National Press Club with CNN's Roland Martin on the NABJForum. In the middle of our e-mail discussion, I noted that it was generational; Roland is about 20 years younger than I am. He insisted it was not.
    Later in the day, I heard from Daniel St. Albin Greene. Dan took me under his wings when I was a cub reporter at the National Observer back in the early '70s. I hadn't talked to him in more than 25 years. He happened to see one of my commentaries on line about Rev. Wright and tracked me down.
    After a bit of catching up, we took up the Wright controversy. Dan admitted to being thoroughly confused about Barack Obama's former minister until he saw the Bill Moyer's interview.
    Then he got mad.
    Back in the late '60s, Dan, who is an exotic mixture of Native and Euro-American, spent much of his time covering riots and racial protests for the Observer. He developed an in-depth understanding and an abiding appreciation for what was going on in the black liberation struggle.
    When he got his first beyond the looped snippets look at Rev. Wright, he understood the man instantly. Wright, Dan surmised, was an old-fashioned black nationalist who had disappeared into the faith but still holds the liberation movement close to his heart and deep in his soul.
    Dan's anger was sparked by the realization that there is an entire generation of journalists; editors and reporters that have no connection or understanding of the black liberation movements of the 1960s. Nor do they understand that while there are the Oprahs, Bob Johnsons and Bill Cosbys, blacks with plenty of wealth and influence, far too many African Americans are no better off, no more embedded in the American dream than their parents were a generation ago.
    In watching yesterday's news and the response of regular black Americans, then Obama's angry divorce from his former pastor, I began to wonder if Roland hadn't gotten it completely right and if I had missed the boat.
    I called Rev. Frank Watkins for a reality check. Frank was an idealistic young white man when he joined the civil rights movement back in the '60s. For the longest time, he was the Rev. Jesse Jackson's right-hand man. He later went on to work as Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.'s press secretary and was the campaign manager when the Rev. Al Sharpton ran for president four years ago.
    Frank viewed Rev. Wright Press Club performance much like I did. As we talked and analyzed our response versus the vast majority, we concluded that it WAS generational for sure.  We were looking at Wright's performance through the lens of the '60s.  We were listening to his words to the tune of a time when Nina Simone's protest song, "Mississippi Goddamn," summed it all up.
    Rev. Wright's God damns America echoed that sentiment. 
    As Frank and I talked, he pointed out that Rev. Wright was an analyst and that as an analyst he had been brilliant. Unfortunately, Wright's politics are as bad as his comprehension of this nation's problems is good.  Beyond that, times have changed. It's no longer good enough to understand America's failures and to strongly express your frustrations with them.
    The time has come to seriously seek out solutions. That's what Obama's candidacy symbolizes: a chance to put somebody in command that understands the shortcomings and will vigorously act to correct them.
    This is why Obama's campaign themes of hope and change resonate so well with young people. With all respect to Rev. Wright and the late Nina Simone, a new day is on the horizon and Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" tells that tale.

Let's have all Wright all the time

    After being caricatured into a racist, hate-filled, anti-American nut job, Rev. Jeremiah Wright is emerging from his self-imposed public exile.
    Barack Obama’s former pastor appeared on Bill Moyer’s Journal on Friday, was the keynote speaker at the Detroit Branch NAACP's 53rd annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner on Sunday and  continued his message that different is not divisive in a speech and Q and A  at the National Press Club in D.C. this morning.
    Great. In this 24/7 news cycle world, we need all Wright all the time.
    I know this is counterintuitive, but I think it will serve the Democratic Party’s presidential frontrunner well if we see more Wright—much, much more Wright. 
    The conventional wisdom is that Wright’s return to the national scene is not doing Obama any favors. You hear that the Protestant pastor should have remained MIA until shortly before Thanksgiving—if not for eternity. You read that any time Wright speaks he only serves to stoke the passions of righteous Americans who have taken to heart the hard knock words they’ve heard out of context. You know that the running rap has Rev. Wright as a big-time blight hampering the Obama campaign from closing the deal.
    I say it ain’t necessarily so.   
    Since the manufactured controversy erupted last month, Wright gives certain American voters, as Chris Matthews describes it, a “permission slip” to not vote for Obama. The former Trinity United Church of Christ pastor gives them cover to continue voting whites only.
    Wright, however, doesn’t have to remain the blunt instrument the rightwing clinches to beat Obama down from here to November. With the exception of the conservative whites that aren’t going to vote for what could be America’s first black president for any reason at any time, a Wright P.R. blitz can shrink the mountain back to a molehill.
     Let’s begin with the obvious: Rev. Wright disappeared after misleading snippets began endlessly looping because a fair amount of his life’s work has been dedicated to social justice. Witnessing the very real possibility that this great nation may finally break its bad habit of electing one white man after the next to its highest office has to be as exhilarating to him as it is to me and millions of other Americans.
    But then, the situation got way out of hand. Rev. Wright’s four-decade legacy went to hell.  He had to flesh out the cartoon villain the viral videos have transformed him into. He needed to explain and defend his church’s black liberation theology, which has been so unfairly misrepresented. He’ll have to do it some more and then some more again.
    “I’m distressed by white people, out of a very different religious, cultural, racial, theological/ecclesiastical experience, presuming to judge African American faith practices and religious expression and preaching,” Rev. John Buchanan, who is white, said last month to his congregation.
    I found no evidence that Rev. Buchanan is related to that other Buchanan, Pat, a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans and rightwing agent provocateur who plays a political analyst on TV.  John Buchanan is the pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. His Gothic-architecture church was the setting where Carmen Diaz got married in “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” In real-life, Fourth’s flock is just like in the movie. Its congregation is largely white and rich and powerful.
     “Senator Obama’s critics wonder how the senator could have remained in Wright’s congregation and under his leadership for twenty years,” Rev. Buchanan said in his week-after-Easter sermon. “The answer is that Wright didn’t say ‘God damn America’ every Sunday. In fact, Wright’s sermons were biblically based, relevant, literate, and eloquent, week after week. When the preachers of the land decide whose sermons and lectures or preaching they want to hear, Jeremiah Wright’s are near the top of the list.”
    Of course, you’d never imagine that by watching Fox Cable News or from any of the other ongoing outlets for the rightwing propaganda machine. Last week, the North Carolina Republican Party unveiled an ad using Rev. Wright to attack Obama as “too extreme.”
    Without question, that’s just an early cheap shot the rightwing is preparing to sling. The Republicans believes Wright will be their WMD. And that’s why he should saturate the media with his intelligence, conviction and reason. He should religiously make the media rounds from “Meet the Press” to “This Week” to “20/20” to “Countdown” to “The O’Reilly Factor” to “The Colbert Report” to “Nightline” to “Saturday Night Live.” He should go on Oprah, Ellen and "The View," too.
    Should he make those rounds, before long, the fickle American media with its attention-deficit audience will decide that what was once “shocking and stunning” is really basic and boring. Old news is no news.
    And for Wright, Obama and the nation at large, no news will be good news.

(You can also see this post on ebonyjet.com. It ran on Tuesday under the headline, "Wright Here, Wright Now."  Check it out to see the comments. There are a lot more there than here. Also there are many other interesting posts on the website.)

A Name Game

 

 

    There are 38 of me. When I was much younger, I thought there were only two: my father and me. He thought so too. Although my birth certificate reads Monroe Anderson, III, my father, Monroe Anderson, Jr., was orphaned when he was one, so we knew of no other living Monroe Anderson.
    Back in the middle of the last century, it wasn’t easy discovering how many of you there were. Of course, with the Internet, it’s a cinch. I’ve long known that the Texas cancer center, M.D. Anderson, was named after the late businessman, Monroe Anderson, whose middle name was Dunaway. And a couple of years back, a fictional teenager in the novel, Maybe a Miracle, started showing up on Google’s search engine.
    But, it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I discovered how many Monroe Andersons there actually are in the United States—38.  I also discovered that Anderson is no longer the 8th most common name in America as it was when I was a child, now it’s 10th. Out of the 303,944,807 people in the U.S there are 945,268 Andersons and 12,158 Monroes.
    But enough about me. Let’s see, there are 431 Americans named Joyce Owens but only one who is a nationally known artist and is married to me. Anyway, Shakespeare comes to mind here. His immortal rose by any name line.

    But I digress. There are 449 John McCains. There are 510 people named George Bush, including his daddy, president number 41 and 261 who share William Clinton’s name. There’s only one Hillary Clinton.
    Here’s the puzzler. According to the website, HowManyofMe.com, that does the U.S. Census search and provides the numbers, there are zero Oprah Winfreys. Ditto for Barack Obamas.
    You may want to wait for the 2.0 version, after they've worked out the glitches. If you want to check it out right now, go to the left column of this blog where you’ll find HowManyOfMe listed under Research In. One click and you too can discover if there are many of you—or none at all.