Backwards Christian Soldiers

An unpublished letter to the Los Angeles Times:

Dear Sirs,

Any self-respecting journalists who were unfortunate enough to see the recent interview of Jeremiah Wright by Bill Moyers must, by now, have relinquished their credentials. The offices in your building where some of them used to congregate must now surely be empty since they have hurriedly made off to take up worthier professions where they are unlikely to be so embarrassed or to become objects of so much derision.

Moyers's critical faculties, which have been diminishing with every succeeding year, certainly deserted him that night. He turned in a performance so supine in its lines of inquiry that it could hardly have failed to make the bowels of Larry King, the supreme pitcher of inquisitive soft balls, shrivel into oblivion.

Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw became comic in order to be serious. Bill Moyers is so full of seriousness, portentousness, and pretension, that he has become comic. Sitting with his brow furrowed and his hand supporting his chin, leaning forward in all earnestness, and with a voice so calming, reassuring, and sympathetic, he went on to ask Wright how he felt about the thirty second "incendiary" sound bites that have landed him in so much trouble. The tone of his question implied that somehow the length of the sound bites automatically invalidated their content. We can be grateful to Moyers for one thing though. He played much more of the clips than we had previously seen thereby revealing that they were not taken out of context at all and we were not mistaken in our original assessment of them.

We saw, yet again, Wright gyrating around his pulpit wearing outfits that he could only have purchased from The Very Silly Robe Shop, spewing his sermons of hate filled lies, and rousing his hapless congregation in the form of a miniature Nuremberg rally into a frenzy of gleeful and adoring approbation. He is clearly enjoying himself and, as we have seen this week, never misses an opportunity to repeat his performance. He is a scourge to his friends and a gift to his enemies. It's showtime and it keeps the money rolling in, well hallelujah brother.

The most grievous insult to our intelligence was when Wright gave the impression that the words we so clearly heard did not mean what they mean and that they were taken out of context. If only we had heard the sermons in full we would understand his message. Perhaps if we apply some arcane cipher to his sermons they can be decoded to reveal the words of, "Oh, What A Friend We Have In Jesus". Somehow, I doubt it. Clearly, Wright believes that, like his congregation, most of us possess the kind of imbecile credulity that would make a witch doctor positively green with envy.

Moyers never challenged Wright when he repeated Obama's words, from his florid, in parts disingenuous, and much praised Philadelphia speech, that America cannot afford to ignore the issues of race at this time. Ignore? For the last forty years and for as many trillions of dollars we have attempted to level the playing field in order to atone for and to expurgate America's original sin of slavery along with its pernicious consequences.

Wright is a hoarder of grievances and, frankly, grievances that are not really his own. He is what Juan Williams describes as one of those black leaders who orchestrate support for themselves by manipulating black people into seeing themselves as victims thereby creating a black "culture of failure". Cynically, and like all charlatans, they expect a cavalcade of congratulation for saving their community from the ills that they themselves have engendered. Sadly, and all too often, they get it along with a sickening amount of obeisance and adulation much, of course, to their unending approval.

Christians are told that they will die in the flesh to be reborn in the spirit. Jeremiah Wright has been born in the flesh only to be transported to a million-dollar pile in Tinley Park, a predominantly white and affluent suburb of Chicago, duly paid for by his parishioners. There is little, it seems, that appeals to him in a gospel of renunciation. Can so assiduous an accumulator of treasures on earth really applaud the sentiment that the poor are blessed? The meek shall inherit the earth but not a 10,400 sq.ft. mansion. Let's all be quite clear about that one, brother.

As for the woeful Bill Moyers, he failed in his duty to inform by acting as an apologist for his subject rather than as an objective journalist. One could see that he enjoyed pandering so obsequiously to a tenth-rate demagogue, but this should come as no surprise to us since he was once the press secretary to Lyndon Johnson. Those were the days when his shimmering vacuity sparkled, but not as incandescently as it does when he is in quest of the holy Peabody Award.