After enjoying Jeremiah Wright's speech on Sunday night (except when he mocked John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson for their speech patterns, which seemed bizarre) I felt renewed admiration for him and his obvious intelligence and education. I thought he might add something positive to the discussion about racism in this country.
Then I heard the speech at the National Press Club, but more importantly the Q and A afterwards when he showed an ugly and destructive side of himself, a side that is arrogant, narcissistic, and apparently bent on vengeance against Obama, or else utterly stupid about how his behavior would affect Obama's candidacy. He certainly did Obama no favors with his repetition of his accusation that the government (could have) created the AIDS virus and his insistence that the media was attacking the black church.
I am a wise enough person to know what I don't know – and I don't know if Wright's rhetoric and style are simply part of one segment of the black church experience. And I am profoundly uncomfortable by all those equally ignorant white pundits who think they understand the black church experience any better than I do, each coming to the same conclusion about what a monster Rev. Wright is. (I still believe there's some racism going on here in the media.)
How damaging this is to Obama's campaign remains to be seen, and it remains to be seen if it might present Obama with another opportunity to move the nation forward. I believe he can and I am waiting to see if he does.
What I think Obama should do, what I desperately hope he can do, is use this campaign put the final nail in the coffin of the sixties.
He has to once and for all move this country out of the divisiveness and radicalism of the sixties, which are involved in the Rev. Wright flap. For nothing has defined who we have been for over forty years in this country, nothing has helped to create our current divisions and internecine rivalries, than that infamous decade in which I grew up.
Barack Obama is the only one who bury the divisiveness of the sixties, because he is the only major player on the stage right now who is of the generation that came to maturity when the sixties were over.
Let me explain. Jeremiah Wright, John McCain, and Bill and Hillary Clinton are all creatures of the sixties, people whose entire identities were developed in the chaos, rebellion, and struggles of the time. So are George W. Bush, John Kerry, and all the big players in the mainstream and cable media who seem to latch onto every figure from the sixties who emerges in every presidential campaign. And so we replay every conflict from that era every election season, and rub salt into the wounds that have never healed. All the presidential candidates but Obama are products of the sixties, and the Jeremiah Wright controversy is this season's homage to that era.
Jeremiah Wright joined the military during the Vietnam War. He was profoundly influenced by the Civil Rights struggle that reached a peak in the sixties. He still preaches black liberation theology, and as Barack Obama so accurately said, he still lives the reality of that era and has now dragged it into the presidential campaign, allowing it to be used against the only candidate ever to represent the post-sixties mentality.
John McCain was flying bombing missions over Vietnam in the sixties until his plane was shot down and he was taken prisoner. For the last three years of the sixties, and the first three of the seventies, McCain was a POW. His experience of the sixties is obviously colored by that reality. McCain represents the backlash to the sixties.
Bill and Hillary Clinton are baby boomers. Both were in college during and profoundly influenced by the sixties. Bill participated in anti-war demonstrations, traveled to Russia, and managed to avoid the draft because he "loathed the military." Hillary Clinton first worked for Goldwater, then pivoted and adopted Bill's ideals. Both remember, as do I, the intensity of that era, the positives and the negatives, and both still find themselves defined by one side in the debates of that time.
So let's talk a little more about those debates.
This is the era in which the baby boomers came to dominate social issues. This is when they marched off to college, many to avoid marching off to a war that they detested. This is when they began an antiwar movement, burned their draft cards, and helped set off a forty year divide between supporters and opponents of the Vietnam War, a divide that was resurrected as recently as four years ago when a famous anti-war veteran of the Vietnam War ran for president and was smeared by those who represented the backlash against the anti-war movement.
The anti-war movement ultimately was victorious in ending the Vietnam War, but it led to much resentment and anger on the part of the backlash that labeled war protesters as unpatriotic and blamed them for America's "loss" in that war. To this day the two sides have not reconciled and the current divide over the Iraq War is a shadow of the debate over Vietnam.
While many college age men burned their draft cards in the sixties, a few college age women were burning their bras, symbolically rejecting the system that they saw as keeping women subjugated to men, forced to accept male ideas of feminine beauty and feminine roles. Ultimately, the feminist movement won, bringing millions of women into the workplace, passing laws giving women equality in many arenas, and making it possible for a woman to finally compete for the presidency. But the anger over the legalization of abortion, the resentment of some men over what they perceived as women taking their jobs, and the social and religious conservative movement that seeks to turn back the clock on women's rights, are still alive today.
The sixties was also the time of Martin Luther King, and the ultimate victory in the fight for legal Civil Rights for African Americans. But the sixties also produced a backlash against equality and integration, and resulted in the murder not only of King, but also of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, two powerful leaders in the African American fight for equality. This fight led to the conservative backlash, culminating in Nixon's "Southern Strategy," the Republican Party's appeal to white voters in the South who were bitter about integration. Radical groups on both sides emerged, represented by white supremacists like David Duke, and black liberation preachers like Rev. Wright.
The sixties divided this country into the coalitions we still see today. The right wing opposes some of the feminist gains, like abortion and equal pay, some of the civil rights gains, like affirmative action, and the objectives of the ongoing peace movement. During each presidential season, we see each side use some of these issues against the other.
Never before, however, has the contest been so defined by race. It was inevitable, of course, with an African American candidate coming so close to the Oval Office, but who could have predicted this? The appearance of Rev. Wright has put us into a time machine and transported us back to the rhetoric that may have made sense in the sixties but seems completely out of place now. Once again, the divisive sixties emerge to taint our election, nearly fifty years later.
The sixties tore the country apart, and those whose political views were created in that cauldron of conflict are still determining the content of our political campaigns.
There's a reason Hillary Clinton is winning over the post fifty women. The still live in the sixties with her, still clinging to the feminist fight that she so symbolizes.
There's a reason John McCain will win all the pro-war Americans, all the social conservatives, and all those who hated the radicalism of the sixties. He is the candidate who represents the glory of the Vietnam War, the bravery of a POW, and the one who never engaged in the radicalism of the sixties.
And there's a reason Obama wins all the young people, who find the sixties irrelevant and old, and all the intellectuals, who are done with the sixties and see the need to move the country past its victories and its nonsense. And there's a reason he is winning over African Americans. He is not only one of them, he represents one of them who can actually win the presidency. Until, that is, Rev. Wright emerged to throw everyone back to the radicalism of the sixties, and throw the country – and the election - into chaos once again.
Barack Obama has to remind people again, in a big way, that he does not represent anything from the sixties, that he is not only a post race candidate, but that he is a post sixties candidate, looking only to the future. He must expand on the words in his Philadelphia race speech, when he defined Wright as belonging to another era, as being part of the past, and elaborate in great detail about how and why he has a different mindset, one that will carry us into the future where we can finally put to rest the divisions that began and reached their peak in the 1960s, divisions that are always below the surface, ready to come back to life and tear us apart all over again.
The young people of today, those voters who represent the future of the Democratic Party, do not want to participate in the chaos of the sixties, It is not their fight, and because of that, they see nothing inspirational in the two sixties candidates: Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
We must all let go of the sixties. It is no longer relevant. The biggest battles have been won and we must move ahead and reconcile. If Barack Obama can take the lead, and tell Jeremiah Wright that while his rhetoric might have made sense during the nation's radical sixties decade, his time is past and he must go away, then perhaps the voters can tell John McCain and Hillary Clinton to go away.
If he doesn't, we will remain stuck for at least four more years in the sixties.
Isn't it really time to lay the sixties to rest?
