The Bullfrog

Barack Obama’s longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, threatens single-handedly to derail his parishioner’s candidacy. Reverend Wright infamously said the death of thousands on 9/11 meant “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” and that, although no one knows anyone who is in the Ku Klux Klan any more, our nation is “the U.S. of KKK--A”. In interviews and speeches over the weekend the latter-day Jeremiah thundered against the evils of modern-day America. His speech to the NAACP on Sunday is worth a read.

Some of Rev. Wright’s words would be familiar coming from the pulpit of any mainline church:

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We established arbitrary norms and then determined that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different.

His enjoinder to take the log out of our own eye before worrying about the dust specks in others’ was also familiar, as were pleas to love others, even and especially if the others are very different. (I have no comment on Wright’s theories of neurology, pedagogy, and pathology, which are unconventional and have attracted much criticism—for critiques see these by George Will and Byron York.)

One problem that I have with Rev. Wright is that he has little sympathy for a struggle that all Christians face; we are imperfect beings trying to act perfectly in an imperfect world. Jesus said that there is no difference between committing adultery and just thinking about it. In the real world, however, we distinguish not only between thought and action but among the actions themselves: jaywalking is different from shoplifting which is different from armed robbery, etc.

The United States killed hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end a brutal war when many millions had perished. Horrific as the bombings were, we know that an invasion of mainland Japan would have cost at least as many and likely more lives on both sides. To juxtapose these acts against the destruction of the World Trade Center, an act of terror during a time of peace, is to compare very different events without (to use a fashionable term) context. Yet, hear what Jeremiah Wright said after 9/11:

We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.

Jeremiah was a bullfrog
Was a good friend of mine
I never understood a single word he said
But I helped him a-drink his wine
And he always had some mighty fine wine
--Three-Dog Night

© 2008 Stephen Yuen