…and this one, from The New York Times:










By personalizing the Wright narrative—by writing him off as Obama’s “crazy uncle,” by focusing on his “vanity” and his penchant for “performance”—the media coverage effectively delegitimized Wright as an agent of salient argumentation or even viable moral thought. His portrayal locates Wright in the pettiness of the personal rather than the fullness of cultural context. And it precludes conversation by taking Wright’s ideas and opinions and arguments and brushing them aside as the delusions of an unreliable narrator.

Which is, alas, nothing new. Consider the near-obsession with denouncing that has defined so much of the discourse during this election season—witness the many times, during the nominating contests, that a candidate has been forced to denounce/repudiate something one of his surrogates—or even someone only casually connected to his campaign—has said. Recall Hillary Clinton, without a hint of irony, asking Barack Obama not just to “reject,” but to “reject and denounce” the support of Louis Farrakhan during their L.A. debate. Recall when, after Geraldine Ferraro made her statements about Obama’s race, Clinton was herself made to “reject and repudiate” Ferraro’s statements—and the woman who had made them. Indeed, during the 2008 campaign—though it’s not limited, unfortunately, to the rhetoric of the campaign trail or, for that matter, to this year—the diction of healthy debate (challenge, disagree, argue, etc.) has been replaced by a cacaphonic chorus of language that would impugn debate itself:

Renounce! Denounce! Rebuke! Revile!
Condemn! Reject! Reprove! Disclaim!
Deny! Decry! Denigrate! Repudiate!

Even the editorial board of The New York Times—not a body known for dashing off emotional outbursts—subscribed to the rhetoric of renunciation: “This could not be handled by a speech about the complexities of modern life,” the board wrote in an editorial last week, daring Obama into action against Wright. “It required a powerful, unambiguous denunciation—and Mr. Obama gave it.”

When the editorial board of the country’s most powerful newspaper—by nature and by necessity one of the strongest advocates we have for a free and open marketplace of ideas—calls for denunciation (and “powerful, unambiguous denunciation” at that), that makes for a powerful and unambiguous annunciation about the marketplace itself. We’re talking, after all, about the language of McCarthy. Of Salem. Of Lenin. The language that assumes there is but one way to do things, and that those who would dare to claim otherwise deserve to be publicly pilloried, silenced, or, perhaps worst of all, ignored.

Whence controversy? Whence productive, provocative debate?

Which is not to say, of course, that Jeremiah Wright is a modern-day Cassandra, that to ignore him is to ignore—and, thus, deprive ourselves of—some kind of transcendent truth. While I think much of what Wright has been saying is truer than we have let ourselves admit out loud, there’s much of it that I disagree with. Vehemently.

But that’s beside the point. Wright’s is a story of race and politics and culture, to be sure, and of the connection among the three—but it is also a story about dissent, about the way we Americans, in this particular and perhaps even pivotal historical moment, treat ideas and opinions that don’t conform to the mainstream. Wright is openly challenging America’s most basic origin myth (the embrace of self-evident truths giving way to Liberty and Justice for all—virgin lands waiting to be populated by hardy immigrants who would risk their lives in the service of religious freedom). Yes, there was a war to win that Justice; yes, those virgin lands weren’t so virgin, after all; yes, those who came seeking Liberty won it by robbing other people of theirs. But most of the narratives we hear about America—not about the United States, the country, necessarily, but about “America,” the idea—are leavened, even today, with the assumption of Destiny. And with the assumption that the term “God bless America” is not a desire so much as a declaration of fact.

Wright flouts that assumption, openly and defiantly and, occasionally, literally. His sermons narrate history not through the lens (or the “hermeneutic,” as he likes to call it) of its victor, but from the perspective of those many and varied people who have been conscripted in freedom’s service—those victims of the means America justified by its lofty ends. (America is therefore the land of the future, Hegel wrote, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history shall reveal itself.) Wright is not questioning the American dream, or even its citizens—he is not, like Pat Robertson or John Hagee or their ilk, questioning the personal behavior of individual Americans—but rather the actions of the American government.

And for that, he has been made a laughingstock. What we’ve seen in the Wright coverage wasn’t a dialogue, or even a deposition; it was a prosecution—one in which we all but pled insanity on the defendant’s behalf. The People vs. Jeremiah Wright, the “crazy uncle” versus Uncle Sam, made a mockery of the pastor in the press, all because—in addition to ministering to the poor in Chicago and serving as a spiritual guide to thousands—Wright had the temerity to question the actions of a government that has been, in kindest terms, imperfect. In a country so proud of its tradition of free speech, the narrowness of permission Wright’s treatment represents when it comes to our cultural discourse is profoundly ironic. As Mark Twain put it, “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense.” And in a nation whose founders deemed the questioning of government to be among the highest measures of patriotism, that irony is even deeper.