'Beware the Terrible Simplifiers'<br><br>By <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_3">Bill Moyers</span> <br>Bill Moyers Journal <br>May 3, 2008<br><br><a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvnMK1d9xE0"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvnMK1d9xE0</span></a><br><br>I once asked a reporter back from <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_5">Vietnam</span>: 'Who's<br>telling the truth over there?'<br><br>'Everyone,' he said. 'Everyone sees what's happening<br>through the lens of their own experience.'<br><br>That's how people see Jeremiah Wright.<br><br>In my conversation with him and in his dramatic public<br>appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more<br>complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto<br>the public stage.<br><br>More than 2,000 people have written me about him, and<br>their opinions vary widely. Some sting: 'Jeremiah<br>Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling,
American-<br>hating radical,' one of my viewers wrote. Another<br>called him a 'nut case.'<br><br>Many more were sympathetic to him. Many asked for some<br>rational explanation for Wright's transition from<br>reasonable conversation to the shocking anger they saw<br>at the National Press Club.<br><br>A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and<br>see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a<br>psychologist.<br><br>Many black preachers I've known-scholarly, smart, and<br>gentle in person-uncorked fire and brimstone in the<br>pulpit. Of course, I've known many white preachers like<br>that, too.<br><br>But where I grew up in the South, before the civil<br>rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black<br>men to express anger for which they would have been<br>punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce<br>thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed.<br><br>I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had<br>been transported thousands of
miles in the hellish hole<br>of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated,<br>whipped, and lynched.<br><br>Or if my great-great-great grandfather had been but<br>three-fifths of a person in a Constitution that<br>proclaimed: 'We, the people.'<br><br>Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial<br>vitriol of <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_6">Jim Crow</span>, <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_7">Strom Thurmond</span>, Bull Conner, and<br><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_8">Jesse Helms</span>.<br><br>Even so, the anger of black preachers I've known and<br>heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and<br>cathartic. That's not how Jeremiah Wright came across<br>in those sound bites or in his defiant performances<br>since my interview.<br><br>What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory<br>words is an attack on the America they cherish and that<br>many of their sons have died for in battle - forgetting<br>that
black Americans have fought and bled beside them,<br>and that Wright himself has a record of honored service<br>in the Navy.<br><br>Hardly anyone took the 'chickens come home to roost'<br>remark to convey the message that intervention in the<br>political battles of other nations is sure to bring<br>retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the<br>particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that<br>actions have consequences.<br><br>My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes,<br>people are understandably seething with indignation<br>over Wright's absurd charge that the United States<br>deliberately brought an <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_9">HIV epidemic</span> into being.<br><br>But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory<br>the U.S. public health service conducted a study that<br>deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into<br>believing that they were being treated while actually<br>letting them die for the sake of a
scientific test.<br><br>Does this excuse Wright's anger? His exaggerations or<br>distortions? You'll have to decide for yourself, but at<br>least it helps me to understand the why of them.<br><br>In this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available<br>on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media - the<br>beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for<br>the fast food with emotional content.<br><br>So the preacher starts with rational discussion and<br>after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on<br>the fire that will eventually consume everything it<br>touches. He had help - people who, for their own<br>reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who<br>wasn't running for president with the man in the pew<br>who was.<br><br>Behold the double standard: <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_10">John McCain</span> sought out the<br>endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-<br>bashing <span class="yshortcuts"
id="lw_1210104568_11">Texas</span> preacher, who said the people of New<br>Orleans got what they deserved for their sins.<br><br>But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions or<br>thinks <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_12">AIDS</span> is God's punishment for homosexuality. <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_13">Pat<br>Robertson</span> called for the assassination of a foreign<br>head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court<br>justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican<br><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_14">religious right</span>.<br><br>After 9/11, <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_15">Jerry Falwell</span> said the attack was God's<br>judgment on America for having been driven out of our<br>schools and the public square, but when McCain goes<br>after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned<br>as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.<br><br><span class="yshortcuts"
id="lw_1210104568_16">Jon Stewart</span> recently played tape from the Nixon White<br>House in which <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_17">Billy Graham</span> talks in the Oval Office<br>about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows<br>in his heart that they are undermining America.<br><br>This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given<br>leeway in politics that others aren't.<br><br>Which means it is all about race, isn't it?<br><br>Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory<br>appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a<br>shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call<br>for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with<br>children in Sunday school.<br><br>What he does is to speak his mind in a language and<br>style that unsettles some people, and says some things<br>so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves<br>Obama no choice but to end their friendship.<br><br>We're often exposed to the corroding acid of
the<br>politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen<br>anything like this - this wrenching break between<br>pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our<br>eyes.<br><br>Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves.<br>All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for<br>letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony<br>of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and<br>prevents an honest conversation on race.<br><br>It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the<br>great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, 'beware the<br>terrible simplifiers.'<br><br><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_18">Bill Moyers</span> is managing editor of the weekly public<br>affairs program "<span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_19">Bill Moyers</span> Journal," which airs<br>Friday night on <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_20">PBS</span>. Check local airtimes or comment at<br>The Moyers Blog at <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.pbs.org/moyers"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_21">www.pbs.org</span></a>/moyers. The video for<br>this essay can be found on <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_22">YouTube</span>:<br><br><a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvnMK1d9xE0"><span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1210104568_23">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvnMK1d9xE0</span></a><BR><BR><div id="RTEContent"> <div id="RTEContent"> <div><strong></strong><em></em><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Declare It Now! Wear Orange!</span><br>Impeach Bush & Cheney for War Crimes<br>& Crimes against Humanity!<br></span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 127, 64); font-weight: bold;"></span></div></div></div><p> 
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