Ishmael Reed - Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media - The Return of the Nigger Breakers

…Moon’s jingle of deep-pocket cash also has caused conservatives to turn a deaf ear toward Moon’s recent anti-American diatribes. With growing virulence, Moon has denounced the United States and its democratic principles, often referring to America as “Satanic.” But these statements have gone virtually unreported, even though the texts of his sermons are carried on the Internet and their timing has coincided with Bush’s warm endorsements of Moon.

“America has become the kingdom of individualism, and its people are individualists,” Moon preached in Tarrytown, N. Y., on March 5, 1995. “You must realize that America has become the kingdom of Satan.”

In similar remarks to followers on August 4, 1996, Moon vowed that the church’s eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism. “Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme individualism are foolish people,” Moon declared. “The world will reject Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested.”

During the same sermon, Moon decried assertive American women: “American women have the tendency to consider that women are in the subject position,” he said. “However, woman’s shape is like that of a receptacle. The concave shape is a receiving shape. Whereas, the convex shape symbolizes giving. (…) Since man contains the seed of life, he should plant it in the deepest place.

“Does woman contain the seed of life? [“No.”] Absolutely not. Then if you desire to receive the seed of life, you have to become an absolute object. In order to qualify as an absolute object, you need to demonstrate absolute faith, love and obedience to your subject. Absolute obedience means that you have to negate yourself 100 percent.”

(On November 18, The Washington Post reported that Richard Miniter, former editorial page editor of The Washington Times, had filed a complaint against the paper, charging that he was “coerced” into attending a Unification Church religious ceremony that culminated in a mass wedding conducted by Rev. Sun Myung Moon.)

Diana West and Donald Lambro are applying a double standard for their boss and for Rev. Wright. And why does CNN keep on as a regular the employee of a man who hates our country so much? Does Lou Dobbs agree that the United States is satanic? Does Jonathan Klein, CNN’s boss? Where is NOW?

When Richard Cohen appeared on television on March 21, he joined the media chorus in taking offense to the remarks of Rev. Wright. This is the columnist who defended the practice of racial profiling by Washington shopkeepers.

On March 20, the Dalai Lama was the subject of gushing praise by a writer for Time magazine where Rev. Wright had been roistered all week on cable. From Jameswagner.com : “the Dalai Lama explicitly condemns homosexuality, as well as all oral and anal sex. His stand is close to that of Pope John Paul II, something his Western followers find embarrassing and prefer to ignore. His American publisher even asked him to remove the injunctions against homosexuality from his book, Ethics for the New Millennium , for fear they would offend American readers, and the Dalai Lama acquiesced.”

Also, why isn’t there a running loop about John McCain’s relationship with controversial ministers? Are those who control the media easy on him because he plays the father in their fantasies?

What about these “wackadoodles”? The late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Rev. John Hagee. About 9/11, Falwell said “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For The American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

And Pat Robertson: “I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you, this is not a message of hate — this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs; it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.” This was Robertson commenting on “gay days” at Disneyworld.

John McCain’s spiritual advisor is Rev. John Hagee. He says that the Roman Catholic Church and Hitler formed an alliance for the purpose of exterminating the Jews. Hurricane Katrina, for him, was God’s punishment for a gay rights parade that occurred in New Orleans.

The double standard applied to Obama, the Clintons and Senator McCain and their relationship to controversial pastors is the result of a media gone wild. (On The View , Elisabeth Hasselbeck even compared Rev. Wright to Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal). A media that, since the O.J. trial, has found that it can make more money from the racial divide than by any of the other fault lines in American life.

While Obama talked to Americans as though they were adults, the media treated the controversy as though it were a video game in which Rev. Wright was the heavy. They OJayed Wright for cash. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. Here’s mine. What would happen if all of the whites holding forth in Op-Eds and on cable about race — both in the progressive and corporate media — the middle persons who interpret black America for whites (when they are capable of speaking for themselves), the screenwriters and TV writers who make millions from presenting blacks as scum, and the authors of the fake ghetto books, would just shut the fuck up for a few months and listen. Just listen. Listen to blacks, browns, reds and yellows, people whose views are ignored by the segregated media. Listen, not just to their meek colored mind doubles like an Obama critic, Rev. Rivers, who nobody’s ever heard of, but people who will level with them.

In 1957, Doubleday released Richard Wright’s White Man Listen . In it, he wrote “…the greatest aid that any white Westerner can give Africa is by becoming a missionary right in the heart of the Western world, explaining to his own people what they have done to Africa.”

Nobody expects the media to educate the public about Africa. The current coverage is consistent with the images found in the Tarzan movies. It’s not going to change. I’ll settle for missionary work among the American public. Free them from entrapment by the corporate media, which are causing their brain cells to atrophy. Teach them the other points of views that are smothered by the noise, and trivialized on You Tube. Then maybe they’ll understand where the crazy Rev. Wright is coming from.

(For Quincy Troupe’s magazine Black Rennaissance Noire , I contrasted the treatment of Pope Benedict and Sarah Palin with that accorded Barack Obama. While Rev. Wright was hammered around the clock, Sarah Palin and Benedict were given a free pass. The media were more outraged by a black man’s preaching style, which a Newsweek writer, with little acquaintance with black culture called “hysterical,” than with a Christian leader, Pope Benedict, who continues to cover up the church’s pedophilia scandal, one of the worst to hit the Catholic Church since the days of Saint Peter, and one ignored by The New York Times recent conservative hire. In January of 2009, the Pope “unexcommunicated” a bishop who has denied the Holocaust.)

The responses to the election of the first Celtic-African-American president tested powerful institutions, whose monopoly over how opinion is formed was challenged in a manner rarely seen. In fact these institutions were subjected to what amounted to a grass roots revolt. While the Clinton machine sought to win some Southern states by buying off black preachers, a technique described in It Can’t Happen Here , their congregations flocked to Barack Obama’s candidacy in droves. Clinton supporters among the black leadership had to abandon the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton as they were swept along by the currents arising from below.