Wright's "Blowback"

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Here's what the New York Times had to say about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's causal assessment of 9/11: "A useful and timely alert." 

Newsday had this to say: "[He] is on to something." And from the Nation came this: "A straight-talking analysis."

Barack Obama, on the other hand, called it "inflammatory and appalling."

What gives?

Hold on. I got my notes mixed up.

Yes, Obama's fire was indeed centered on Wright's words, but what the New York Times, Newsday and the Nation were addressing was the first installment of Professor Chalmers Johnson's "Blowback" trilogy, which nevertheless said precisely the same as Wright:

What the daily press reports as the malign acts of "terrorists" ... often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.

... And what U.S. officials denounce as unprovoked terrorist attacks on its innocent citizens are often meant as retaliation for previous American imperial actions. Terrorists attack innocent and undefended American targets precisely because American soldiers and sailors firing cruise missiles from ships at sea or sitting in B-52 bombers at extremely high altitudes or supporting brutal and repressive regimes from Washington seem invulnerable. As members of the Defense Science Board wrote in a 1997 report to the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, "Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States."

Useful, timely, insightful and straight-talking. Bravo.

Now let's put Johnson in the vernacular, and without mongrelizing his message. We'll permit Wright a whack at it: "We are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Perhaps a trifle academically indelicate, but that's also the stuff the multitudes can comprehend with dispatch. Yet rather than being evaluated as useful, timely, insightful and straight-talking, it gets trashed as inflammatory and appalling, and by far more observers than just Sen. Obama.

Again, what gives?

It seems the Rev. Wright is being asked to head to the back of some Straight-Talking Express bus. Quiet, boy, only distinguished white professors are permitted, with impunity, to gussy up the patently obvious in books that the great unwashed will never read, nor should they. That might crimp our imperial style.

Let us, rather, console ourselves with the culpability-expunging idea that terrorists, before striking, anywhere, merely haul out a world map and a dart. Or, we could buy into the retailed fallacy that those swarthy infidels merely hate our cherished freedoms -- such as speaking truth to power, or even worse, to the great and ignorantly unwashed -- of which we'd never dream of staging a hi-tech lynching.

OK, enough with the sarcasm for now. Still, I shall await an analysis, academic or vernacular, of any essential difference between what the acclaimed white professor wrote and the appalling black preacher said.

If Rev. Wright was guilty of anything, other than harshly speaking harsh truths, it was sins of omission. He failed (at least in the video segment I've seen) to exempt the actual victims of 9/11 from personal culpability. He also failed (again, in the narrow segment I've seen) to equally passionately denounce the always-unjustified horror of terrorism against the innocent.

I can offer no proof that the good reverend shares my detestation of both omissions and especially their meanings, because the media, in turn, failed to ask him before blasting the video all over the airwaves; what punch it would have lacked had the media done so. But I'll assume he does, and perhaps someone with a microphone will someday get around to asking him.

It would also seem rather urgent that someone ask Sen. Clinton if she has ever met Prof. Johnson -- that academically acclaimed but nonetheless traitorous scourge of America who, as far as I know, has also never explicitly denied that he either condemns the innocent or condones the barbarous methodology of their slaughter.

Has Sen. Clinton ever sat at his knee, attended one of his public lectures, read one of his books or corresponded with him in any way?

How appalling it would be should we find that she has, because there's no record of her subsequent denunciations.

I shall, however, cut her the same slack and assume she does not, in fact, condone monstrous carnage. Maybe she too will get "lucky" and someone will ask her -- you know, just to clarify things, over ... and over ... and over.

Because for now, we just can't know for sure. We could, after all, have a Democratic United States Senator running for the White House who believes it's just fine that thousands of Americans pay with their lives for the imperial stupidity of their government. But which one?

Yes, this calls for tough questions.

Come on. It is we whom the media need to cut some slack -- unless of course they believe us to be as intellectually unwashed as does our government or any others who attempt to profit from this nonsense.

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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

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