Bush's Dark Days
The American Disgrace of Hurricane Katrina
As we observe the third anniversary of the Iraq war, what have we accomplished and what have we learned? Deposing Saddam was certainly a good idea, but he had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The truth is, the administration was bound and determined to invade Iraq. 9/11 merely presented a convenient opportunity. the administration exploiting America’s grief to launch the war for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Invading Iraq was what they’d come to Washington to do. The president said he consulted God about the Iraq invasion, which raises the question of which god Bush was talking to.
The White House was built by slaves.
Construction on the President's House began in 1792 in
Washington, D.C., a new capital situated in sparsely settled
region far from a major population center. The decision to place
the capital on land ceded by two slave states-Virginia and
Maryland-ultimately influenced the acquisition of laborers to
construct its public buildings. The D.C. commissioners, charged
by Congress with building the new city under the direction of
the president, initially planned to import workers from Europe
to meet their labor needs. However, response to recruitment was
dismal and soon they turned to African Americans — slave and
free — to provide the bulk of labor that built the White House,
the United States Capitol, and other early government buildings.
[Wikipedia]
How odd that, two centuries later, we know and perhaps care so
little about what goes on there.
I don’t know what goes on in your church, but, in mine, there’s
simply no talk of politics. There is lots of singing and passing
the plate around and the pastor does the sing-song bit and
prances about in hysterics talking about David and Goliath and
Feeding The Five Thousand. The overwhelming majority of black
church folk I am personally acquainted with do not watch news of
any kind. Do not read the paper. Have no earthly clue who Andrew
Card is and never heard the name “Scooter” until it was
plastered all over the place this week.
Most of my friends and acquaintances have their TV’s set to BET
all day. They giggle at reruns of Moesha and Living Single and
they play commercial and news-free R&B and rap music on
satellite radio in their cars. What’s going on in Washington is
somebody else’s problem. They feel they have no influence there,
anyway, so they’ve kind of tuned out. They have a vague idea
that Bush has had some problems these past weeks, but most of my
black friends are incapable of discussing the issues in any
depth.
While the white pastors are selling out the “moral” right wing,
black pastors are an even bigger disgrace. I could respect them
for making a conscious choice to keep politics out of the
pulpit, but the truth is most of these men have absolutely no
intellectual curiosity, no appreciation for culture, for
literature. Most of these men are simply uninformed about most
things and are, in large measure, even bigger lemmings than the
average white conservative Christian in that they know
absolutely nothing about politics and, therefore, make
absolutely no effort to inform the black church in the one hour
where these pastors actually have these folks’ attention.
Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized that the church house was the
one place where the black community gathered in numbers and was
the one place where information could be credibly disseminated.
The black pastor, therefore, has an obligation to tell his
church what is going on in the world. To not just spin around
and do the singsong bit about Elijah and the Raven, but inform
us. Educate us. Explain who Harriet Miers is and why her
nomination infuriated Bush’s own conservative base. Explain who
Karl Rove is and what his role in policy decisions and politics.
Sunday morning certainly wasn’t designed to be a news briefing,
and the Sunday service not designed to be a classroom, but the
culture we now live in demands more from the church. Most whites
in America get their news from Jay Leno, John Stewart and David
Letterman (which is why prominent political movers curry favor
with late-night talk hosts) more so than they do from CNN or
MSNBC or, for that matter, the New York Times. Fairly few blacks
watch any of these late-night talk shows, Fox having long ago
dumped Arsenio (and, apparently, broken the man’s spirit, as I’m
sure he must have had many offers to do his show elsewhere).
The fact is, in the vast majority, black America is even worse
informed than white America. But, while white pastors are, in
the aggregate, more apt to organize politically and disseminate
information (typically the GOP party line), black pastors remain
stuck in the past, preaching meaningless Old Testament homilies
and putting on a good hoop show while leaving their congregants
under-fed and under-informed about the world around them.
Black pastors, many of whom are in (big quotes) “Full Time
Ministry,” should have active subscriptions to Time and Newsweek
and the New York Times and should be watching CNN and MSNBC
regularly. They owe it to their congregants to be informed on
what is happening in the world and to better prepare and
minister to the people they are pastoring. But a great many of
these pastors take (big quotes) “Full Time Ministry” to mean
“retirement,” as they spend the majority of their work week
doing whatever they please. Wandering about town, having
lunches, playing golf, wandering through malls, whatever. The
vast majority of these men are, in my experience, AWOL from the
hospitals, from the prisons. Are nowhere to be seen during
street ministry, during gang intervention. Are unengaged in
social activism, are under-informed or completely uninformed
about social and health issues. Know absolutely nothing of
literature or music—and I mean Brahms, not James Cleveland.
Many of these guys have doctorates, running around calling
themselves “Dr.” this and “Dr.” that, but couldn’t tell me how
many red stripes and how many white stripes are on the American
flag. If I held a gun to their head they couldn’t tell me who
the Secretary of the Interior is or even what she does (Gale
Norton and, yes, I had to look it up).
Pastoring is a specific and special calling. I believe only 25%
of black pastors today are actually called to that work. And
only 15% of black pastors working today are actually any good at
it. I believe, in my own unscientific, ranting sort of way, that
at least 85% of all black pastors pastoring today are in it as a
vocation more so than as a calling, and they suck at it. They
are showmen, razzle-dazzle hoop guys, spinning around and
sweating and barking orders while we fools, we starry-eyed, dumb
negroes, bow and scrape and bring these phonies orange juice and
Fritos, grinning and applauding and, above all, paying these
men, these nude emperors leading us in circles in the
wilderness. Yassuh, pastor.
Pastoring should be more than that. Church membership should be
empowering. Should be elevating and life-affirming. Church
membership shouldn’t be this transitional condition that leaves
no mark on our lives. If I spend twenty years in your church, I
should be twenty years smarter, twenty years stronger and twenty
years more empowered than when I first arrived. At the very
least, I should know that over two thousand U.S. troops—many of
our own sons and daughters—have died ostensibly because the
president wanted to avenge his daddy and the vice president
wanted to grab the oil and both wanted to re-make the Middle
East in American-style democracy. At the very least I should
know facts, not rumors, about this president’s monumental
failures of leadership, about how the economy works, why and how
this president’s failed economic and military policies have
moved this country not only toward a terrible recession but
likely depression. I should know who John Roberts is and why his
appointment as the new Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
is historic and how it will impact each and every one of us. I
should certainly know who Karl Rove is and why this man,
essentially, runs the country. Who Ben Bernanke is and why his
appointment to the Federal Reserve Board affects each and every
one of us, black white or green.
But how much of this information is being disseminated from the
one place black America gathers and sits still for at least one
hour a week? How much of our opportunity to enlighten, to inform
and to teach is squandered by pastors who are either too
cowardly or too uninformed themselves to embrace their duty to
not only teach us the moral imperatives of personal salvation
but to educate us, to empower us, to armor us and prepare us to
function within the social, economic and political strata of
life.
I'd imagine the great majority of people who bother to slug
through my rants here are doubtless better informed than the
average Church Folk. Most of my Church Folk friends, frankly,
don't read anything, the Bible least of all. So this may be old
news to you, but since its unlikely any of this has been
discussed from your local church pulpit, let's take a look at
what's been going on:
All of which makes recent events in Washington very hard for the
“moral” right to absorb. I’m convinced most if not all of these
‘moral” leaders knew the president was terribly unengaged and
uninformed; the ultimate Slacker President who, by the great
weight of evidence, never read the intelligence brief marked
“Bin Laden Determined To Attack The U.S.” Bush is a president
who has made a virtue of being “average,” who joked about his
“average” grades at a Yale commencement, and whose lack of
articulation and unfamiliarity with even the simplest facts,
even the basic names of people and places, fairly screams
incompetence. I believe these pastors and moral activists all
know this man is wholly unqualified and unfit to hold that
office. But I believe these people were and are more interested
din winning than in doing what is right.
They are more interested in power, in retaining power and
funding for their causes, than in actually embracing their own
morality, a morality which would ordinarily demand they
acknowledge the fact this president is a dufus, and a dangerous
puppet of corporate America. I’m convinced Regular Folk—whomever
they are—are clueless and uninformed and are content to remain
that way, but the leaders know. They really do know this man is
a disaster for this country, but they embrace him anyway out of
political greed and, now, out of political necessity, as they
have so anchored their own future to the president’s. They have
to stick with him now because, to do any less would undermine
the snoozing lemmings’ faith in their pastors and leaders. For
someone like Jerry Falwell to stand up and admit, “I was wrong.
Bush was a mistake,” might splinter his “moral majority into
many, many factions. It would unmask Falwell as having been
gullible and, at the every least, flawed and human. And Jerry
and all the Jerrys like him, must avoid that at all costs.
Bill Clinton disgraced the Oval Office by extremely bad behavior
and, worse, by lying about it. Congress impeached Clinton for
his poor choices. President Bush has disgraced the Oval Office
by simply being alarmingly incompetent. I doubt the president
deliberately lied to the American people about his casus beli
(cause for war) for his tragic and failed invasion of Iraq, but
the net result remains the same: two thousand U.S. soldiers
dead, times three or four maimed and crippled for life, times
ten Iraqi dead, maimed, crippled—all because of this president's
obsession with Saddam Hussein and his willingness to play cheap
with the tragedy of 911, using it as a springboard to do what
he'd intended to do since he arrived in the Oval Office: avenge
his daddy.
The only disgrace greater than this miserable and sad excuse for
a president is our utter disinterest in most anything the man
does and the near-total abdication of the black church's social
agenda and conscious. These are indeed dark days for the
president, but they've been dark for us for decades now.
Christopher J. Priest
31 October 2005
editor@praisenet.org
TOP OF PAGE
