The Good Radical Within

One of the most interesting things to me about a Barak Obama presidency is that he would bring with him, as an African American, an internalized awareness of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's indignation and anger. It's real stuff. It is shared in some measure by many if not most African Americans for good, historical reasons. And having a little of it in the White House would be good for the country.

There's no reason to believe that Rev. Wright's indignation is central to Obama's politics or that it would guide his policies in a profound way. But Obama is, after all, African American. Historical anger is part of the intellectual, religious and political waters he learned to swim in, and it is a part of the American story that has never been directly represented in the White House before.
Among generally tolerant and sensible people, many feminists I know have been known to enjoy a sip of bell hooks or Andrea Dworkin. Most environmentalists have a soft spot for Greenpeace pirates, tree sitters, and SUV burners. I have heard moderate Jewish friends come to the defense of Meir Kahane in debates, as I, an Irish Catholic, have gone out of my way to hear what Gerry Adams had to say. Whenever I see a picture of Fidel Castro, whom I know to be a tyrant, I can't help humming a wry chorus of Elton John's "I'm Still Standing." It's the way we are. Radical sympathies aren't a bad thing. Like a classical cellist who listens to gangsta on the bus, isn't there a little radical voice in all of us, a Henry David Thoreau who calls us on our mundane, compromised existences and says "Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty," and shakes us up a little bit?

It seems to me that's the jolt Barak Obama got in church from Jeremiah Wright. Good politicians are very absorbent. They listen all the time and pick up on people's hopes and fears, loves and angers. I am reading a biography of the legendary California politician, Jesse Unruh, by former newsman Bill Boyarski. Of Unruh, Boyarski writes, "He had the curiosity of a good reporter plus an economist's belief in data. He also listened to political gossip and solicited advice from many people. On some Sundays he'd drop in on his nephew Paul, by then a blue-collar aerospace worker, and talk politics. He made his judgments based on such information, interpreted through his won experiences in life." Among those experiences, he carried with him the resentment that comes with the humiliation of having been raised in poverty. Unruh was a moderate, who was capable of outrageously boorish behavior against women, but inside he was still a kid who once got into a fight with his friends when they threw a Black kid into a privy. When he got his chance, he carried California's early, landmark Fair Housing Law through the state legislature.

And had Unruh been Black, he would have gone to the church of his folks as well and absorbed the railing anger and urban legends of back political pulpit along with the music and the spirit. Without it, he would have been lacking something in the representation game.
I think that Barak Obama has been writing the speech he gave yesterday for thirty years. At some point in the campaign he knew he'd have to deliver it. Better during the Democratic primary because he knows the Republicans most likely have some ugly Willie Horton via Rev. Wright waiting for him--with a nastiness that even Mark Penn is incapable of. But now, he's disarmed them. He put Wright and race in perspective and he can move on. He has a spotlight now for his views on the economic mess and Iraq. And he'll use it with a chorus of teachers and writers inside of him, Harvard Law professors, Saul Alinsky disciples, Rev. Wright and Ralph Ellison, radicals and moderates, daring and tentative, left and right, people he's met and listened to along the way--a chorus I tell ya.

"These people are a part of me," he said today. "And they are part of America, this country that I love."

And they might all be headed for the White House.