Has anybody actually taken the time to watch Rev. Wright's much maligned sermon in its entirety? The one that the MSM's diced and sliced and handed out like amphetamine-laced communion to its maddeningly impressionable flock? It's there, right on that cyber-commons otherwise known as YouTube.
Yeah, there's all manner of dross there too, banal sub-porno and pubescent moronics woven in alongside clips of Sid Caesar and W.C. Fields (that make anything referring to itself as comedy these days as pallid and lifeless as...well...a really pallid and lifeless thing); pimply teens wrestling and gawking and guffawing can be found and viewed, if that's your idea of a good time. It's a glimpse into our own misapplied youth and it's freakin' embarrassing. It's the Crap Drawer in our kitchen we have to wade through to find the one working flashlight when the fuses pop.
But the sermon's there, the latest in a series of unholy grails, and it's in a context that turns the media-manufactured controversy on its ear.
The Fourth Estate is as troubled as real estate, both suffering from an onslaught of unreliable vendors and lenders, both victimizing their customers through empty half-truths and brazen fraud. Fox and CNN's co-opting of Rev. Wright's incendiary text in order to convert their respective congregations into holy rolling glossolaliacs (that means, like, speaking in tongues, you know?) is as much a reason to lose faith in the democratic process as tampering with vote tallies in a national election. And it's edited with as much heart-stopping pizzazz as an action sequence in a '70s chop saki flick.
In spite of the Rev. Wright's arguably righteous anger spewed from his pulpit, and Obama's eloquent disengagement, the MSM knows fuel when it smells it, knows how to stoke the coals when they begin to cool. They take a moment of rage and imply a lifetime of hate. They depend on -- as much as any preacher does -- the crowd's susceptibility to rapture and the likelihood of its being swept up in the fervor of a moment or in the inspiration of a movement. And if they so choose they can take the upward trajectory of a people's hope and nudge it just enough to crash it into a ditch.
It's how information is disseminated these days; the responsibility to sift through the news, advice, guidance, whatever, has been all but abdicated by the individual and entrusted to those that might not be worthy of such a trust. Blessed are they that put their trust in Him. But even then, you might not be getting the whole picture.