I've finally gotten around to watching the Bill Moyers interview with Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ. Like everyone else in the country, I'd seen the inflammatory clips of Wright declaiming: "God Bless America? No, no! God damn America" and his fulminating that 9/11 was America's chickens "coming home to roost." Of course, it bothered me to see someone's character reduced to a few nasty words looped ad nauseum, but I was mainly uncomfortable with the episode. I was worried about the effect that Wright's words were having on Obama's candidacy. I was saddened to see Obama's nuanced and sensitive positions tarnished by association with a demagogue. I had no personal acquaintance with Wright, I thought; his politics are radical, his faith is not mine, and his voice, that angry rant on YouTube, was not a voice I recognized. I might feel some sympathy for this man's very public character assassination, but I certainly don't know him. How could I?
But before Moyers even began speaking with Wright, he ran some footage from Trinity United shown on Frontline in the mid-1980's. After some setup, the video showed the pastor preaching a sermon in a voice that begins in a low, bass growl and ends in a howling roar. Shivers instantly ran down my spine and I knew where I had heard this man speak and what his preaching had meant to me.
When I was in high school, I'd dreamt of being a professional trumpeter. I'd devoured every jazz recording I could get my hands on, but my favorite was a gift from my parents: Wynton Marsalis's The Majesty of the Blues. Its New Orleans jazz, with stately rhythm and wailing horns spoke to me in a way that music never had before. (Just last year, when I first heard Oswaldo Golijov's ravishing The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, David Krakauer's klezmer clarinet reminded me immediately of "The New Orleans Function", a bizarre and beautiful association from which I still cannot shake free.) I wore out my copy of The Majesty of the Blues listening to it on my cassette walkman under the covers at night. It seemed to me an alien and beautiful thing, ripe with sounds that were not heard on the plains of North Dakota; rich with emotions far from those felt in my house and among my friends.
The track that had me most enthralled was the middle movement of "The New Orleans Function", a stirring sermon called "Premature Autopsies" written by Stanley Crouch and delivered by a black preacher with fire in his throat. Over and over again, I listened to this oration which wove together the story of jazz, the black experience in America, the possibilities of democracy and the dangers of unscrupulous commerce. Heard night after night, this sermon opened up entire worlds for me. I did not understand it completely, but would return to it again and again, throughout my youth and into my adulthood, understanding a bit more of it each time.
I didn't become a jazz musician, and it's probably a good thing. By the end of my junior year of high school, I'd realized that I lacked the real talent that devotion to art requires. I came to see that, as an art form, jazz was nourished by the deep waters of African-American history and culture. I could appreciate these intellectually, wash in them aesthetically, but could not contribute myself to them. Not in any real way. From that perspective, and for all its soaring tone, my encounter with "Premature Autopsies" was a sobering one. I found my limits there.
But I'd also like to believe that the connection drawn in that sermon between rhetoric, art and democracy touched me in a far deeper way. A large part of my intellectual life began then, I think. My lifelong sensitivity to poetry and politics, to music and biblical metaphor was sparked in those late night listenings.
Of course, as I realized tonight, when watching the first few minutes of Bill Moyers Journal, that preacher was Jeremiah Wright. Placed in its proper rhetorical context, Wright's voice regained for me its timbre. What had seemed shrill was shown as climactic. What appeared demagogic became prophetic. An alien suddenly showed the face of a mentor, strange as that seems to say.
The irony is that, in that sermon, Jeremiah Wright himself describes the forces which have led him to this difficult place. In the interview, Moyers asked him why he thought it was that he failed to communicate his message properly. To this, Wright replied:
"The persons who've heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly. What is not a failure to communicate is when something gets taken like a soundbyte for a political purpose and put constantly, over and over again, looped in the face of the public. That's not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or, as the learned journalist from the New York Times called me, a 'whackadoodle.'"
This is true, as far as it goes. There is a bad faith at work in Wright's public misrepresentation and excoriation. There are clearly those who believe they have much to gain by reducing his long career to a few seconds of screaming. But this answer never gets to the heart of things. That there are unscrupulous people who seek to gain by tearing others down is an undeniable fact. Maybe today Wright feels the sting too personally to tell us why this is so. In "Premature Autopsies", Stanley Crouch had described it better:
But we must understand that the money lenders of the marketplace have never EVER known the difference between an office or an auction block. They have never ever known the difference between the place where bodies were sold and the place where souls were saved. They have never known that there was any identity to anything other than that of a hustle, a shuck, a scam, a game. If you listen to them, they’ll tell you that everything is always up for sale. They recognize no difference or distance between the sacred and the profane. For them, everything is fair game to be used in THEIR game.
I realize now, that the one thing the journalists have gotten correct in this episode is that it is a scandal about integrity; not of the speaker or his famous congregant, but of his listeners. There is integrity in respecting the context within which a man's words are spoken. There is sacredness in struggling to appreciate the intention behind speech. Such values are sadly far from our public life.
If you want to hear what Jeremiah Wright sounds like when he's not damning America, listen to this. If you like it, buy it.
