Matt Taibbi: The Wright Controversy Revealed America's Deeply Insecure Side

The Wright Controversy Revealed America's Deeply Insecure Side

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted March 27, 2008.

A society at peace with itself wouldn't have reacted in the way it did to the partly true/partly crazy remarks of Obama's former pastor.


The word "squeeb" is a crude mix of squid and dweeb, and by inventing it I mean no disrespect to the squid, which in most respects is an excellent and admirable animal. In the ocean there's almost nothing you'd rather be than a squid, one of nature's most perfect predators -- fast, resilient, ruthless, more intelligent by leaps and bounds than your average fish, and able to squeeze into impossibly tiny cracks. In the ocean, there is no hiding from a squid, I tell you.

But on land, a squid is about as useless as it gets. It's a spineless, squishy little hunk of seafood that wouldn't stand a chance in a cage match with a baby squirrel. It has no heart, and its first instinct when trouble comes is to hide in a cloud of its own excretions. This is why a squiddy word like squeeb seems to me to be a good way to describe the American voter during a presidential election season.

That's especially true now, during a "controversy" like this latest flap over Barack Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright. This Wright business is a perfect example of the American electorate at its squeeby worst -- panicky, gutless, acting more on reflex than thought, incapable of retaining information for more than a few minutes at a time. It's also a great example of how the presidential election process has become more about enforcing the attitudes of a cultural orthodoxy than a system for choosing leaders.

Through scandal after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom, through a variety of means keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian contest -- survival of the Squeebiest.

As by now the entire country has heard, Barack Obama was forced to run the media gauntlet this week after a series of videos shot across the internet, showing his pastor doing his best Minister Farrakhan impersonation. Pastor Wright's comments ranged from the idiotic (suggestions that AIDS in Africa was spread by the U.S. government) to the even more idiotic (urging black parishioners to sing "God Damn America" instead of "God Bless America") to the not-entirely-without-validity (suggestions that 9/11 in some sense represented a form of blowback for America's violent foreign policies, its role as the world's chief purveyor of weapons, and so on) to the absolutely-true-but-taboo (observations that the U.S. supported terrorism against Palestinians and senselessly bombed Cambodia and Iraq).


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http://www.alternet.org/election08/80577/?page=entire

that keeps Obama from staying on message,
but he must play defense.

It points to the American publics reliance
on the cable news media to think for them,
and to provide talking points around the
American dinner table.

Sadly, the last 8 years were semi-directed
by right wing clergy who blatantly used their
pulpits to push the Bush/cheney agenda.

But now the shoe is on the other foot,
and someone everyone forgets the past..