Bill Moyers offers an important interview of Reverend Jeremiah Wright available in video and transcript format. The interview offers wide ranging perspective into the uniquely American experience of religious pluralism as practiced by the Founders of the nation.
Those of us who pay attention to the sequence of important events in the currents of history will notice an important fact concerning the now notorious sermon by Reverend Wright at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in which one excerpt - "God damn America!" has been repeated with a certain degree of frequency through various media channels. The important fact is that the sermon in question was delivered on April 13 , 2003.
On March 20, 2003, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John S. McCain, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn - among other allies in our government - collaborated together to fashion a costly national security disaster of colossal proportions in the wrong country in our essential conflict to defeat the still undefeated enemy of Al Qaeda. Five years later, Usama bin Laden still lives and chaos brews in Iraq and in the Middle East as many realists predicted in 2003.
In this now notorious sermon, Reverend Jeremiah Wright spoke of Biblical wickedness of governments and inflexible, divine Truth throughout millenial human history. He makes a clear distinction between governments throughout human history (including the United States government) and the people those governments govern before falling into careless shorthand in which he conflates the ''United States Government" with "America" in the climax of his fervent declamations. (See the 23:00 minute mark in the 30-minute interview referenced here.) Specifically, on April 13, 2003, Reverend Wright argued in his sermon that ''governments lie" and ''governments fail''. It is now common knowledge that our government failed us on March 20, 2003 in some measure because of the failure by some of our leaders in government and the media to investigate the inconvenient truth that the dictatorship ruling Iraq had nothing to do with Usama bin Laden's Al Qaeda headquartered in Afghanistan based on the best evidence available to global security experts at the time.
We see similar dangers today with respect to Iran.
Not exclusively in the Fourth Estate, it will be interesting to discover what the record on April 13, 2003 reveals of the relationship between today's critics of this sermon and the important truths that were ignored by too many of our leaders during that critical period for resolving our national security challenges wisely.
After viewing it in its entirety, please share the link to this interview with friends in Texas and around the country by making use of the E-mail this post feature below if you believe knowledge of the interview will elevate public discussion of the issues raised in it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment