In the grand tradition of Saint Jude Thaddeus, patron saint of lost causes (or perhaps Gen. George Armstrong Custer, stupid white man), I'm going to attempt to demonstrate that Rev. Wright - and more importantly the religious tradition from which he springs - has been grievously wronged.

Rather than wishing this would all go away we should be righteously angry at the system - The Man - that generated this fiasco. Or at least understand it. Because it's probably going to happen again and again in the age of character assassination via YouTube, regardless of whether Wright is put "behind us."

And I promise - this won't be a political brief for Barack Obama.

First, a few stipulations: Like all great cranks, Wright is an obnoxious jackass with an ego the size of the Gobi Desert. He was handed a golden opportunity for a global Teaching Moment and he blew it, big time.

Nor am I going to get deeply into Wright's AIDS conspiracism. My position is that it's ugly, it isn't justifiable but is is understandable. See this excellent essay. And I think it is in no way equivalent to the right's conspiracies about AIDS (Wright is a strong supporter of gay rights). It isn't "reverse racism" towards whites.

Nor is the Farrakhan issue justifiable. I don't think it can be properly understood without a deep knowledge of south side Chicago, where Wright was simultaneously competing directly with the NOI for parishioners and cooperating against forces allayed against the community. But nor do I expect people to not hold it against Wright.

Land that I love
Alright. Let's start with the genesis of the shitstorm - the God Damn America video(s). I'm going to put aside the right wingers' berserk because there's no sense in untangling that dementia. But the media - without exception,, to my knowledge - got it 180 degrees wrong. As did many progressives, who unthinkingly lumped the sermons in with the fundamentalist right.

The basic misunderstanding/willful misrepresentation is that Wright claimed the United States got what it deserved and/or that 9/11 was divine punishment for its sins. This isn't mere oversimplification or quoting out of context, it's twisting Wright's words into the exact opposite of what he actually said.

First, the "God damn America" line was not in the 9/11 sermon (it came in another similar sermon in reference to America's history of race relations). More importantly, though he issues it in a booming voice and via biblical allusions, Wright was making a much more nuanced argument that doesn't depend at all on divine intervention. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Wright's central thesis is that people throughout history have claimed God's blessing both committing heinous acts - "dashing babies' brains against rocks" as in Psalm 137 - and in seeking righteous retribution for said acts. Both of these cases are human rationalizations for violence, he says. Psalm 137, often pointed to as evidence of God's sanction, is actually an example of this rationalization.

Wright is making essentially the same point as Soren Kierkegaard (having read a number of his sermons, I'd go as far to say Wright is, like Soren, an proto-existentialist). God is transcendent. He is perfect and unchanging. He is not part of this imperfect, human world, and to assign any part of it - even the Bible - to Him is inauthentic and therefore blasphemy. Or, in Wright's term, "fake."

The end of the sermon is straight out of Kierkegaard, making the distinction between the false god of governments and the public and the true God that resides within everyone:

This is a time for me to examine my own relationship with God. Is it real or is it fake? Is it forever or is it for show? Is is something that you do for the sake of the public or is it something that you do for the sake of eternity?

That's why God damns America, according to Wright - for assigning it's puny motivations to God's will. Now that statement may be just as offensive to "mainstream" Americans as the "divine will" spin. But let's at least crucify Wright for what he actually said.

The big split
This part's going to get off farther in the weeds in terms of analysis. But I believe it's far closer to the truth than the conventional wisdom. The latter is so stupid, misshapen and internally contradictory that I find it hard to summarize. At base I guess it's that Obama was simply using the church as a campaign prop and was hoping Wright's extremism wouldn't be revealed and/or Wright was concealing his hatred in some sort of preacher code that Obama should have detected.

Obama's problem isn't that he got caught up in Wright's hateful religion; it's that he fundamentally misunderstood Wright's heart-of-darkness Weltanschauung.

Obama joined the church in his community activist days because of Saul Alinsky's advice; it's a readily available source of local intel and a structure for organizing.

He stayed, I think, because he saw the church as a ray of hope in a sea of misery in South Chicago. It fit with his earnest idealism, and Wright's sociopolitically tinged style - as opposed to the more abstract yammering in most churches - soothed his secular sensibilities.

I said Wright has existentialist tendencies (which I think is confirmed by his embrace of Ralph Ellison's oeuvre). "Hope" is a complicated concept in this worldview. To someone not steeped in the philosophy, hope can come off as precisely the opposite: as wallowing in one's own misery (read: that crazy dude in Notes from Underground savoring a toothache).

But in many ways it's a philosophy that fits perfectly with the black experience in America. Grace through suffering. The Blues.

Wright's outlook and teaching isn't simply a matter of religion. And the "Audacity of Hope" isn't about soldiering on with faith that the future will be better in this life or the next. It's about soldiering on with the certain knowledge that life sucks and always will. The same thing that pinko commie Sartre said.

I think therefore that Wright's pissing on Obama's parade isn't just about ego. It's a basic resentment of Obama trying to turn sweet sourness into happy happy joy joy horseshit and campaign slogans.

To Wright, campaign politics is basically hopeless and an anathema to everything he believes in. It's Bobby McFerrin trying to sing Leadbelly.