Greeley (belly)aches

I’d like to be able to feel Andrew Greeley’s pain, but he hurts in so many places, I wouldn’t know where to start. 

It’s a darn shame Obama had to “defend his outspoken pastor,” says G. in his Sun-Times column.  I would have said he had to defend himself for picking the guy, and not in a month of Sundays at Trinity UCC on 95th St. or in any other church would I let him off the hook with “outspoken.” 

“There is no evidence at all that the senator identifies with his clergyman, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”  Other than he picked him as a veritable soul mate and guide and stayed with him 20 years.

If O. loses Pa., “[t]he United States will reveal itself to the world as a country in which a candidate can be destroyed by a single explosion on YouTube — at least if he’s black.”  Oh boy.

“The media will celebrate that they have dragged down another celebrity like Gov. Eliot Spitzer.”  Oh my.  Where do we start with that comparison?  Or “the media” as undifferentiated beast.  Where is this Andrew Greeley coming from, to use a semi-current expression meaning, what makes him tick or what in tarnation is he thinking?

The teacher [whom G. creates for the moment] will have to tell [students wondering years hence why a good speaker like O. didn’t make president] that there were enough closet racists in the United States (especially in Pennsylvania) in those days who seized on the outburst of his cleric as an excuse to destroy Obama. It’s not fair, they will cry out. Whoever said fair? The teacher will reply, quoting John F. Kennedy.

Or he will tell them what he says about William Jennings Bryan or Adlai Stevenson — excellent speakers, I believe — using the reason offered frequently by Mayordaley I when one of his candidates lost, they didn’t get enough votes.

Hillary C. and her staff

did everything they could to keep the race issue alive during the campaign [the teacher will say]. They attacked Obama on every possible occasion, just as if they were Republicans. She even hinted by lack of strong support that Obama might not be a Christian.

I am working on that “lack of strong support” part and hoping it comes to me in the wee hours when I sit up in bed and say “Eureka,” which is a once-current expression meaning, “Yippee, I got it!”

Hillary, G’s teacher will tell these terminally disillusioned kids, one of them “a boy with clenched fists,”

was the only one to gain by it. Of course, it proved that [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright was correct in his judgments about the American people. Many of them hated blacks so much they would do anything to keep one of them out of the White House. At least they didn’t shoot him.

I’ll say.  G’s teacher, his hyper-melodramatic back-to-the-future alter ego, concluded:

He almost won the primary anyway. If he had, they probably would have shot him.

Spattering brains all over the motorcade.

Back to 2008, when “many of the gloating members of the commentariat” — the dirty stinking bastards! sob! —

have appointed themselves to be the jury to determine whether Obama was guilty or not guilty of a major “gaffe” that cost him the election.

The majority seems to have found him guilty. In fact, the only thing of which he is guilty is that he is black. Worse still, he is a pushy black. My teacher in the future used the wrong word. Obama was lynched.

And Clinton was ultimately responsible for playing the race card.

She set loose the whirlwind.

Beat that for purple prose if you can.  Does this guy get excited or not?

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Save jobs for SEIU?

 Will Chi’s S. Side Chatham neighborhood — “Pill Hill” for its many physician residents — get a Wal-Mart or won’t it?  Where do consumers come into the labor-union-solidarity picture anyhow?

Arnita Mock Harris, [a] resident, said she and her mother travel to Evergreen Park and Lansing to shop at Wal-Mart and would rather shop in the city if they could.

“We don’t shop in our neighborhood,” said Harris. “The prices are too high. We go to the suburbs.”

It wouldn’t be the first time black shoppers had to go suburban to find prices, not to mention goods.  But in this case, it’s unions that would be sending them there.

Tell it, brother

What better sign do we have that Obama Central is running scared in the wake of Rev. Jeremiah’s sermons than this plaintive plea by Sun-Times columnist and O. enthusiast Mary Mitchell:

We get it. A lot of white people were offended by snippets of sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.  [She doesn’t get it.]

But frankly, critics and those who are supporting a candidate other than Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination have gotten all of the mileage they can out of this debate.  [No.]

All right, fellas, you had your fun.  However:

The aftermath of this racially polarizing incident is predictable. Instead of rising to the challenge to move away from the racial rhetoric that Obama talked about in his historic speech, we the media will continue to fan its flames.

Next, you’ll be bombarded with polling data that purport to show that Obama is losing ground with the white vote.  [Purport all you want, you creeps.]

But wait.  The holy man’s words are plastered over Internet and YouTube, his flock stands and waves approval, he’s the most famous preacher in the America, and it’s racially polarizing.  Would Mary M. rather he be a little secret?

Nope.  How can any of his people object when his light is taken out from under the bushel of 400 W. 95th Street? 

Look.  Candidate O., a person of interest in the matter, gives a speech that NYT’s David Brooks calls “the perfect statement of dignity” and “a glimmer of hope” in a world otherwise gone terribly wrong. “You just can’t buy that kind of analysis,” said A Waco Farmer, one of the Bosque Boys.

But all Mary M. can do is sigh:

At this point, Obama has done all he can do to put this matter to rest.

He has condemned Wright’s controversial sermons as “wrong” and “divisive,” even though he knows as well as I do that after 9/11, you could have walked into several activist churches in Chicago and heard a similar sermon delivered from the pulpit.  [How many?]

And he has given many black people reason to pause by distancing himself from a man he once introduced to the world as his spiritual leader.

She defends Wright as a man unjustly criticized, in view of his non-preaching achievements, blaming us who have not praised them, herself included.

She pictures him as shattered by the publicity:

I have not spoken to Wright, who will retire in June as the church’s senior pastor, but I imagine his heart is broken.

She should talk to him.  If Jeremiah Wright’s heart is broken by this outpouring of attention for him and his preaching and his black liberation theology, I am a proud graduate of Moody Bible Institute. 

It’s to die for, what’s happened to him.  He’s living a preacher’s dream.

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The grandmother issue

Count me among those who wondered if the grandmother who worried about black men she passed on the street were still living.  Answer: yes. 

Here’s John Fund:

Mr. Obama’s campaign has made clear that his 84-year old grandmother, who has asked to be left alone, should be considered off-limits to political reporters. But yesterday, it was Mr. Obama who didn’t leave her alone when he used her for one of the central themes of his speech.

O. said he can’t disown Rev. Wright, who spoke from a pulpit to a crowded church that sold CD’s with his sermons recorded, any more than his grandmother, who raised him and along the way made “stereotypical” remarks in private that made him “cringe.”

Don’t they teach logic at Harvard?  Or gratitude in church?  Did Wright make him cringe?

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Sauce for goose . . .

Oak Park columnist John Hubbuch ably defending an earlier column in which he called Hillary a “cuckquean,” feminine for cuckold:

I would hope my wife, sister, daughter or female friend, presented with this appalling pattern of behavior by their spouse, would file for divorce and stop enabling the husband and demeaning herself.

Same for other supposed stand-up feminists who stood up for their man who tomcatted around.  The sheer effrontery of these guys called for rapid response of sharpest nature from the abused wife.

Not saying divorce is required.  But some bringing to heel of the heel in public, if only by declining to do a press conference with him, is clearly in order.

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Big for his britches?

AP veteran Ron Fournier has coined a potentially harmful look-out, watch-out description of Obama: He thinks he’s hot stuff.

[T]here’s a line smart politicians don’t cross — somewhere between “I’m qualified to be president” and “I’m born to be president.” Wherever it lies, Barack Obama better watch his step.

He’s bordering on arrogance

The man from audacity “can be a bit too cocky for his own good,” says Fournier. 

“To know me is to love me,” Obama said in July.  “Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama’s been there,” he said later.

True, there’s a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekiness to such remarks — almost as if Obama doesn’t want to take his adoring crowds and political ascent too seriously. He was surely kidding when he told supporters in January that by the time he was done speaking “a light will shine down from somewhere.”

“It will light upon you,” he continued. “You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it.”

Kidding on the square, as my father used to say?

O. and his wife “ooze a sense of entitlement.”  She recently laid it on heavily, calling him “one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics” — we should be very grateful — and we will get only one chance to elect him.

With the entitlement will come his feeling very hurt if we don’t elect him, with accompanying emotions from his supporters, especially those who seethe with their feelings of victimhood — the other side of the volatile entitlement equation.

Update: A former reporter for the Hyde Park Herald recalls O. from his state senate days, when he was prone to a hot response and willing to bully a newsman:

It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn’t yet hit local newsstands.

It’s the first time I ever heard him yell, and I’m trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

Yet more interesting, in those days he was Emil Jones’s man.  Jones, senate president, became his “kingmaker,” writes Todd Spivak in the Houston (TX) Press:

“Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator,” Jones told former alderman, now talk-show host Cliff Kelley, an old friend.  “Oh, you are? Who might that be?” asked Kelley in a conversation both confirmed for Spivak.  “Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

O’s earmark requests were to include “tens of millions for Jones’s Senate district.” 

Back to O. as intimidating:

I was 25 and had no problem interviewing big-wig politicians. But I always had to steel my nerves when calling Obama. His intelligence was intimidating, and my hands inevitably shook with sweat.

Barack, we hardly know ye.

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Oprah bailed out of Obama’s church?

The plot thickens in the matter of Oprah Winfrey’s belonging to or attending Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th St. in Chicago, as mentioned in various places, including in a Chi Trib piece in January 2007:

At least one member of Rev. Wright’s church apparently had her fill of [his] rhetoric. Oprah Winfrey, a staunch backer of Mr. Obama, began attending the church in 1984. But sometime in the mid-1990s, Christianity Today reports the superstar abruptly stopped going.

That’s John Fund in the subscription-only Political Diary of the Wall St. Journal.  He’s referring to Christianity Today’s 4/1/02 piece, “The Religion of O,” which quotes a Black Collegian magazine column in which Wright shows himself irked by Winfrey’s departure and indulges in some unseemly backbiting:

Wright mentioned Oprah as an example of African Americans who forget their roots in the church after finding success. “A lot of us do not even like the word faith anymore,” he wrote [in the column]. “We prefer the more chic-sounding word, spirituality! We are caught up in an Oprah-generated mentality and a 12-step vocabulary that prevents us from using the very words and the very bridge that ‘brought us over!’ “

He makes her out to be a cheapskate in his comments to the CT writer:

“I think it is hard for most very wealthy people to be a part of the church,” he says. “Somebody who makes $100 a week has no problem tithing. But start making $35 million a year, and you’ll want to renegotiate the contract. You don’t want to be a part of ‘organized religion’ at that point. That’s a generalized statement, but that’s what I’ve found across the years. The wealthier somebody gets, the more they pull away from the church.”

In any case, she had not attended the church for eight years, Wright said in 2002, presenting her as a backslider:

“She has broken with the [traditional faith],” he says. “She now has this sort of ‘God is everywhere, God is in me, I don’t need to go to church, I don’t need to be a part of a body of believers, I can meditate, I can do positive thinking’ spirituality. It’s a strange gospel. It has nothing to do with the church Jesus Christ founded.”

Fund speculates that she wanted “to distance herself from [Wright’s] fiery speech” and notes that Obama “took a different path,” remaining in the church.

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Chicago Daily Observer | Sin everywhere you turn

This of mine is newly posted at Chicago Daily Observer:

The Vatican chimed in on the ills of the day:

This latest update on how God’s law is being violated in today’s
world comes from Msgr. [Bishop in the non-Vatican term] Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary.

He pointed to ’‘violations of the basic rights of human nature’’
through genetic manipulation, the use of drugs that ’‘weaken the mind and cloud intelligence’’ and the vast disparity between rich and poor.

’‘If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it
has a weight, a resonance, that’s especially social, rather than
individual,’’ Girotti said in an interview published Sunday in the
Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano about what he views as the ’‘new sins.’’

I love the “penitentiary” business. Not as in Stateville, be it known,
but as in penance, which we do for our sins whether eligible for
Stateville or not.

…………………………  more more more

 

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Bashing Belleville’s Braxton

This comes as no surprise to those familiar with the arch demeanor and towering self-esteem of Ed Braxton, a theology consultant who served briefly (3 years) as an Oak Park IL pastor before making bishop:

BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) – Nearly four dozen priests in Belleville’s diocese want Bishop Edward Braxton to step down.

A letter signed by 45 priests and sent to Braxton says his resignation would be for the good of Braxton and the diocese.

He apologized in January for spending money not his own — restricted Vatican and diocesan funds — for vestments and in general has demonstrated “lack of collaborative and consultative leadership,” say the Four Dozen, who are forwarding their letter to Cardinal George in Chicago and the Vatican’s man in Washington.

They are sure to respond promptly and affirmatively, backing up the priests’ wish for so-called Vatican 2–style governance procedures. 

But first, the Cubs and Sox play a seven-game World Series after Jerry Reinsdorf breaks the bank to buy A-Rod and other stars and Sam Zell gives up on selling Wrigley and changing its name.

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Death sting eliminated

Ezekiel delivers the ultimate promise from God, quoting him:

O my people, I will open your graves
and have you rise from them . . .

Paul tells Romans the same thing:

If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
the one who raised Christ from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also . . .

This is great news, to say the least.  It solves the ultimate mystery.  These two short (5th Sunday Lent, 3/9/08) passages lead to John’s long account of the raising of Lazarus.

He’s sick and not long for this world, or so people thought.  Jesus decided to use him to make the Ezekiel point about graves opening — and to anticipate the Paul point about resurrection.

The body was in Judea, where they were laying for Jesus.  “You’re sure you want to go back there?” his people asked him.  He answered mysteriously about a twelve-hour day (of daylight, we presume) and stumbling in the dark, meaning let’s go before it’s dark.

There was the back-and-forth with the dead man’s sister, who unwittingly sets him up for his clinching argument, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

He immediately puts it to her: “Do you believe this?”  She can’t say yes fast enough.  This was Martha, who got something of a bum rap earlier for getting tied up in housework when something big was happening — the biggest she would ever come up against.  It was a mistake she wasn’t going to make twice.

She sends for Mary, who gets up to go and meet Jesus outside of town.  “The Jews,” present everywhere you turn in these stories, follow her.  She arrives shaking with grief.  He catches his breath at the sight: this Mary broken up, racked with sobbing.  He groans and cries.

“The Jews” see it.  Some of them get nasty about it: “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?”

Jesus goes into action.  Roll the stone away, he says.  The body will smell awfully, says Martha, the practical one.  Didn’t I tell you not to be that way? Jesus says.  The stone is removed, Jesus prays to the Father, he issues the call: “Lazarus, come out!”

He comes out: “Untie him and let him go,” says Jesus, and the rest is history — the gospel truth, we might say. 

As for those “Jews,” they are pretty much understood to be the Jewish authorities.  “Johannine [John] Christians” were Jews in conflict on the basic issue of messianic identity.  This gospel, a sustained argument for Jesus as messiah, is for Jews who knew Greek, to convert them or to defeat them in an argument. 

The late Rev. Raymond Brown, a Catholic scholar of the first water, concedes anti-Jewish sentiment here.  At the very least, there was rivalry, sometimes intense.  That’s how it was in those days.

 

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