BARACK Obama is the Sidney Poitier of presidential politics. Not the Poitier who snarled "They call me MISTER Tibbs", at bigoted Sheriff Rod Steiger (in In the Heat of the Night), but the charmer who soothed Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn when he came to dinner. Poitier's job in the Hollywood of the 1950s and '60s was to be the leading man black man, the actor who made blackness socially and aesthetically acceptable to whites.
The Bahamaian-native Poitier wasn't only pressed into representing African America. He was cast in British films (To Sir with Love) and South African stories (Cry the Beloved Country) to be emblematic of black dignity and decency.
Though nowhere near as cute, Obama has a far greater burden of symbolism than Poitier, and the dramas in which he stars are unscripted. Like Poitier, he's had a calming effect on white sensibilities, so that when he came to dine at the high table of US politics he made a meal of Hillary Clinton. At least until his enemies started screening videos of his ebullient black pastor. Having seen the Reverend raising the roof at his church of choice, Obama is suddenly being viewed as another dangerous darkie. Like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.
Obama has long wanted to transcend race as an issue and to be a crossover candidate, not only reaching out to white Democrats but also to Republicans. And until last week it was working. Having failed to brand him a secret Muslim, the anti-Obama forces from the Clinton camp to the religious right now find it easier to identify him with a Christianity of racial protest, one that's been around since the civil rights movement. While angrier than Martin Luther King's, it's wholly explicable in the political and social context.
But for real religious extremism look to the right, to what's left of the Moral Majority, those evangelical nutters whom John McCain denounced as bigots in his previous tilt at the presidency.
Exhibits A and B: Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, sometime candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Both are on record as believing that AIDS is God's judgment on gays. And they insisted that 9/11 was God's punishment for gays, gay marriage, abortion and sundry attempts to secularise the US.
They're typical of the legions of religious sociopaths who destroyed pluralism in the GOP and who, in unholy alliance with the neo-cons, sent the Bush administration and Iraq to hell in a hand-basket.
Falwell and Robertson saw the War on Terror as a crusade against blasphemous Islam, while their blank-cheque support of Israel is based on crazed interpretations of biblical prophesies regarding the Last Days and the Rapture. Compared to them, Obama's pastor is a pussycat.
And now McCain is reaching out to the theocratic buffoons he's long despised. While Obama's candidacy is being destroyed by a couple of sermons in a local church, Robertson has his own television network which,disgracefully, reaches into Australia via the appalling Christian channel on our pay TV, a collage of US fundamentalism with some local help from Hillsong.
Exhibit B. To give you a glimmering of Robertson's madness, consider his claim to have signed an exclusive deal to telecast the Second Coming. Presumably with God. Whereupon he had his outside broadcast experts choose camera positions in and around Jerusalem while working to develop camera lenses that would not be damaged by Christ's holy radiance.
Consider the following tit-bits. Robertson supported apartheid, refuses to admit any constitutional separation of church and state, believes atheists should be denied citizenship and urges his millions of idiot followers to let "a wave of hatred and intolerance flow over you, yes, hate is good". And who should they hate? Among others, gays, lesbians, humanists, Hindus and Muslims. He also states that other brands of Christianity, from competing tele-evangelists to the Vatican, are the anti-Christ.
Robertson recently attacked the Planned Parenthood movement for teaching kids to fornicate and promoting homosexuality, adultery and, believe it or not, bestiality.
He's frequently warned viewers of his 700 Club that the end of the world was nigh, giving various firm dates over the past 20 years, telling East Coasters that they'd be washed away by a giant tidal wave in 2004.
A few months ago he demanded that the US assassinate Hugo Chavez as that would be cheaper than launching a full-out war on Venezuela. And I almost forgot Robertson's claim that at age 76, he can lift 2000 pounds, something beyond the powers of leading athletes.
You'd think that carrying all that weight around would make Robertson anathema to any sane presidential candidate. But while he's embraced by McCain, it's Obama whose religious affiliations are being used as a WMD. Let us pray for America.
Comments
I saw that speech on race and politics by Obama. He's a decent bloke who speaks from the heart and I think, with sincerity. If he were, dare I say it, anglo, he wouldn't be putting up with half of the crap he's had to endure. This is the stupidity around when people can't see past their skin colour.
For the sake of colour, people could very easily miss the bigger picture.