The Wright Controversy Revealed America's Deeply Insecure Side

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

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).

Anyone who's ever listened to Farrakhan or any other angry black nationalist is familiar with a lot of these ideas, which have been around forever and aren't exactly controversial in certain circles. The same white America that enjoys saccharine Ice Cube movies like Are We There Yet? and Barbershop probably would puke in its minivan if it listened closely to Farrakhan-inspired Cube tunes like "When Will They Shoot?," which talk about Uncle Sam being "Hitler without an oven," with white America guilty of "Burning up black skin," and bombing neighborhoods to "push the crack in."

A lot of this stuff is stupid as hell and totally paranoid -- the much-regarded theory that white scientists cooked up AIDS in order to keep Africa poor (as if it needed help) rivals only the 9/11 Truth movement for sheer stone-headed dumbness -- but a lot of it is just angry America-sucks ranting grounded in the unfortunately utterly factual record of American iniquity, not much different from the kind of thing you'd read coming from Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky.

But whether or not any of Wright's "controversial" statements have any validity at all is beside the point. The point is that a country that had any balls at all -- that was secure enough in its patriotic self-image to stare vicious criticism right in the face and collectively decide for itself, in a state of sober reflection, what part of it was bullshit and what wasn't -- such a country wouldn't do what it did in the case of the Wright flap, which is to panic instantly, collectively leap off the ground in terror like a bunch of silly bitches, and chase the criticism away in a torch-bearing mob with its eyes averted without even bothering to talk about what was actually said.

Yet naturally this is what was done in this case; the very first response of the entire national media apparatus was to denounce Wright as a kind of living disease and shriekingly demand that Obama do the same.

These controversial occasions, it should be said, are favorites of the national punditry. They offer an opportunity for slothlike, couchbound columnists everywhere to dress themselves up in white-hot outrage and to pen long accusatory columns in a tone suggesting that all contentment and happiness in their lives will henceforth be impossible until the offending agent is fully and completely shunned by society.

See more stories tagged with: barack obama, election 2008

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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