The Sin of Jeremiah Wright

"The sin, the sin, eating in..." A snatch of poetry suddenly bubbling up from memory; but Google doesn't recognize it, so maybe I remembered wrong...

Anyway, I have finally decoded the sin of Jeremiah Wright, the thing that made him so wrong, so Not Ready for Prime Time TeeVee. He forgot the cardinal rule of Media Figures (not to be confused with Public Figures, which he has been for decades now): Never Forget You Are On TeeVee. And the corollary to that rule, the one that makes this cardinal rule inviolable: TeeVee is the only Reality.

It's been this way for so long now we've stopped thinking about it. Harlan Ellison told the story in one of his collections of stories about Dan Blocker, the actor who played "Hoss" on "Bonanza," back when that show was on the air and as important to people as "The Sopranos" or "Battlestar Galactica" are now (yes, Gen X'ers and all you post Baby Boomers, hard as it is to believe, someday people will not recall your favorite TeeVee shows with any more importance than you have forgotten "Gunsmoke" and "The Rifleman" and "Have Gun, Will Travel," a particular favorite of my grandfather's and mine, when he was alive and I was wee. We also loved "professional wrestling," but that's another confession entirely. We dearly enjoyed comedy.)

Back to Dan Blocker: Ellison was with Mr. Blocker one day when an elderly woman approached him and reproached him for the condition of the Ponderosa, for the way Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene, for those of you too young to know) was running the house, and the food "Hop Sing" (their Chinese cook) served. Mr. Blocker tried in vain to dissuade this ardent fan; he could not convince her he was an actor, that he had no familial relationship to Mr. Greene, nor was he really "Hoss Cartwright." That TeeVee show was her reality, and she wouldn't be shifted from it.

And she was too old to have grown up watching TeeVee.

When Rev. Wright preached his "controversial" sermons, he wasn't preaching to America, or anyone beyond his congregation, and they seemed to not only agree with his sentiments, but to understand just what he meant. I have learned from my brief time preaching (too brief, but that's yet another story) that sermons are aimed at a particular audience, at a congregation you come to know, and one that comes to know you. Sermons develop out of a conversation with that congregation, they develop their own vocabulary. The sermons of Martin Luther King we remember were delivered to an audience he knew was not his congregation. Whenever I give a sermon to a strange group, one, that is, strange and new to me, it's never the same sermon or experience, as a sermon I might give to a congregation I have pastored for many years. The differences are subtle but important, and the main one is this: I know who is listening to me when I preach to "my" congregation. Put that sermon on tape and send it out for the world to see, and I don't know who is listening to me, or how they will take what I say.

The other main criticism against Rev. Wright, the one that has achieved the imprimatur of "conventional wisdom," (and my thanks to Grandmere Mimi for the link) is that Rev. Wright did alright in his speech to the National Press Club, but it was in the Q & A afterwards where he "failed." Note that the criticism of that portion of his presentation is all based, again, on it being on TeeVee.

TeeVee is not reality, it is a camera: it is a small, narrow aperture, a tiny particular eye through which many people at once can see: and because of its narrowness and particularity, it presents an imitation of intimacy. It appears that the speaker before us is speaking to us, even though he can't possibly be aware who is watching him. It's a one-way conversation, which our celebrities and politicians are trained in using. They are experts at the mimicry of intimacy, when the intimacy is sometime not even with a questioner (who may be in a studio) but only with an instrument, a device, a lens and a box held on an unspeaking person's shoulder. We've all learned this, by now. Watch old footage of "man on the street" interviews, and people seem awkward and stiff with this glass eye sucking at their attention. They try to talk to the person holding the camera, not the persons watching the image the camera captures. Today everyone knows how to "act" on TeeVee.

I cannot describe to you how odd it is to first stand in front of a group and give a sermon. In many churches, no one responds, nor do they expect to. You can feel like you are casting pebbles into a very deep well, and not even hearing the splash, sometimes, until weeks later. Sometimes you hear nothing at all, ever. I imagine speaking to a TeeVee camera is like that: it's a one way conversation that we, the audience, imagine is two-way. Rev. Wright, of course, is used to a congregation that does respond; that is evident from the briefest clips of videotape. And even reading the transcript, you can see the audience responding at the National Press Club. But they respond with laughter, and applause, and even questions from the floor, which he tries to answer but which get cut off. Rev. Wright tries to establish the intimacy with the interrogators, not with the moderator: he tries to take the audience in the room seriously and personally, when the TeeVee Audience imagines it is the audience he should be playing to. Thanks to the narrow vision of the camera, we don't see that audience; and since we are not there, their presence is not present to you and me. Only the man before the camera is real, and since he does not pretend to be real to you and me, we take umbrage with his responses aimed at an audience we can't see.

That audience laughs, applauds, responds to what the speaker says, and the speaker responds to them. But that audience doesn't go on the evening news and pundit shows. The audience that does that, even if they were in the room, understand the rules of this "cool" medium, and they freeze out the man used to the "hot" medium of personal responses from an audience he can see. Those responses are even removed on the sound bites and clips shown on the evening news: the frame is narrowed further, the focus tightened until only the central figure can be seen, and his movements and expressions, isolated from context and meaning, become bizarre and weird and the unreality of TeeVee becomes the only reality we can see.

Which is still tangential, but then again not quite, to the either/or we are still pursuing.