Bernie:
Great article. As one with no ancestors here I’m even more free from “white guilt” than other immigrants from the Old World. But I do derive myself from a spiritual–for lack of a better word–ancestorship, the Founding Fathers, their smart wives and daughters, and their constituencies.
One thing that strikes me that hasn’t been pointed out enough is that Pfleger, like Jeremiah Wright, is a mountebank, a con artist, a purveyor of hate and anger potions. Their trade is in a phony sense of identity and resentment. It’s an emminently easy trade, apart from the contortions of the body on the stage and the cost to the vocal chords that can be relieved, behind the stage, with a shot of bourbon. Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the actors on London stages and on the country roads of England would have recognized these fools as two renegades of their own craft.
Try to watch Jeremiah Wright in another medium, being interviewed on TV. His incarnation is scholarly, reasonably restrained, almost genteel.
