I’ve noticed that other bloggers sometimes use recurring titles for posts that mention various content items without trying to pull them together into an essay. In thinking about what I might use for such a title I remembered that my major prof in graduate school liked to come into a Friday class sometimes and say, “Let’s talk about snakes.”

Cheney in Iraq: This morning’s Credo Action carried a subversive piece by Michael Kieschnick about the current troubles in Iraq. According to Kieschnick:

[T]he single best explanation for the violence now wracking the country is that [Vice President] Cheney traded American military support and the lives of our soldiers for taking down the Sadr movement in return for ISCI [Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq] backing the elections that are required to show progress that gives McCain a better story going into our own elections.

Kieschnick’s primary evidence is this suspicious coincidence:

On March 17, Cheney visits Bagdhad, and has a private meeting with Abdul-Aziz Abdul Mahadi, the leader of ISCI. Almost immediately thereafter, the ISCI vice president announces support for elections. And several days later, the central government, backed by US troops and airpower, begins its assault on Sadr neighborhoods in Basra and Baghdad.

So, we’re supporting Mahadi’s attempt to suppress a political rival in order to give McCain something to claim as a political accomplishment of the surge, something guaranteed to be popular in the US, like the last Iraqi election — “remember the purple fingers of Iraqis who had voted all over the mainstream television broadcasts?” It’s believable in light of the political connection between this war and shrub’s second term in office, but here’s a different take.

Read the rest of Kieschnick’s argument here.

Obama, politics and theology: Fr. Mark Harris put me onto a post at Covenant entitled “Racism and the meaning of Baptism.” Actually, it’s a fairly lengthy excerpt from an article, by Professor J. Kameron Carter of Duke University, in Theology Today. That, in turn, led me to this Carter opinion piece in the Des Moines Register. I especially like this paragraph:

The challenge of Obama’s speech is that it advanced a politics of race that says post-racial politics cannot amount to a refusal to remember. It requires memory, even though it is more comfortable not to remember. We remember for the sake of being responsible for the present so that we can chart a new American future.

But Professor Carter’s language here is quite different from the language of the reflection quoted at Covenant. There’s an edge to the newspaper piece, a seeming willingness to be adversarial. Among other things, he argues that one cannot speak politically about race in America:

To speak of such unsavory matters in the context of politics is to be deemed a “race man.” And once deemed a race man, a candidate is dismissed, his political aspirations dashed against the stones.

And with respect to Jeremiah Wright, he says:

It is worth noting that in disavowing his former pastor’s remarks, Obama also held up his former pastor as a symbol of the larger frame of black prophetic Christianity. This Christianity is a voice of the nation’s conscience, calling us to our better lights.

But as I say, the language of the Theology Today essay is quite different, and the difference is not just that Carter’s scholarly idiom is larded with postmodernist jargon. His argument appears to be that in the context of trinitarian Christianity, baptism entails a renunciation of all oppositional thought and behavior.

To be baptized into Christ is to move beyond the hegemonic-counterhegemonic polarity. Indeed, it is also to move beyond the dialogical I-Thou polarity, which is but another oscillating and, finally, oppositional metaphysic. It is to move, again in Perkinson’s language, into “a different form of power” precisely because it is entry into a different body-politic, namely, the trinitarian body-politic of Christ. It is this baptismal body-politic that discloses “[t]he reality of what is,” a reality that is a different way of being in the world.

This language seems to devalue the prophetic, as Carter does at the beginning of the quoted excerpt, framed as a response to another theologian whose manner of argument, like Jeremian Wright’s, is shaped by a type of black liberation theology that Carter finds lacking in understanding of “what it means to be a Christian, along with an understanding of the theological task that is transparent to that meaning.” I’m neither moved nor persuaded by this argument. It seems just a fancy-dress version of the age-old argument for quietism in the face of injustice. But I don’t want to say anything else, and should perhaps not have said this much, because I’m aware that I may not be fair.

Professor Carter’s new book, Race: A Theological Account, which I suspect will include the essay I have quoted, will be available from Oxford University Press on August 25, 2008, which happens to be my birthday. I look forward to reading it.

Mobs and smart mobs: Thinking about how the Jeremiah Wright videos have gone viral has reminded me of Howard Rheingold’s theory of smart mobs. The mob that’s after Jeremiah Wright, and Obama because of his association with Wright, may be a smart mob. At least one of the respondents to the Carter op-ed piece at the Des Moines Register thinks so.

When all is said and done, this episode will be viewed as just one more time that the press/media has taken the bait and let itself be led around by an hysterical fringe element. We’re already seeing the electorate stop in their tracks, do their own research and thinking, and concluding that maybe they don’t know as much about the black experience as they ought to but more clearly that they don’t think a contest to see who will denounce, reject, and disown the greatest number of people they disagree with is anything to brag about.

But to judge from the majority of responses to that same piece, this mob may be just an ordinary mob. It’s amusing to a geezer like me to read all the flaming directed at somebody who stands accused of nothing more than using extreme language. But verbally lynching Jeremiah Wright is very serious indeed, and somebody I’ve read has used the term McCarthyism to describe the attack on Obama over his association with Wright. It’s infinitely worse than that — infinitely worse. Obama may recover politically — likely he will. Wright’s reputation, and we’re talking about a good man who has had a distinguished career as a clergyman — Wright’s reputation may never recover.