I'm not writing to disagree with M.J. Rosenberg, with whom I wholly agree that one's pastor should not be considered a spokesperson.  But I do think that Jeremiah Wright's story is relevant simply for contextualizing what it has to do with Obama and his run.  The wingnuts raving about Obama's crazy, America-hating pastor never mention Wright's military service (during which he received two presidential commendations), but I bring it up here to establish a timeline.

In 1961, the year that Wright joined the marines, nine students about his age from all-black Tougaloo College in Mississippi were arrested for entering the all-white main branch of the Jackson public library and sitting at tables to read books not available in the "colored" library.  Peaceful protesters at their trial were attacked with tear gas and police dogs.

In 1963, the year that he transferred from the Marines to the Navy to train as a cardiopulmonary technician, four young girls were killed on a Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama when their church, a meeting place for civil rights activists, was bombed.  

In 1967, the year he was discharged from the Navy, a trial was held in Neshoba County, Mississippi for the killers of three civil rights workers aged 20-24: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney.  The murders had been orchestrated by the county's deputy sheriff, probably with the knowledge of the sheriff himself, who belonged to the same cell of the Ku Klux Klan as his deputy.  Among the jurors was an admitted former Klansman whose participation was challenged by the defense; their challenge was denied by the trial judge, an ardent segregationist.  When seven of the eighteen defendants were convicted, the judge imposed sentences of four to ten years, saying "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man...I gave them all what I thought they deserved."

Think about what it must have felt like for Wright to have been serving his country while these things were going on.  The pride in the service, and the despair and rage at what was happening in the country he served, among its citizens and in its institutions.  Patriotism has always contained a paradox for black people.  On the one hand, we love and cherish the ideals our country is based on.  On the other hand, the Constitution, the document in which those founding ideals are spelled out so confidently, also contains a clause defining black slaves as three fifths of a person, not in order to grant them even a three-fifths share of the rights enumerated there, but to increase the power of slaveholding states by allowing their slaves to count when allocating members of the House of Representatives and of the Electoral College.

That paradoxical feeling we have long had, of carrying a crushing, passionate love for this country alongside a bitter disappointment in much of its past and its present, must be why it's very easy for me to hear Wright's anger toward his country in what I think is the accurate way, as directed toward its baser realities not from the lack of but BECAUSE of his patriotism, because of an unbending belief that we should be--must be--better.  The kind of patriotism that demands unsparing criticism of your country's moral failings is the kind Obama alludes to by taking off his flag pin to distinguish it from blind submission, I think, and the kind that those who are offended by that gesture don't consider patriotism at all.  Seeing Wright's influence in Obama doesn't scare me one bit.  What amazes me is the extent to which Obama has been able to take up the aspirational elements of that criticism and somehow escape the sense of impotence and despair that it tends to engender.  That he's truly done so is evident in every aspect of his campaign.  

Anyone who doesn't get that when they cool down is already beyond the reach of this campaign.