Now we have the Jeremiah Wright "scandal," which frankly makes me like Obama more. If you don't have a friend -- a real friend, someone who means something to you and sometimes influences your decisions -- who occasionally expresses a nutty opinion ("The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color") or an impolitic truth ("a country and a culture controlled by rich white people"), then you really, really need to get out more. Obama's connection to Wright is like his cigarette habit, his willingness to talk about his past drug use, his fondness for gritty TV shows -- it's a sign that there's an actual human being in that suit after all, no matter how empty it may seem when he's blathering about "an insistence on small miracles" and the like. It's a sign he might know a thing or two about the real America after all.
This morning Obama delivered a speech on the subject. It goes on endlessly, as his speeches often do, but it makes the essential, obvious point:
As imperfect as he may be, [Wright] has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions -- the good and the bad -- of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
I guess you either understand this instinctively or you don't. And then, of course, there are the people who understand it but will continue to pretend they don't, the better to smear Obama as a secret jihadist, Weatherman, or Farrakhanite.
[T]he lyric was written by Bunny Jones, a straight black woman with a family. Jones employed gay people in her New York hairstyling salon, and many of them became her close friends. When the gay rights issue got hot and heavy she decided that it was time for a positive statement.
"She is the opposite of Anita Bryant," states Bean.
I found that clip on the Queer Music Heritage website, which also informs us that the songwriters Ronnie Wilkins and John Hurley were lovers. Wilkins and Hurley wrote two major hits, one of which was "Son of a Preacher Man," which takes on new dimensions if you imagine it sung by a guy rather than by Dusty Springfield or Aretha Franklin. It may well be autobiographical, since Hurley himself is a gospel singer. (As is Carl "I Was Born This Way" Bean. That's Archbishop Carl Bean to you.) So I take back what I said about Tiny Tim: "Son of a Preacher Man" is the gayest song ever.
The other big hit written by Wilkins and Hurley? It's "Love of the Common People," which is, depending on how you prefer to think of it, a great country song by Waylon Jennings, a great soul song by the Winstons, a great reggae song by Nicky Thomas, or a great '80s pop song by Paul Young. Also, this guy plays it on the accordion, which is totally gay.
Also, it isn't online yet, but the March 10 issue of The American Conservative includes my review of Thomas Kitts' Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else.
The anthropologist Margaret Dorsey has listened to lots of lyrics like these -- though this is the first time she's heard someone combine a corrido, a specific kind of ballad frequently used in South Texas political campaigns, with Mexican mariachi music. "This is insane," she laughs as she hears the song over the phone. "I can't wait to listen to it at home. It sounds like a wonderful example of cultural hybridity and innovation."
Dorsey has spent a lifetime surrounded by borderlands politics and borderlands music. The daughter of a now-retired Texas judge, she attended her first rally when she was five. More recently, she spent several years researching and writing Pachangas (2006), an intriguing study of the intersection between music, marketing, and politics along the Texas-Mexico border. It focuses on the pachanga, a local institution whose forms range from family barbeques with musical entertainment to choreographed commercial spectacles sponsored by Budweiser, Ace Hardware, and other multinational firms.