Carnal Reason

Here’s a clip of Jeremiah Wright, now famous as the pastor of Obama’s church. Some people say that Wright’s remarks are racist.

The Anchoress thinks otherwise.

What is going on here is a profound slight-of-hand, or an illusionist’s expert misdirection. You are being told to think you’re seeing one thing, when you’re actually seeing another. Except for the fact that whoever released these tapes has played it, this sermon would not be an example of a “race card” being thrown. It’s a victim card. This is about the Primacy of Victimhood over all else.

….

Both Democrat candidates have been playing victim cards in their turn, for months. Yesterday Geraldine Ferraro upped the ante by playing the gender and reverse-racism victim card.

…

The victim card is an odd card to play in a presidential race; victimhood in and of itself seems like a strange theme for either presidential candidate to embrace. “Vote for me; I’m the bigger victim and this qualifies me to…” what, exactly, lead the wailing?

I want to say a few words about victimhood.

About four years ago, my wife and I started taking our then two year old daughter to a series of doctors. We went out to the UNC Chapel Hill medical center many times. It’s a huge complex, but we always went to the same building, the one where the neurologists work. Part of any such trip is waiting around for your appointment. So we waited, in a pleasant, well-lit little corner of hell. I saw patients waiting, people with real problems. Terrifying, tragic problems. I remember one man in a wheel chair that looked like something NASA designed. I don’t think he could even breathe without assistance.

Three years after that, I remember the first time I took my daughter to school. She is autistic, and so attended a special needs program. That was the first day I met her classmates. It broke my heart to see the fate God or nature had inflicted on those innocents. I came home completely shaken. My wife told me I had to toughen up. I suppose I have, but it’s just discipline. It’s a trick, a facade. Inside, I’m still shaken.

Sometimes I see a healthy person, walking around with eyes, a spine, and a brain that work. That person, privileged to live in this country, is complaining about being a victim. I never know what to say. Sometimes I almost feel sorry for them. Not because they are victims, but because they are pathetic self-absorbed fools. So I don’t say a thing.

Let me leave you with quotation from Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. Think about it next time you hear someone demanding political handouts, or office, because he’s a victim.

A chromosome crosses or a segment snaps, in the egg or the sperm, and all sorts of people result. You cannot turn a page in Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation without your heart’s pounding from simple terror. You cannot brace yourself. Will this peculiar baby live? What do you hope? The writer calls the paragraph describing each defect’s effects, treatment, and prognosis “Natural History.” Here is a little girl about two years old. She is wearing a dress with a polka dot collar. The two sides of her face do not meet normally. Her eyes are far apart and under each one is a nostril. She has no nose at all, only a no-man’s-land of featureless flesh and skin, an inch or two wide, that roughly bridges her face’s halves. You pray that this grotesque child is mentally deficient as well. But she is not. “Normal intelligence” the text says.

Of some vividly disfigured infants and children–of the girl who has long hair on her cheeks an almost no lower jaw, of the three fingered boy whose lower eyelids look as if he is pulling them down to scare someone, of the girl who has a webbed neck and elbows, “rocker-bottom” feet, “sad fixed features” and no chin– the text says “Intelligence normal. Cosmetic surgery recommended.”

Turn the page. What would cosmetic surgery do for these two little boys? Their enormous foreheads bulge like those of cartoon aliens, their noses are tiny and pinched, the size of rose thorns; and they lack brows, lashes, and chins. “Normal intelligence”.

Posted on March 13th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: personal observations