16 April 2008
 
Heaven’s Scenes

The Pope is in town, carrying his campaign of tough love to the American branch of his sometimes fractious flock. I am not going to try to get to the stadium downtown tomorrow, though I have to pass by during the day, and will be on my toes.
 
They called the Holy Father the Marine of Theology, and in his no-nonsense approach to his flock, there is more than a little truth in it. In the Marine Hymn, they say that:
 
“If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes
They will find the place well-guarded by
The United States Marines.”
 
True or not, I am unlikely to ever find out. But God bless the United States Marine Corps. They are the few, the proud, and the most unashamed Americans on the planet. I am proud of SSGT Ronald Mace, USMC, who assisted my transition from flabby civilianhood into the strange world of the Naval Service.
 
He taught my little class at Aviation Officer Candidate School with an iron fist, and an ironic humor that took a several weeks to fully comprehend, by which time the experience was blessedly over.
 
I will never forget the first salute I received as a commissioned officer from him, his stoic face not registering a bit of the irony he must have been feeling.
 
There are dozens of Marines who have illuminated parts of the odd pathway that my life has taken. The hundreds of them who died in the Beirut Bombing, the time we should have woken up to the fact that our enemies were quite serious about the business of killing a lot of us, and the tens of thousands who have served with honor, and unique élan when the nation called on them to do so.
 
And a thousand of them dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
So the Jarheads have a special place in my heart. You can imagine my surprise the other day when I heard the news about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the focus of attention in the messy business of the Trinity Union Church of Christ in Chicago. Senator Obama has attended for the last twenty years, and his close relationship with Wright was the mini-firestorm before last in the endless campaign.
 
This one has legs, though, and I believe that we will be seeing more of it as the rest of this endless year grinds on. Here is one of the quotes that has made Rev. Wright such a lightning rod:
 
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
 
There is much more, of course, and we will be seeing those, too, on an endless loop through the summer. This particular one makes me scratch my head, since it contains things that are true enough, and things that are not true, and there are things that just make you irritated.
 
But I think we should cut the Reverend a little slack, based on his service to the nation we assume that he hates. Reverend Wright was a Marine. That is his picture at the top of this installment of spleen, taken at his graduation from Boot Camp in 1961.
 
I don’t know why his response has been so long in coming, since it is a thoroughly American story. Jeremiah Wright was attending Virginia Union University, a historically black school in Richmond Virginia in 1961 when President Kennedy issued his historic rhetorical call to service: “Ask not what your country can do for you.”
 
Wright dropped his student deferment, left school and joined the Marines. He survived Boot Camp, and was assigned to the 2nd Marine Division. After two years of honorable service as a rifleman, he applied for transfer to the United States Navy to enter the Corpsman School at Great Lakes Naval Training Center.
 
Ask any Marine what he thinks about Corpsmen, the enlisted Sailors who are the combat medical component of the Corps. You will be impressed, I think. I’m sure there have been poor Navy Corpsmen who have been assigned to the Marine Corps, but there are probably more that earned posthumous Navy Crosses.
 
Rev. Wright did not do that, though. He graduated as the class valedictorian, and as such, was assigned to the flagship hospital of the Naval Service, the Bethesda National Naval Medical Center. He was then trained as a cardiopulmonary technician, graduating number two in his class. Bethesda is the health-care facility of choice for Congress and the Executive Branch. That is how Petty Officer Wright came to be one of the care-givers for President Lyndon Banes Johnson when he had heart surgery in 1966, and he still thought the war in Indochina was winnable.
 
Petty Officer Wright got three letters of commendation from the White House, so his service was apparently pretty good. He launched off on a new career in 1967, the years that things were falling apart in the District. He got his bachelor’s and masters degrees from Howard University before going back up north to the Windy City, where he earned his masters in divinity from the University of Chicago.
 
He started his career at Trinity United after that, and in his thirty-six year ministry, developed some ideas that I think are appalling. The trip to Libya is on the edge of good taste, and the idea that the HIV virus was cooked up by Uncle Sam to infect Africa is straight out of the Soviet Disinformation handbook. A smart guy ought to know better. His exhortation to “God Damn America!” is a little galling, considering who is guarding the streets up there.
 
But I sometimes get the same reaction to things I hear down at the VFW, too. I figure they are entitled. They are family. I have to say that Rev. Wright’s five years in uniform, serving the same Constitution the rest of us did, gives him the right to say what he wants, crackpot or not. I think there is an Amendment about that.
 
Being able to say it doesn’t make it right, of course, nor does it prohibit other people from running the more gratuitously embarrassing bits over and over again. But as opposed to two thirds of the people in this race for the Presidency, and the vast majority of those telling us what to think about it, at least Rev. Wright paid some dues to speak his mind.
 
That ought to count for something.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com