God bless America vs. God damn America

Mark Steyn, making sense:

The song the Rev. Wright won't sing is by Irving Berlin, a contemporary of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, all the sophisticated rhymesters. But only Berlin could have written without embarrassment "God Bless America." He said it directly, unaffectedly, unashamedly – in seven words: "God Bless America Land that I love."

Berlin was a Jew, and he suffered slights: He grew up in the poverty of New York's Lower East Side. When he made his name and fortune, his marriage to a Park Avenue heiress resulted in her expulsion from the Social Register. In the Thirties, her sister moved in with a Nazi diplomat and proudly flaunted her diamond swastika to Irving. But Berlin spent his infancy in Temun, Siberia (until the Cossacks rode in and razed his village), and he understood the great gift he'd been given:

"God Bless America
Land that I love."

The Rev. Wright can't say those words. His shtick is:

"God damn America
Land that I loathe."

I understand the Ellis Island experience of Russian Jews was denied to blacks. But not to Obama. His experience surely isn't so different to Berlin's – except that Barack got to go to Harvard. Obama's father was a Kenyan, he spent his childhood in Indonesia, and he ought to thank his lucky stars that he's running for office in Washington rather than Nairobi or Jakarta.

Instead, his whiny wife, Michelle, says that her husband's election as president would be the first reason to have "pride" in America, and complains that this country is "downright mean" and that she's having difficulty finding money for their daughters' piano lessons and summer camp. Between them, Mr. and Mrs. Obama earn $480,000 a year (not including book royalties from "The Audacity Of Hype," but they're whining about how tough they have it to couples who earn 48 grand – or less. Yes, we can. But not on a lousy half-million bucks a year.

God has blessed America, and blessed the Obamas in America, and even blessed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose bashing of his own country would be far less lucrative anywhere else on the planet.

UPDATE: I was thinking just now about Martin Luther King. He was a true prophet, in the Old Testament sense, who did not damn America, but called her to be true to herself. It's easy to imagine King denouncing the grave sins of this country, because he did that. It's impossible to imagine him denouncing this country in the fanatical terms used by Jeremiah Wright. Had he done so, we would be living in a different country today, and a worse one.

I was also thinking of the startling first chapter of Keith B. Richburg's "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa." Richburg, who is now a top Washington Post editor on the paper's foreign desk. Richburg, who is a black American, covered Africa for the paper in the 1990s, and he recalls standing by a river in Rwanda, watching bodies float by in the genocide there:

Sometimes they came one by one. Sometimes two or three together. They were bloated now, horribly discolored. Most were naked, or stripped down to their underpants. Sometimes the hands and feet were bound together. Some were clearly missing some limbs. And as they went over the falls, a few got stuck together on a little crag, and stayed there flapping against the current, as though they were trying to break free. I couldn't take my eyes off one of them, the body of a little baby.

More:

What I...noticed were the weapons--crude farming tools, really. Machetes and long panga knives, more typically used for clearing brush and chopping firewood than for severing human limbs. There were also clubs. Big, flat wooden clubs, smaller at the handle end and rounded at the top. They reminded me of the all purpose clubs Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble used to carry in the old TV cartoon. But with one small difference: To make the clubs more deadly on impact, the Hutu militiamen drove long nails into the end. That's what Rwanda has become, I thought. The country has reverted to prehistoric times, to a kind of sick version of Bedrock. And could these be fully evolved humans carrying clubs and machetes and panga knives and smashing in their neighbors' skulls and chopping off their limbs, and piling up the legs in one pile, and the arms in another, and lumping the bodies all together and sometimes forcing new victims to sit atop the heap while they clubbed them to death too? No, I realized, fully evolved human beings in the twentieth century don't do things like that. Not for any reason, not tribe, not religion, not territory. These must be cavemen.

Richburg says he started thinking forbidden thoughts. It came down to this:

Sometime, maybe four hundred years ago, one of my ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain. He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen or a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. And then he was put in the crowded, filthy, hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World.

Many slaves died on that voyage. But not my ancestor. Maybe it was because he was strong, maybe just stubborn, or maybe he had an irrepressible will to live. But he survived, and ended up in forced slavery working on plantations in the Caribbean.
Generations on down the line, one of his descendants was taken to South Carolina. Finally, a more recent descendant, my father, moved to Detroit to find a job in an auto plant during the Second World War.

And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that 35 years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist - a mere spectator - watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that's when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them -or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage.

And:

Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.

In short, thank God that I am an American.

History is tragic. Had my ancestor not gotten out of Germany in the 18th century and come to this country, God knows what would have become of us. Massacred on the Somme, or on the Soviet front. Had my Irish ancestors not gotten out when they did, we might all have starved in the famine. As far as I know, nobody in my family, since the immigrant days, has ever gotten rich or powerful (we've not even done as well as Barack and Michelle Obama). But we've done all right. Because of this country, my father, who was born into a house with no indoor plumbing, and who had to eat wild animals to survive during the Depression, was able to become the first man in the long line of our family since the first immigrant got to these shores to go to college. He did it on the GI Bill. And because of this country and the opportunities she gave to my family, my dad worked his way into the middle class, and put my sister and me through college. And we're making a better life for the next generation because of this. My sister's husband is serving our country right now in Baghdad.

Look, nobody had it worse here than the descendants of African immigrants. I get that. But the great majority of people who have come to America, from wherever they arrived from, had it tough on arrival -- but this country has given more than it has taken. As Richburg, the descendant of slaves, recognized, even the agonies his family was put through was a blessing compared to what might have been had they remained in their country of origin.

In Africa today, they're still killing each other without mercy. And in America today, we might be months away from electing a black man, the son of a Kenyan, as our president.

Despite her many sins and failings, God bless America. I criticize this country a fair amount in my writing, but let there be no doubt: like Keith Richburg, I thank God that I am an American.

UPDATE.2: Now Obama's church has issued a statement comparing criticism of the Rev. Wright to the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. They make themselves look more ridiculous by the day.