One polemic by Edwin Young

Pastor Mueller, Doctor King, and Pastor Wright: An Heroic Trilogy of Truth Sayers
By Ed Young

Put the part of your MSNBC King Memorial clip, frpm Friday, April 4th, at 10:30 AM CST, in which Rev. M.L. King spoke about Viet Nam next to the 'so called' inflammatory remarks of Pastor Wright. If you do this and if you think about it seriously, you cannot escape indicting the media's coverage of Pastor Wright as a caving in to our contemporary Jingoism as seen by its adoption of the right wing perspective and its framing of our justification of our headlong rush into cultural and economic imperialism.

We threaten our diffidently disagreeing citizens with character assassination. We buttress our patriotic drumbeat with our unrivaled armed forces and indomitable militarism by which we threaten those countries that disagree with, defy, or retaliate against our imperialistic designs.


The legacy of Pastor Mueller, the man who preached against Hitler and the rise of Germany's Jingoism, resounds across these sixty-five years since. In the 1960s, we heard those reverberations in the acerbic indictment hurled at us in King's preaching truth to power about our maniacally straying into the unjust military desecration of Viet Nam, our insensitivity and inaction toward racial injustice, and our callous neglect of the poor and disadvantaged. Now, in our day, we once again have listened with ears that do not hear, nor do they heed, the ringing, bitter, indicting words of Pastor Wright's voice as one crying in the wilderness. Now, once again, we rage, like a crazed mob, whipped up by spineless, sell-out, media agitators. Once again, we, an equally weak-kneed people, are lulled into becoming the pundits' mindless sound-byte junkies. At their beck and call, we remonstrate with an inferno of protests against Wright's searing message that lays bare our egoistic, narcissistic, chauvinistic, guilty national soul.

We chant "Nay, nay, crucify him, crucify the anti-American Pastor Wright. We will hear no more of his betrayal of our Manifest Destiny".

When shall we hear a new Edward R. Murrow voice coming to us with courageous, stinging truth through one of our principle TV Channels?


Author bio:

Edwin Young is working on a book tentatively called, "Can There Be a Paradigm Shift in Psychotherapy?" Links to some of his essays can be found at The Natural Systems Institute.