The American Spectator : McMansion Marxism

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Black liberationists who pour bile upon America rarely want to leave it, preferring to wallow in the "white" wealth they claim to distrust than risk penury and persecution in their imagined Marxist paradises.

Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent figure in the Black Panthers, once tried life abroad in those glorious countries free of racism and oppression -- Cuba, Algeria, among others -- and returned shaken and depressed. He had seen the future and it seemed to him pretty crummy and not a little bit scary.

"Pig power in America was infuriating," Cleaver concluded. "But pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable."

Speaking to Reason in 1986, Cleaver confessed that he had "a great burning desire to help enlarge human freedom and no desire at all to increase human misery or totalitarianism, so I stood up in America to fight against what I saw as the evils of our system. Then to go to a country like Cuba or Algeria or the Soviet Union and see the nature of control that those state apparatuses had over the people -- it was shocking to me. I didn't want to believe it, because it meant that the politics that I was espousing was wrong and was leading toward a very bad situation..."

If one is enamored with the liberation theology or ideology of non-Western countries, it is better not to visit them and certainly not to live there. Marxism is best contemplated upon in a mansion; Afro-centrism is most comfortably practiced in America.

BARACK OBAMA'S FORMER pastor Jeremiah Wright has received a thoughtful retirement gift along these lines from the United Church of Christ. As the Chicago Sun-Times reports, thanks to his congregation's largesse, Wright will soon ease into the big R in a $1-million-dollar, four-bedroom home in the "Odyssey Club neighborhood" of Tinley Park, Illinois.

Perhaps confused observers can be excused for mistaking this as a new missionary assignment. According to Wikipedia, the demographic makeup of Tinley Park is alarmingly unbalanced: as of the 2000 census, it is "93.16% White, 1.92% African American, 0.13% Native American, 2.38% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 1.11% from other races, and 1.27% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.13% of the population."

Padding between his reported whirlpool and circular driveway, or maybe while fishing out a snack from the butler's pantry, Wright can develop some thoughts for volume one of his memoirs on the blinding racism of bourgeois living in the USA.

Not that Wright is alone in his McMansion Marxism. That's the familiar posture of most radicals: the farther they get from Marxism, the better it looks; the more America protects their celebrity, status, and wealth, the more secure they feel in denouncing it.

LIKE WRIGHT, THE celebrated black novelist Alice Walker is comfortable enough in Uncle Sam's arms to gnaw on his fingers.

She says Obama is a gift to racist America: "He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change it must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves."

And also like Wright, she is comfortable enough in the arms of white liberals to nibble at their fingers too. Spelling out for Democrats that race trumps sex in the party, she lectures white feminists that Hillary is not merely a "woman"; she is a white woman and as such deserves to lose right off the bat.

Writes Walker, Hillary "carries all the history of white womanhood in the US in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to try to make her innocent of her racial inheritance."

Eldridge Cleaver, looking back at America while suffering in Cuba and elsewhere, understood the insanity of such posturing. Agitprop safe at home sounds absurd and revolting abroad.

If you are a "victim," make sure to select a kind and gentle oppressor like America. Gandhi, too, by the way, had that figured out, selecting the civilized British as his brutal master. At least he had the decency not to move into a McMansion.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Barack Obama, Business, Africa