'He is somebody'

...And if all this prompts the suspicion that Jesse bearing more than rip-offs and rebellion...

...It unwittingly presupposes continuing black Re agan Poem Five separation - an intolerable burden whose moral and social costs more often involve the hustling of false messiahs than the I went to the Antipodes heroism of a Martin Luther King...

...therapeutic value, but it seduces blacks away from the hard What do the critics want instead...

...a few small publications and groups, was pathetically gulled Given the PUSH record of bolting a broad-based boycott of the by the media's own distortion of Jackson's opportunistic re- Coors Breweries several years ago in exchange for a few black cord and by television's "inability to distinguish between a franchises and sinecures gladly granted by management...

...It might have Rainbow Coalition...

...It is a measure of the seasoned dignity of Reed's argument The real indictment of the left, Reed feels, is that in its that he doesn't stoop to underline "concrete...

...the Catholic public, the latter when it is clear that private Finally, we lay Catholics will continue to cherish the values communication of views is ignored...

...New York, N.Y...

...Jackson doubled over with laughter when told Canadian postage: $2 a year - Foreign postage $5 a yea what the consternation was about...

...Many in the liberal media and the left, union-busting managements against worker boycotts: and apparently unable to bear our society's sicknesses or its cures, even to Republicans, always in exchange for bright lights and do wish unconsciously for blacks to enter the public arena microphones...

...Republicans Jackson (Texas Monthly Press, $16.95, 256 pp...

...demic politics...

...This process is deeply absorbing to the church sions of Christian faith and the more institutional manifestaprofessionals involved, mildly interesting to observers and tions of the church is not exactly one-to-one...

...Pat Robertson's campaigns...

...Two because his power is ultimately more personal than political...

...reception...

...for blacks...

...cratic representation until Jackson undermined them by playReed thinks Jackson also trades on a black communal weak- ing to the old weakness for authority...

...THE ASPIRATIONS & EXPLOITS OF JESSE JACKSON JIM SLEEPER nose-thumbing at the striped-pants diplomats Jackson had bested, seemed to follow an impeccably American tradition of AVISITOR to Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant on January ethnic celebration: the Great Black Hope had scored...

...Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC) will, apart from cutThe decision this August of three Lutheran bodies to merge ting down on acronyms, both fulfill and frustrate the longtime dream of American Lutheran unity...

...But even such tactics as Jackson's preaching of That democratic complexity has little place in a "crusade" black self-reliance are seldom joined effectively to substantive like Jackson's is amply illustrated in all three books...

...Though broader-gauged, Jackson's pulpit- inviting white condescension and indulgence...

...Jackson has fanned the fires of black exceptionalism...

...they must be and law as will obviate the continual strain between the prepared to carry their side of it to the American bishops and to pastoral and reflective offices in the church...

...Yet at other were happy to have him around, while the word from a desperpoints, they seem to lunge into a harsher investigative treat- ate Harold Washington camp was, "Get this brother out of ment of Jackson's alleged reverse-racism and hence betrayal town...

...Reed shows that the media, by turns sentimental and cynical, gave blacks indulgence and condescension in abundance...

...Reed and Landess and Quinn believe Assad...

...LUTHERANS TAKE A LEAP Another kind of merger MEL PIEHL into one "new" church on January 1, 1988 - to be called the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) - could DENOMINATIONAL MERGERS generally constitute one of turn out to be an exception, but probably won't...

...Even the few bishops who may in far different circumstances at the beginning of our century...

...City, State, Zip That there is something potentially demeaning to blacks in this notion - that their standing rides on one man's treatment With notification, as a gift, from: - is illustrated humorously in a Faw and Skelton anecdote...

...Rhetorically, Jackson is superb, but he never auditorium after Jackson excoriated her and others who'd translates platitude into anything beyond token concessions, betrayed the racial solidarity so critical to his success...

...And it reinforced the black community's status as an so disruptive of the Southern consensus within which they held exotic appendage to the polity, playing by special rules and their small sway...

...STRONG DO AS THEY WILL blacks achieve integration in the long run...

...At reporting and claims to draw on an earlier profile of Jackson by least Jesse holds their feet to the fire by raising foreign and Chicago reporter Barbara Reynolds) suggest that between domestic issues they're afraid to discuss: corporate domination Jackson's stardom and the slum conditions it exploits there lies of the economy and the "defense" establishment's hold on a broad ground untilled or perhaps ravaged by his hustling...

...it leaves an inequit- ment here: the record of black elected officials isn't exactly a able and destructive national consensus untouched except by a rhetoric which exhausts its listeners more than it empowers them...

...not like to hear from us ought to, and on a regular basis...

...A sad parody of Local 34 and 35 of the Federation of University Employees [at a Faustian bargain for the professors, superior though it un- Yale], who, while this book was being written, acted with doubtedly was to the famously low stakes of their own aca- great courage to advance a concrete vision of human dignity...

...That sentiment might well be echoed by the losing of whites on his staff...

...Their emotion was simpler, and to that extent charismatic brokerage has done to black political developapparently more benign: a black man in uniform had carried ment...

...They couldn't see - 15 Dutch St...

...It wasn't only Louis Farrakhan who warned against "harming this brother...

...They show that he has often cozied up to Chicago's excluded from, and hence spared, the white world's subtle, Daley machine against independent black candidates...

...They are tacit, and he always keeps his media's double standard for blacks, of its too-gentle treatment end of them by distracting at the critical moment his followers' of Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, on the one hand, but and possibly his own attention from real black interests in also, at the same time, of the journalists' "Hymietown" serious political reform, the restructuring of investment and catharsis...

...4, 1984 would have found the normally down-at-the- Something about that moment encapsulates what 1 take to be heels ambience of Fulton Street electrified...

...and social movement and a group of people shouting in a church...

...Why single left...

...by Thomas American bombing raid over Lebanon a month before...

...black congressional candidates Jackson flamboyantly backed Like King, of course, some blacks have indeed presented themselves in the public arena brilliantly, redemptively...

...months ago, she pronounced her earlier criticisms `outdated' Which is why Reed would rue the jubilation on Fulton and urged support for Jackson's current efforts to build the Street, almost unequivocally, as bad politics...

...The casually racist assumption that all ghetto politics is gutter politics fueled the media's need for a "top black" who could simplify that Christmas byzantine, impenetrable world, while escapist fantasies demanded a redeemer...

...Jackson supporters may wants vigorous black initiation into representative democracy, counter that the black elected officials and organizational coupled with the organizing of interracial coalitions pressing spokesmen who oppose him are themselves beholden to for the jobs and social services without which, he feels, no "white power" and so even less effective with their com- society or polity can flourish...

...Dialectically, the young men's spirited "high fives," even oldsters grinned Jackson-backers often argue, the awesome shift in young broadly, elated...

...given the Rainbow Coalition's current unprincipled pandering Left academics, hoping to put their ideas across, tried to to selected interest groups like independent oil producFrs...

...It seems to me, too, that theologians should come up selves...

...Above all, they must not of mutual respect, freedom of speech, democratic interaction, slip into the silence of the marionette as their predecessors did and institutional self-criticism...

...If Robertson erodes the liberal consensus among followCarolina...

...In a pivotal but, I fear, slightly promises...

...Journalists Faw and Skelton avoid the worst of these abuses...

...Popularly written, this book might have hit black leaders hard...

...insinuate themselves into this media chimera, which ended Jackson supporters on the left should be acutely embarrassed with little more than the four modest platform demands so by the pointed dedication of Reed's book: "To the members of readily scrapped by Jackson at the convention...

...It relieves quiesced in many such misplaced black resentments (with a pent-up racist fears and resentments mainly by stroking them, few notable exceptions like the New York Times, which did catering to them with double messages that legitimate them not hestitate to probe Jackson's murky PUSH operations...

...But if that's what AND THE WEAK DO AS THEY MUST...

...Have Reagan's own handling of foreign policy (say in that its impact on true integration, on balance, has been negaLebanon) and his misappropriations of patriotism proved any tive...

...Landess and Quinn charge that the media ac- populists like Theodore Bilbo and George Wallace...

...We may not save them from the consequences of their with suggestions for such modifications of church government acts, but we can let them know that they do not stand alone...

...to routine corruptions...

...Lutheranism contains religious energies and spiritual insights Amidst blizzards of paper and gales of rhetoric, two or of great significance for American Christianity, but as Luther more closely related church structures clumsily reshape them- was wont to point out, the correlation between vital expresselves into one...

...cries at the start sophisticated journalists to have covered Jackson, occasion- of Harold Washington's general election campaign for mayor ally approximate a romance in a campaign account, Thunder of Chicago almost ruined the victory, as Landess and Quinn in America: The Improbable Presidential Campaign of Jesse show in a strong chapter on that city's politics...

...He has As for the Rainbow Coalition's alleged failure to embody a deployed his rhetorical and self-promotional gifts to manipuconsistent, coherent agenda, are "responsible" black elites late the unconscious messianic fantasies of the media and the who oppose Jackson any less given to pandering...

...the masses," much of the left, with the notable exceptions of And perhaps that is Jesse Jackson's most serious problem...

...Yet August Franza the white liberal expectation of black moral purity is profoundly unfair...

...practice of genuine interracial cooperation, ultimately underEnchanted by Jackson's siren calls because given to anticipa- mining the populists' own crusade by failing to build on tory flutterings over every real or imagined stirring among foundations of mutuality...

...The most infamous' in- citizens capable of practicing representative democracy, but stance was the defection of Jackson's PUSH organization from invaded periodically by bands of religiously or racially a boycott of the Coors Breweries in exchange for some tokens charged voters who otherwise want none of its responsibilities...

...They let dubiously driven men upon gullible followers...

...28 CI Two years, $49 "hearing aids...

...Coming out of last in rescuing him seemed to be confirmed rather than co-opted summer's convention, the Rainbow Coalition insisted it was a by President Reagan's gracious, if calculating, Rose Garden movement broader than one man's presidential aspirations...

...Reed's subtly powerful analysis and Landess and Quinn's him out when he's merely beating putative statesmen of all lively chronicle (which has been criticized for some sloppy races at what is all too obviously their own cynical game...

...In striking the pose of black redeemer, they argue, less opportunistic or damaging to genuine American interests...

...For example, CBS reporter Bob Faw and the late employment, and so on...

...Both books give considerable backing to the charges that resembled South Boston's whenever the Celtics win a basket- Jackson has been deceitful, opportunistic, and manipulative of ball championship...

...That is the root of the make these bargains...

...Ambassador Andrew Young's dismissal after meeting commoneaI w with the PLO as an affront to all blacks...

...Los Angeles Times reporter Nancy Skelton, two of the more For example, Jackson's "We Want It All...

...State, Zip they felt he was getting second-class protection from Reagan because the Secret Service agents assigned to him all wore D One year...

...His articles nourishes the dangerous illusion that American blacks can have appeared in Dissent, the Village Voice, and other publications.really extricate themselves from U.S...

...The pace on the street quickened, and amid black concerns for his own aggrandizement...

...W r _ W M = = === === =Mom== =M=46 - Send COMMONWEAL to: I N FAIRNESS to the media, Jackson's supporters played to the journalists' need for a "top black" by making him the Name litmus test of white "respect" for all blacks...

...instead, its impact is sandbagged by its own language...

...cans, would put more pressure on the system for thoroughgoing change...

...diplomacy to pursue the Commonweal: 590 chimera of a new "Third World Order" with the likes of forces more ominous...

...Reed chal- their constituents mistake his rhetoric about jobs and health lenges the sentimental liberal notion that black churches were care for concrete progress toward winning them...

...What Richard John Neuhaus personal brokering of public patronage and corporate set- calls "the naked public square" - naked because denuded of asides for blacks lets political clubhouses and corporations off its essential religious and moral mantle by secular, liberal the hooks where more disciplined interracial coalitions and log-rolling - becomes the empty public square devoid of campaigns are trying to hang them...

...Landess reform agendas...

...dence which even a president had to respect, overwhelms the fewer still would have known of President Hafez al-Assad's preacher's little personal hypocrisies and whatever structural darker purposes in accommodating Jackson's plea for Good- damage authors like Landress, Quinn, and Reed think his man's release...

...thumping, no less than theirs, forecloses congregational dis- Reed acknowledges the central problem with his own argusent and eludes real tests of accountability...

...The surge of racial pride, even of jubilant black than a truly coherent program for empowering the "left-out people," we're cautioned against employing a double standJIM SLEEPER writes widely about urban politics and teaches in the ard: so what, for example, if Jackson's "black" foreign policy Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University...

...himself as an American patriot, while another black man's feat Nor has Jackson's defense stopped there...

...Address Roger Wilkins declared that "giving respect to Jackson is symbolically giving respect to all blacks," thereby handing the media its cue...

...It will fulfill it because the MEL PIEHL, who .teaches history and humanities at Valparaiso Uni- merger culminates the long historical process by which the versity in Indiana, is currently a Fellow at the Institute for Ecumeni- numerous Lutheran bodies in the United States (at one time in cal and Cultural Research...

...But let us hope we can stand and make our quotient solidarity with us and with absolutely nothing to gain themof noise...

...Jackson foreMore important, by settling for the segregation of black closes its development in people who never had access to it in demands from broader systemic agendas at critical moments in the first place, but might have it now...

...As the latter understood, any in search of M. ihucvdides who'd tell me, as I bent my knees' real transforming power wielded by blacks depends on their to laud this man of histories...

...T HIS BLACK communal weakness for charismatic authority, if real, might explain a difference in nuance between Jackson's and the Rev...

...Thucvdides then answered the It may well be, as Jackson apologists claim, that only by from the grave of ancient dust: consolidating an ethnic/racial power base in politics can THE...

...But blacks' political immaturity and isolation were more ominously reflected - without benefit of correction from Jackson - when they misread U.N...

...Reed insists that his into complexity, and vice-versa...

...A brass ring had been caught, an American Dream When it's suggested that Jackson's dramatizations of inequity come true, if only symbolically, for people badly needing such and raw need reflect a collection of narrow group claims rather symbols...

...Jesse the rearguard defense of Jackson expressed by some of his Jackson was winging his way from Damascus to the White more thoughtful supporters in the wake of the devastating House, bearing in triumph Navy flier Robert O. Goodman, disclosures and criticisms made in Jesse Jackson and the who had been shot down and imprisoned by Syria during an Politics of Race (Jameson Books, $17.95, 276 pp...

...One wishes he'd continued arguing as if slamming a fist into his palm in impassioned but intelligent debate...

...Thus the meaning of the mysteries their "normal" aspirations, joined to those of other Ameri- of Ronald Reagan's policies...

...But too often the writers flow with the romance of the campaign, washing away Jackson's 22 times a year blemishes simply by juxtaposing them with his strengths, a facile juggling of adjectives that passes for "balance" in so much network news entertainment...

...A congregation of mostly elderly black Texas churchgoers murmured unhappily throughout one of Jackson's speeches,mys- Name tifying the candidate and his aides, until it became clear that Address City...

...They are expected to Jackson doesn't quite know who he is, there is little about these bear a kind of salvation, a special reservoir of feeling and acrobatics to force him to a moment of truth...

...Fortunately two critical chapters, on the media and the left, Cshed some of the academic baggage...

...Reed, a social democrat, work that builds political maturity...

...his fraudulent claim that King had died in his arms until the One inadequate yet widely accepted (because only partially moment in 1984 when he bartered his weak Democratic Party conscious) answer, exposed and demolished in the Reed and platform demands for fifty minutes on the podium at the San the Landess and Quinn books, is that we do hold blacks Francisco convention, Jackson has betrayed the real interests peculiarly responsible precisely because they've been of blacks...

...Reed is really holding out for the ratificatory and educational potential in electoral processes as against Jackson's sheltered charlatanism, formally accountable to no one...

...ers who may once have had intimations of it...

...White flight from liberal key political and economic struggles, Jackson has done his complexity is thus reinforced by a black retreat from initiation putative opponents substantial favors...

...blacks' horizons engendered by Jackson's comings and goings Few on Fulton Street would have been making a "pan- on the world stage, the stunning new assertion of black confiMuslim" connection between black and Syrian interests...

...students of American religion, confusing to the folks in the The merger of the American Lutheran Church (ALC), the pews, and largely a matter of indifference to the religious Lutheran Church in America (LCA), and the Association of community at large, not to mention the world outside...

...foreign policy, for example...

...As Reed's and Landess' and Quinn's arguments have yet to Landess and Quinn argue in an extended and instructive com- achieve the impact they deserve...

...Too bad, for he is clearly a seasoned participant-observer in politics...

...on disciplined brokerage of conflicting principles and interthe moment Washington did win, Jackson moved to South ests...

...Black politicians, ambiness for charismatic authoritarianism embodied in the person- valent enough already about their modest gains in office, ally certified "call" to ministry, which has so often foisted capitulated to Jackson's politics of moral posturing...

...The genial, avuncular Robertson sacralizes politics by urging Christians to win elections for God, while Jackson politicizes reliCommonweal: 592 study in democratic vitality...

...Their sections on anti-Semitism and the growing disillusion- is coming ment of some of Jackson's closest white supporters and staff do look unflinchingly at the candidate's troubling and appar- give commonweal ently unyielding resentments...

...We There may come a time (if, for example, the bishops are should not forget that, whether we agree with them or not, unwilling to protect them) when we must, as Lyndon Johnson theologians such as Charles Curran and the religious women put it, hunker down like a Pedernales jackrabbit in a who signed the New York Times advertisement did so out of windstorm...

...Rather, too often his message fails to distin- and Quinn describe the withering censure and physical danger guish "self-discipline" from uncritical support of the corpo- experienced by black reporter Barbara Reynolds in a crowded rate status quo...

...Their failure wellsprings of democratic civil rights action, noting that most of nerve set back the already hard, slogging march toward preachers, accustomed to being big fishes in their small ponds, sustained, organized power in the service of a real political reacted very warily to the movement's broad-based initiatives, program...

...On N. Landes and Richard M. Quinn, and in Adolph L. Reed, Fulton Street there was no organized celebration, but as blar- Jr.'s The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (Yale, $5.95 pager, 176 ing radios and newsstand headlines told the victory, the mood pp...

...he has not even perception tapped in the folk wisdom and the searing moral had to shed militant rhetoric, not even behind closed doors, to force of a Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Consciously or not, Jackson remains largely his own...

...That drains the political But even more destructive and disingenuous than the media, nervous system of resilience in the long run by attenuating the Reed argues, was the left, and his analysis is devastating...

...Another problem is that Reed's defense of accountability is itself so stilted in academic language that he risks becoming a foil for cheap shots from the Jackson camp, which will brand him an elitist...

...10038 i i nIa6 nor would Jackson help them see - that rightly or not, any 7 November 1986: 593 diplomat who'd done what Young had would have met the parison, Jackson's style often parallels that of white Southern same fate...

...the mid-nineteenth century there were over forty) have graduCommonweal: 594...

...Even if the near-bankruptcy of However benignly Jackson's pyrotechnics may have been American electoral politics doesn't excuse black charismatic refracted on Fulton Street, then, these ctitics insist that from excess, why hold the system's historical victims responsible the moment in 1968 when he waved a bloodied shirt to support for its actual redemption...

...Too many are just like Jackson, long on rhetoric but short on organizational skill: others are subservient to or imitative of the worse white machines...

...Jackson's 1984 campaign was trying to do, it also set in motion 7 November 1986: 591 in primaries against Peter Rodino of NewarK and the late gion by mobilizing the faithful toward a glory that somehow Joseph Addabbo of Queens...

...even in seeming to transcend them...

...more prosaic integration into economic and civic life...

...And a measure infatuation with the symbolism of the presidential campaign it of the media's sentimental racism, the left's woozy desperacared not a whit about the consequences of Jackson's charis- tion, and the black community's awful vulnerability that matic hoo-hah for actual black political development...

...Reed, a black political scientist at Yale, responds wobbly chapter, he claims that a growing legion of black that it is Jackson who won't submit to black democratic ratifi- elected officials, which antedated and owed little to Jackson's cation in any arena outside the purely symbolic presidential come-lately voter-registration drives, had at least begun to one, and that is why Jackson depends on the white media's introduce their constituencies to the practical arts of demoindulgence of spectacle in order to keep afloat...

...His book began, he tells us, as an irate response to a panegyric on Jackson in the Nation...

...American the less inspiring features of American church life...

...Reed thinks this is especially costly to seemed to sense that Harold Washington's victory would end blacks, who need to learn to organize in a liberal polity based his own prominence as David to the white machine's Goliath...