The Rev. Jeremiah Wright wasn't going to take it any longer. He was being done in by a TV snippet here and another there, and it was time, he figured, for the Full Monty. For context. For an enlarged view of who he was and what he stood for. Here's some advice to the Chicago pastor: Stick with the snippets.

While the lessons about him have come the public's way as a kind of continued slap in the face, we have seen, too, that he is no dumbbell, but well-read and remarkably expressive, someone who, in relaxed mode, has a professorial aspect. Then we experience the charisma-touched, frisky entertainer, someone who throws his whole body into a performance that, unfortunately, is a kind of freak show of bizarre ideas.

He says America brought the al Qaeda attack on itself by committing deeds of terrorism itself, that this country is as world-controlling as ancient, imperial Rome, that even today, after a slave-freeing Civil War that left hundreds of thousands dead, after a magnificently successful civil rights movement in the 1960s, after all kinds of programs meant to overcome discrimination and racism-born disadvantages, we are the same, old bad place we always were, and that we today are guilty of the sins of the fathers.

It gets worse when he talks about the government as spreading AIDS among blacks and justifies that conclusion because of a verified, ghastly outrage, the Tuskegee study of syphilis that used black men as guinea pigs. If his intellect had not been eaten away with vitriol, this educated man would know that one horror is no evidence of another, and that if one assumes otherwise, and never notes sweeping reforms and official apologies, there will be no end of recrimination and fear and rage.

Wright's bluster is no innocent thing. This sort of rhetoric can bring listeners not to their own best natures, but to responses in kind, pushing the country toward name-calling generalizations, to resentment, to the opposite of what's needed for a reconciliation more complete and loving than so far achieved. He says God damn America, and then excuses the words because he is talking about the government? A likely, visceral reply from some is God damn you, and everything you represent.

The words of this pastor have an importance beyond him, even if his oratorical strutting has seemed mostly about the rescue of an endangered ego, as one reporter has suggested. A difficult question is the degree to which he represents other blacks, and whether the sympathy he surely elicits from some might be mostly focused on the sense they are being encouraged to stand up for what's right, not a non-abating sense of hostility to this special land.

The other pressing question, of course, is the extent to which Wright might undo the aspirations of a member of his congregation, Barack Obama, who is now swinging back furiously and insisting the Wright we are now seeing is not representative of the black church nor the Wright who drew him to the faith 20 years ago.

I have problems with this presidential candidate's politics, but take him at his word when he pronounces himself "offended" by words that "contradict" his own world-view and his own convictions. He does not seem imbued of the notion of some of his fellow liberals that virtue has escaped America, and has in fact said that the founding ideals have served to rectify our social and other ills.

I would add to that. These ideals have given us a special greatness, despite the faults they consistently if sometimes laggardly subdue.

Jay Ambrose writes for Scripps Howard News Service.