There’s definitely something mythical, if not Biblical, about Obama’s repudiation of Jeremiah Wright. The word “jeremiad,” which the OED describes as “a complaining tirade,” comes from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament; he was a prophet who kvetched before there was a Yiddish word for it. Wright’s arguments, advanced tirelessly between Friday and Monday, were not with the Lord but the world — particularly the political world his most famous former flock member inhabits.

A few pundits have already labeled this Obama’s Sister Souljah moment, — but the black activist Bill Clinton condemned before the Rainbow Coalition back in 1992 was nothing to him. She was just a way of making a point: that he wasn’t beholden to “the black community.” Wright was Obama’s pastor for 20 years –he married him and baptized his children — and in breaking with him, he breaks with one of his spiritual fathers. As Maureen Dowd noted in her column today, “The Illinois senator doesn’t pay attention to the mythic nature of campaigns, but if he did, he would recognize the narrative of the classic hero myth: The young hero ventures out on an adventure to seek a golden fleece or an Oval Office; he has to kill monsters and face hurdles before he returns home, knocks off his father and assumes the throne.”

I found myself thinking about Falstaff, whom Henry IV rejects in Part II of Shakespeare’s bio-plays. (It’s been said that only men appreciate the drunken, lecherous Falstaff — a character in a Richard Ford novel says he’s like the Three Stooges in that regard — but legend has it that Queen Elizabeth was so taken with the old rogue that she ordered Shakespeare to bring him back, as he did in the Merry Wives of Windsor.) The old scalawag taught the young Hal plenty about the ways of the world (and how to have a good time) before he was headed for the throne. But by the time the king confronts the corrupt courtier and his posse at the end of Part II, the thrill is gone:

How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester!
I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane,
But being awake, I do despise my dream.

Not that Wright is obese (“surfeit-swelled”) or even a fool and a jester…much. Though watching the replays of some of his remarks, especially the Q&A period of his speech before the National Press Club, I wanted to yell, “Stop clowning!” The stakes are too high; this isn’t about you but the whole country. And if this is but part of our hero’s journey, it’s the part where he begins to cut away the obstacles from his past that would weigh him down. As King Henry says to his former mentor,

Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turned away my former self,
So will I those that kept me company.

Too bad Hillary can’t brush off Bill like that! Now there’s a man who’s been in touch with his inner Falstaff…