Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- January 16

I have to marvel that it has been 44 years since I heard the news that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.had been assassinated. I met him once, briefly. It is the rare individual who changes the heart of a nation, but Dr. King did that.

Here are a few quotes. You can read others. If you do, you will discover what an extraordinary person he was.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King was a preacher and the son of a preacher. As you watch the efforts of those to remove religion from our nation's life, remember that.

America Started as a Protest

Chicago Police, 1968

By Alan Caruba

So I am watching the police in Portland, Oregon drive the Occupy protesters from some area they choose, tearing down the makeshift living quarters, tossing the signs onto a pile to be carted off. All across America mayors have decided that the pattern of disease, crime, and uncivil behavior has lost its charm. “They’ve had enough time to make their point,” said one.

Most of us are still trying to figure out what the Occupy protests were all about. There was a lot of whining about having to actually pay back a college loan, a general unhappiness with banks, but it was both leaderless and unfocused. A protest just to have a protest.

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times” said the narrator of A Tale of Two Cities, but it is always the best and worst of times, depending on whether you are old or young, have a roof over your head, and most of all a means to earn a living. Interesting phrase, “earn a living.” Pull it inside out and it says that life is not free. No matter what you want, there’s a price on it. It’s called the free market. Or taxes. Or both.

In my seventy-plus years, I suspect there was always a protest going on somewhere in America. Indeed, if you think about it, America started as a protest. “No taxation without representation.” The Revolution was six long years of protest, interspersed by a number of battles from Bunker Hill to Yorktown.

One year in particular stands out for its protests, 1968. I had just entered my 30s. My Army service was well behind me and I had no concerns about being called up to go to Vietnam, but that war was raging in 1968 and so were the protests against it.

On a parallel track the Civil Rights movement, despite the passage in 1964 of federal laws, was still going strong and had been joined by a feminist movement and a nascent gay rights movement. It was hard to keep track of who was protesting what, but in1968 they all seemed to come together during the Democratic Party convention in Chicago and that turned into a police riot against the protesters.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Occupy Wall Street has gotten is measure of media coverage, but in 1968 people were talking about Resurrection City, a protest to demand attention on behalf of the rural and urban poor. A shantytown was put up parallel to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was organized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In April, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis. The Resurrection City protest was all but over when, in May, rain of biblical proportions turned it into a slum, a very muddy one at that.

As the nation grieved Dr. King’s assassination and in the wake of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement that he would not run for the office again, Kennedy’s brother, Robert, entered the race in mid-March. On June 4, after celebrating a primary win in California, a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan shot him in the hotel’s kitchen. He died twenty-six hours later on June 6. Barely two months had passed since Dr. King’s death.

On August 26, the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago. It would nominate Hubert H. Humphrey, LBJ’s Vice President as its candidate. The battles with anti-war protesters in Lincoln Park and a few nights later in Grant Park were the real news.

In November 1968, Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, was elected President. How close was it? Nixon received 43.4 percent of the popular vote. Humphrey won 42.7 percent. An independent candidate, a racist Alabama Governor named George Wallace, received 13.5 percent.

As 1968 wound down, Douglas Engelbart and fellow researchers at Stanford University announced the invention of the world’s first word processor that included something called “a mouse.” Elvis Presley made a comeback with a TV special on NBC. On December 24th, the crew of Apollo 8 sent back the first images of Earthrise and read from the book of Genesis.

There were 549,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam as 1968 came to an end. Nearly 17,000 had been killed in action that year.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Hideous MLK Memorial

By Alan Caruba

I was a young working journalist during the era of the Civil Rights movement and one evening I was covering a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the campus of Drew University in Madison, NJ. I was accompanied by Vivian Braxton, a civil rights activist who said, “Let’s go backstage and meet him” when the speech was finished.

Backstage, Dr. King stood alone while others stood at a respectful distance, afraid to approach him, so overwhelmed by the power of his words and personality. Vivian, however, headed straight for him with myself in tow. My first reaction was that he was shorter than I had thought and my second was a smile that was an embrace.

I introduced myself as a freelance journalist who was there to cover the speech for a local black newspaper and Dr. King found that very amusing. We chatted briefly and I tucked away a great moment in my memory, never anticipating that he would fall victim to an assassin’s bullet or that, years later, a Washington, D.C. memorial would be created in his honor.

Opened to the public on August 19, a statue of Dr. King stands thirty feet tall and in an irony that boggles the mind, was carved in China, the work of a Chinese sculptor, working in an Orwellian, totalitarian society.

It is also one of the most hideous works of “art” imaginable for anyone who recalls the times and the character of a man who said, “I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I am interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.”

The statue depicts a scowling figure, his face fixed with the look of every despot whose statue is intended to instill fear or awe in those who gaze upon it. His arms are crossed over his chest as if protecting himself or preparing to pass a harsh judgment.

It is hideous because it completely obliterates the gentleness of Dr. King, the heart that strove against injustice. The awfulness of the statue reminded me of another of his quotes, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

I have no idea what the memorial committee had in mind when it sanctioned this statue, but I have little doubt that Dr. King would have been mortified by it. He was a man who, on that long ago evening on the Drew University campus, greeted Vivian and me with a big smile in the midst of a great struggle to secure the rights of blacks in America.

In these times in which Arabs in Syria, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia have put their lives on the line to overthrow their tyrants, Dr. King had anticipated that human aspiration saying, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

So, now, on a four-acre site on the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, a huge intimidating statue stands where a life-size statue would have permitted visitors to marvel at the power of love over hate, morality over oppression, and the struggle for justice that is the birthright of all men and women.

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking,” warned Dr. King. “There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

Dr, King’s life was devoted to making all Americans think about the kind of society, the kind of nation, in which they wanted to live.

“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”

The memorial will be dedicated on August 28 by President Barack Obama, a man who was elected more for the color of his skin, than the content of his character. The date marks the 48th anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, “I have a dream”, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Dr. King surely would be appalled that young blacks would be rioting in the streets of American cities, looting, attacking people, nearly a half century after the achievement of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts for which he gave his life.

I think he would have been appalled by a thirty-foot-tall statue that resembles those of tyrants like Mao tse Tung, Stalin, or Saddam Hussein.

For my part, the King Memorial completely misses his message of humility combined with tenacity, of spirituality linked to non-violent struggle, of faith that great wrongs can be put right by people of faith and of courage.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Dream, The Reality

By Alan Caruba

My life straddles the days of Jim Crow segregationist laws and the years following the Civil Rights movement, so I can recall buses in which Blacks did, indeed, sit in the back, separate drinking fountains and separate just about everything else. I spent enough time in the South to see racism at work and I watched enough of the civil rights marches to see it crumble from its own lack of moral justification.

That, perhaps, is why Dr. Martin Luther King is honored now with a federal holiday. That is why those of us who heard him speak recall, if not the words, at least the great moral passion he brought to his audience; a passion for justice and equality that went beyond mere legalisms.

I heard Dr. King speak at Drew University in Chatham, New Jersey in those heady days and then I went backstage and met him. It was a brief encounter and to this day I find it astonishing that I shook hands with someone who has become an American icon; someone whose name and cause is forever embedded in the fabric of our history.

There is no doubt that Barack Obama would not be President today if Dr. King had not put his life on the line in the 1960s.

Dr. King was an inspired orator. I doubt that Dr. King had a speechwriter and I doubt he needed one. This was a man that one felt had been touched by God, called to a greater duty, greater service, and the ultimate sacrifice.

That may sound hokey to those who discount the role of serious, committed belief in a greater power, but it was unmistakable in terms of the way this minister and son of a minister from Montgomery, Alabama led a boycott of the city’s bus system in protest of its demeaning “back of the bus” rules, and then expanded the cause to the nation.

It was the boycott that got the whole civil rights movement going. It was followed by “sit-ins” at restaurants, marches, and all manner of demonstrations, culminating with the August 28, 1963, Washington, D.C. event in which Dr. King delivered his famed “I Have a Dream” speech. I suspect no one else could have so stirred a nation as he did and surely none of the other speeches given that day are remembered.

It was a call to what Abraham Lincoln deemed the “better angels of their nature”; our capacity to live up to America’s best values.

The civil rights movement also included some very ugly riots in the ghettos of some American cities and, nearly fifty years passed Dr. King’s speech, too many blacks continue to lag behind the rest of society.

The civil rights spokesmen that followed in Dr. King’s footsteps have largely been a disappointment, race hustlers, and others who rode the movement to positions of political power.

This is to be expected because there was only one Martin Luther King, Jr., martyred for his steady faith in the goodness that could be evoked in the hearts of both black and white citizens.

It is important to remember that Dr. King was not calling for special privileges and dispensations based on race. He was demanding equality before the law and an end to the codified racism of exclusionary laws.

America is a better place because Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lived.

The Endless Inauguration

By Alan Caruba

I am the last person you want to invite to a party. I am almost always the first to leave. There’s something about a whole bunch of people getting together to celebrate anything that doesn’t work for me.

I am one of those who far prefer a small group of people, perhaps no more than three couples, who can exchange their thoughts and points of view without having to shout over loud music or, worse, to pretend to be happy if they’re not.

That’s why I am already “partied-out” with the inauguration, not because it isn’t a historic occasion, but because it already seems to have gone on for too long when, in fact, it will not officially and formally occur until Tuesday.

It may have something to do, for example, with the fact that Time Magazine has put a portrait of President-elect Obama on its cover thirteen times in the passed year. That’s just stupid.

I can live with the fact that my political party’s candidate lost. I wasn’t that thrilled with him to begin with and, apparently, neither were several million Republicans who simply stayed home on Election Day. I am not one of those people who think that the nation is in great peril just because the other guy won.

I do think that many of the policies that will carried out in the next four years by the Obama administration will illustrate once again why liberals should never been allowed to be in charge. To be fair, however, the last eight years of Republicans turned out to be a nearly complete renunciation of the party’s principles. Let’s face it, they deserved to lose.

To return to my complaint of the day—if I am not cranky, you need to check my pulse—all the media coverage of every single aspect leading up to the event seems to demonstrate just how much those about to acquire power can lead this adoring media around to ensure hour upon hour of vapid reporting.

Monday will be no better and, of course, Tuesday will encompass the actual event, plus the parade, plus the many gala balls, plus whatever else is deemed momentous.

Only in America, a nation already engulfed by one of the worst financial situations in modern times, could we witness millions spent on an inaugural celebration and its attendant events.

I would have preferred a more subdued atmosphere, minus the theatrics of a train ride from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., with a stop at Wilmington to pick up the Vice President-elect. The incoming President seems to need huge crowds on a daily basis and I am sure will love hearing “Hail to the Chief” everywhere he goes.

I will, of course, watch the actual inaugural ceremonies. There are moments in the nation’s history that must not be ignored. In 1963 I watched Dr. Martin Luther King deliver his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I wish he could have been here for this inauguration.

Somehow, for all the criticism raised against America, we seem always able to utterly confound our critics and our enemies. That’s something worth celebrating.

Weekend Musings

By Alan Caruba

Assassination Time

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. I remember when it happened and I remember the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy. Like some spasm resulting from the resistance to the Civil Rights movement and whatever other causes the murderers of the Kennedy’s had in mind, one must wonder why there have been no similar assassinations since?

The 60’s seemed to fill the nation’s television screens with scenes of rioting and marches, but the final decades of the last century did not evoke much public disorder. I briefly met Dr. King once, after he had delivered a speech at Drew University. It was a pleasant encounter, but if you had told me there would be a national holiday in his honor I would found that hard to believe at the time. That’s the problem with living through history. You have to look back at it from a distance to understand what happened.

I thought living through the Watergate scandals in the 1970's and the 1990’s disgrace that Clinton brought to the Oval Office was bad, but at least the former produced satisfactory Congressional action that led to Nixon’s resignation and jail for several of the participants, while the latter has given us a bad-boy political rock star and the absurdity of his wife running for the same office. Can you imagine the response if Bess Truman had announced she was running for the presidency?

Gore’s Gall

People tend to forget that Al Gore went from being an undistinguished Senator from Tennessee to Vice President thanks to Bill Clinton. Now he’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner, an Oscar winner, and the very image of a bloated man of wealth bent on getting everyone to do what he says, not what he does. The contempt he must feel for us "little people" must know no bounds.

In many ways Gore and the Clintons are some kind of grotesque cartoon version of what used to be people whom we respected for having served in high office. Truman went back to Independence, Missouri, and stayed out of the spotlight. Other Presidents like Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan did the same, but this newer generation craves the spotlight. Perhaps Jimmy Carter started the trend, forever pontificating on everything after an utterly failed, single term in office. Carter, in turned out, was more stupid than anyone could have imagined.

Now Gore has launched a $300 million, three-year effort to use mass media to convince people that "global warming" is just around the corner. Meanwhile, reputable scientists are telling us that the Earth has tipped into a cooling period since 1998 according to all those satellites that measure such things. There is a cyclical weather event called the "La Nina" that is helping to cool things down.

Obama’s Lies

On a forum where I am one of the moderators there is a list of Barack Obama’s lies on the campaign trail. I think the list was imported from Slate.com. It is a long and very specific list.

We all know the Clinton’s lie all the time, but there was some hope that Obama would bring a fresh, untainted personality to the race for the presidency, but we all initially and briefly forgot that he comes straight out of one of the most corrupt political machines in the nation, Cook County’s Chicago where the dead vote with regularity.

I can’t prove it, but I think that Obama is still a Muslim despite his attendance at an Afro-centric church. In the Sunni Muslim tradition, taqiyyah is dissembling to give a favorable impression of Islam or in situations where being a Muslim or the wrong sect might be dangerous. He may have learned of this in his youth. I think he has been telling everyone anything they wanted to hear in his climb up the political ladder. No doubt he absorbed and learned this well before he got into politics.

If Dr. King was alive, I suspect he would be seriously conflicted over Obama as the presumptive Democrat candidate.

She's Not Martin Luther Clinton

By Alan Caruba

It is truly wonderful to watch Hillary Clinton try to talk herself out of the hole she has dug by suggesting that, without President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Civil Rights Act would never have been passed.

Actually, a lot of the credit goes to President Kennedy who was working toward its passage when he was assassinated. So, yes, these two Democrat presidents expedited the legislative aspects of the dream Martin Luther King Jr had nurtured.

The quintessential politician, LBJ for much of his early career voted with the Southern bloc of Congress against every civil rights bill that came before it. Historians believe he genuinely thought that segregation was wrong and welcomed the opportunity to end it, but after signing the 1964 bill, Johnson is famously remembered as saying to his aide, Bill Moyers, “I think we have just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

The Clintons, whose past residences were in Arkansas, acquired such an aura of affinity for Black Americans that Bill basked in the fiction of being called the first Black President of the United States. The prospect of an actual Black President must be driving the Clinton’s crazy.

Years and years ago, following a speech at Drew University in New Jersey, I was taken backstage to meet Dr. King. As is often the case with such eminences he actually stood alone as people were in such awe they could not bring themselves to approach, but this has never been a problem for me.

As a journalist, we are expected to engage such folks and Dr. King was delighted when my companion introduced me. When he learned I was there freelancing for a Black newspaper, his face broke into a broad smile. Why is that, he asked? I told him that black or white, all money is green. That tickled him further. Some small talk ensued and that was my brief moment with him.

What I didn’t tell him was that, while having been stationed in Georgia with the U.S. Army in the early 1960s, I had vivid memories of Black soldiers not being allowed to sit in the main waiting room of the bus station in Columbus as well as other experiences that fixed the ugliness of segregation in my mind.

Until Brown v. Board of Education and the integration of the Little Rock High School, enforced by the Eisenhower administration; until Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the movement to boycott Montgomery’s discriminatory bus system; until he led marches, was imprisoned in Birmingham, and mobilized the better angels of our souls, there was no civil rights movement and neither Presidents Kennedy nor Johnson would have been under much pressure to end the last vestiges of the Civil War.

I have yet to identify anything of lasting merit that President Clinton did during his eight years in office, nor anything Hillary Clinton has done while Senator from New York that comes close to rivaling the achievement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Suggesting it depended on LBJ reveals her cast of mind that only politicians can bring about change.

Both Clintons were and are intent on wielding the power of the Oval Office for their personal gain. Whatever idealism they may have had in their youth has long since been drained from their plastic personalities.

What Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved, he did because of his profound belief in the transformative power of justice by and for all Americans.