This is from last year’s MLK day, and bears rolling forward today.
I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face Jeering, and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer.
They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My fleets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he k alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?
If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.
I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Today is the day to look inside ourselves for our own Martin Luther King Jr.
Dave Schuler’s link roundup (see our Trackbacks) is great. “Joe Gandelman’s excellent tribute is especially worth your time.”:http://themoderatevoice.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/dr_martin_luthe.html
Too many have thrown what MLK took rocks in the face for away, how many kids in those leftist controled schools of multi hour courses on self esteem and multicultural nonsense could even pen such a letter ?
They dont know the aphabet much less the words.
Bill Cosby is starting to address the very thing.
Dr Rice might be the first black Woman President of the United States, while the left crack jokes about “house slave” and other stuff.
Michelle Malkin is getting as much.
“Hi Self hating flat nosed Filipino Bitch”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/001212.htm
“There’s a new race traitor on the block, and her name’s Michelle!”:http://www.margaretcho.com/blog/indefenseofmichellemalkin.htm
Charlton Heston, who marched with Dr King, has his Alhimers celebrated because he dared front for the NRA.
Dr Kings speaches and letters are some of the best words for those yearning for freedom from oppression, too bad those that still pretend to hold his banner have long forgotten what it was really all about.
You will have arrived at the point of true integration and brotherhood when you can talk to a person of different color and NOT see their color, only the person within. Then and only then will you understand.
At this point I feel obligated to bring up “La Griffe du Lion.”:http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/
His conclusions are quite repulsive, but what I want to know is, _is the math wrong_? And if it isn’t wrong, what should be done about it?
Martin Luther King’s memory is a relic of a past age, as admirable and as antique as the documents of the crusaders of the middle ages, but much less useful as an example.
Marin Luther King was effective because he was a Christian talking to Christians about what all held sacred, with the support of Jews. That was great.
But that was then, and this is now. Now we have multiculturalism, which teaches that our unity is in diversity, a diversity that means precisely the destruction of those uniform codes of religious sentiment and custom that empowered teachers such as Martin Luther King not only to help their fellow Christians reach up to their better selves as individuals but to make key elements of that common religious culture a solid and politically potent force.
Now all the moral appeals have been made. They received their answers not according to their merits but according to the populations they were made to. The answers for that past age have been recorded in worthy books that can rest quietly on their library shelves, waiting for some happier age when they might be useful again, if such an age ever comes.
The populations of the past are gone, and terrible demographic currents are pulling us further and further away from those departed populations, that dead historical era, to turbulent deadly waters where entire peoples are being violently sucked under, never to be seen again.
No such appeal as Martin Luther King made could be effective in the Muslim world, or in areas Muslims are claiming, like say Nigeria, or France, or Germany or New Jersey; because Muhammed and jihad, not Jesus and the sentiments and structures of values that Martin Luther King appealed to, sway Muslims.
Nothing that Martin Luther King ever did or said has any significant moral weight next to the moral claims of the children, teachers and parents of Beslan School #1. Yet incomparably the stronger moral claims went for absolutely nothing. It is a new age.
In the face of Muslim hordes that practice violent, intolerant, morbid, sexually charged, religiously sanctioned aggression – that is jihad – with the utmost probity and pious self-satisfaction, innocence is as good as struck dumb.
What common value will you appeal to now? Beauty, perhaps? “Death to beauty!” cried murdering Muslim mobs in Nigera. “Miss World is sin!” And they made a wide slaughter to prove it.
The time of men such as Martin Luther King is utterly done till this new age of jihad is also done. In this new age of ours, tell me of the noble lives of only such saints as carried swords.
TJ –
I glanced at La Griffe’s site, and gotta tell ya there’s a lot of BS there. what he’s talking about is culture (which has a high correlation with race, since ethnic kin groups tend to acculturate together). The notion that intelligence is somehow tied to race is a pretty silly one, and distracts us from the real issue, which is how to reform disfunctional cultures (a la Cosby).
David Blue –
Happily, I completely disagree with you. While I think that the Left has foolishly abandoned both the moral center and style of discourse used by Dr. King, I’d bet that it would resonate still in the right voice. I’m ooking for that voice…
A.L.
Letter From a Birmingham Jail is also a favorite of mine. Perhaps that should be the way we celebrate his life, by re-reading his great speaches and writings at least once a year.
The thing that keeps surprising me is that many folks see MLK Day as a “black” holiday.
For me, and for other whites of a certain age, King showed us the way out of a giant cultural mistake, dispite the best efforts of our elders to perpetuate it. To say that we’ve corrected the error and made amends would be wrong, but it is obvious to anyone who was alive then that many many things have changed. Mostly for the better.
I revere Dr King not for freeing his people, but for freeing mine.
>>The notion that intelligence is somehow tied to race is a pretty silly one, and distracts us from the real issue, which is how to reform disfunctional cultures (a la Cosby).
I certainly hope that you are correct, and that Griffe, Razib, and the rest of the GNXP crowd are wrong.
AL, I certainly hope that you are right and that La Griffe and the GNXP guys are wrong.
Armed Liberal –
Fair enough. If I completely disagreed with everything I said above, I would be happier too.
But starting when the first plane hit the building, my “happy” assumptions haven’t been the ones that have held up in the jet-fuelled fires of reality.
“Islam is not the enemy.” Oh boy! “Basic moral standards are not our private cultural property, they are the universal voice of God in mankind, and the stern moral codes of Islam in particular allow little wriggle room. This [11 September, 2001] is sheer evil, sheer frightfulness, against the universal moral law. Muslims are not going to stand for this, they are going to reject it, and – ” I can’t go on. What a moron, what a fool!! Every solemn and certain words was the direct opposite of the truth!
So I think I’ll do without my old “happy” beliefs from now on, no matter how good they used to make me feel.
The words of Dr. King above breathe the atmosphere of the Gospels, of the deeds of the Apostles guided by the Holy Spirit, imprisoned unjustly but ceaselessly, gently doing the Good Lord’s work. And so naturally, being primed for such good words, we may think: “That’s beautiful. That’s morally upright. That’s moving.” But this is only a worthy piece of rhetoric in a certain context.
Now here’s a different context: Husam Abdu, the 14-year-old Palestinian boy who was apprehended wearing a bomb vest. He was caught on his mission to slaughter Jews, the motivation for which was “Blowing myself up is the only chance I’ve got to have sex with 72 virgins in the Garden of Eden.” A killer’s lust satisfied in a brothel heaven as a reward for massacre – is that really his religion? Yes, it really is. His Prophet was – oh to Hell with it.
Dr. King’s words are completely meaningless in this context, which is the context that Islam creates everywhere it gains power and applied with fervour. When a “martyr” is a brutal killer and quite likely a rapist as well (in the context of the rape jihad) all holy words lose their proper context and sense.
For secular Americans, I think accepting an equation like terrorists=Minutemen is also enough to make further conversation meaningless. There’s no language left after you go for that. (As best I understand the American “civic religion” anyway.)
I’m not saying words are a priori are completely useless. They can have a use. “Halt! Raise your hands! Remove your clothes!” These may or may not be useful words, if they are backed by ample armed forces and the certain, ruthless willingness to use it. But unarmed pitiful appeals like “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Have mercy! Have mercy!” Or kneeling. On average, how often does all that stuff seem to work?
Or is it that people who saw – even just the front cover of Time Magazine from Beslan, for pity’s sake! – and felt nothing change inside them forever . . . they are waiting for a speech that reads well in the context of a religion for which they probably feel little or nothing anyway – and then, then they’ll rise from the morally dead?!? I don’t think so.
I’m not making any case for revenge, or for wrath, or for hate, or for violence as good in itself. I still like the lambs.
But now only such lambs as were or better yet are fiercer than dragons: armed, intrepid and deadly. The rest are useless in the new age of jihad, or if they pacify people, worse than useless.
Just my opinion of course. And I’m sincerely glad that completely disagreeing with it makes you happy.
Everyone should also not forget, or learn if you have not learned it now, that King was a known, documented communist stooge who espoused the nationalization of industry and confiscation of property and weapons. I don’t care what his claimed intentions were, he was nothing but a useful idiot for our enemies.
Improbablus –
Gosh, you’re right. the fact that he wasn’t a pure hero means that we should ignore the real good that he accomplished and the real – positive – changes that he helped bring to the rest of us in America.
Because he wasn’t perfect, let’s go back to two water fountains at every public place, and negroes sitting in the back of the bus – when the bus will pick them up.
Hate to break it to you, but your position is – charitably – a shortsighted and foolish one.
A.L.
Everyone also should not forget that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were known slave owners and that Abraham Lincoln was a racist. I assume Improbulus Maximus would throw them in the trash bin as well.
Improbalus Maximus: All heroes have feet of clay, even without exagerrating thier failings.
David Blue: As innocent as lambs. As cunning as serpants.
Armed Liberal: David is more right than you are willing to accept. The problem in this country is that though we all speak the same language, we no longer have a common culture to give meaning to that language. The Left and the Right are losing the ability to talk to each other meaningfully. The gulf between the Left and the Right may not yet be as large as between the West and Islam, but its growing and is already perhaps sufficient. And the real dangerous thing is that even the concept of a cultural gulf is not something that exists in some people’s philosophies. A good majority of people take it for granted – as a moral axiom which is not only unquestioned by them but which to them shows moral depravity if you do question it at all – that all differences between peoples are due to ignorance, and that if they only got to know each other better those differences would fade away.
I think I see this better than you have because you tend to write to the internet in the manner of an academic writing in journals. Most of your posts are not addressed to anyone in particular. They are not conversations, or when they are conversations they are conversations largely conducted within the strictures of academic conversation with other academics. Such formalized communication can mask how little sharing of ideas is actually taking place.
I on the other hand right in comment sections. Down here in the peanut gallery amongst the groundlings, conversations are much more rowdy and personal. In all my years writing, I’ve observed many things. One thing I’ve observed is how little each side hears the other one. Instead, each side hears the other always in the framework of what they expect of the other one, and increasingly what they expect the other one to be and believe is simply put ‘evil’. It’s increasingly two one-sided arguments between people who’ve lost the ability to talk to each other. They might as well be builders at Babel arguing over how many courses of bricks to lay.
Even when I approach a problem tangentally and say things which I know neither side has likely heard before, yet I find that both sides perceive what I say as being something familiar so that both sides percieve me as simply rehashing what the other side says. We are losing our way.
Take any of the following words as a mere sampling of the problem: ‘enemy’, ‘evil’, ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, ‘good’, ‘culture’, ‘justice’, ‘privacy’, ‘imperialism’, ‘facism’, ‘terrorism’, ‘patriot’, ‘dissent’, ‘sedition’, ‘socialism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘profit’, ‘treason’, ‘right’, ‘guilt’, ‘morality’, ‘family’, ‘marriage’, ‘citizenship’, ‘honor’, ‘duty’, ‘rights’, ‘racism’, ‘truth’, ‘war’, ‘peace’, ‘God’, ‘courage’, ‘suffer’, ‘hero’, ‘oppression’, ‘sacred’, ‘minister’, ‘gospel’, ‘democracy’, ‘American’, ‘love’, ‘piety’, ‘hypocracy’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘beauty’, ‘discrimenation’, ‘balance’, ‘fairness’, ‘Islam’, ‘Christianity’, ‘science’, and ‘religion’.
Could the Left and the Right actually conduct a conversation involving any of the above words? Could either convey its meaning to the other by the use of such words? I am filled with a terrible foreboding, that unless a miracle takes place we in this country are heading to a very dark place. The rift is widening and I see no basis for consensus; no basis at all for a discussion. The ‘reality-based community’ lives in one world – loosely based on reality; and the other side (which ever side you believe that is) lives in another.
David is spot on when he says, “For secular Americans, I think accepting an equation like terrorists=Minutemen is also enough to make further conversation meaningless. There’s no language left after you go for that. (As best I understand the American “civic religion” anyway.)”
Unfortunately, he is right.
THis is what Dr. King believed in:
That America was worth fighting for, and dying for. That the American ideals MEANT something, and should be taken seriously.
One of our greatest Americans. He should be celebrated.
His death was a great tragedy for the Nation because alone of the 60’s generation he BELIEVED in the promise of America redeemed from racism. God’s Drum Major for Justice was hardly a post-modern multi-culturalist.
Which is why he should be celebrated as one of America’s greatest heroes.
the REAL W Bush.
I am a tiger.
reelcobra: I’m really not sure what sort of point you were trying to make, but thanks for making mine.
Hey reelcobra – you’re a freaking genius. When all those who live in red-state places you mock “…a town of southern rednecks who kill and eat northern liberals, minorities, and gays in shocking ways” get together and vote more Republicans into office, and those Republicans in turn appoint more conservative judges and pass more conservative laws, look in the mirror and pat yourself on the back for me will you?
Because you’re Karl Rove’s wet dream. Attaboy.
A.L.
Q. How is post 17 any different than SPAM? It has nothing to do with the topic and its sole purpose appears to be to sell a product.
AL: I’m deeply tempted to try to make more of reelcobra’s post than it deserves. I’m trying hard to refrain, but one thought refuses to be put down:
At one time the liberal movement in America defined itself by such things as Martin Luther King’s, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Today, the liberal movement in America defines itself by such things as “2001 Maniacs”.
“Q. How is post 17 any different than SPAM? It has nothing to do with the topic and its sole purpose appears to be to sell a product.”
LOL. I’d thought of that too. In fact, the daily kos poster strikes me as rather disengenious in his pitch of 2001 Maniacs as Blue State propaganda peice designed to annoy GWB. It sounds like he’s just trying to make money too. It’s not like such films are going to portray the “northern liberals, minorities, and gays” in a flattering manner, and in fact if the film follows the usual standards of slasher films, the villains will be protrayed far more charismaticly than the people that they kill and the victims will be protrayed as having gotten what was coming to them. The message will likely be, ‘northern liberals, gays, and minorities are brainless jerks with no morals’.
All of which is to say, that as something to identify your movement with, ‘2001 Maniacs’ is likely to be found severely wanting.
But then again, I could say the same about ‘Syriana’, ‘Munich’, ‘Farenhite 9/11’, ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ and all the rest of the propaganda films that have come out lately.
“For secular Americans, I think accepting an equation like terrorists=Minutemen is also enough to make further conversation meaningless. There’s no language left after you go for that.
I read this and thought is someone on this list Reagan bashing? The Contras, as you know, were indeed the moral equivlant of our founding fathers. But now I’m not so sure.
TJ, I consider myself to be part of the GNXP crowd and don’t really bat an eye at discussions of race, but I have to ask what this has to do with Martin Luther King Jr and civil rights. Psychometrics and suchlike is interesting, but hardly germaine. For what reason do you bring this up? Is this not a bit of a troll?
That said, AL’s gone and done it now, and I have to say something:
“The notion that intelligence is somehow tied to race is a pretty silly one, and distracts us from the real issue, which is how to reform disfunctional cultures (a la Cosby).”
I’m not sure where to begin with a statement like this. It’s not even wrong, it’s just completely misconcieved. Let’s start from the bottom: the argument is a statistical one — nobody who understands this stuff says that intelligence is tied to race, but the statistical relationship between IQ and race is frankly undeniable.
Secondly, the presumption grates that “culture” should be the default hypothesis for explaining everything — why? Nobody argues over genetic differences between races for things like sickle-cell anemia, so why is it so difficult to believe that there may be genetically-mediated differences in cognitive ability between races as well? IQ is 80% heritable, and correlates at 40% with brain size, which needless to say is genetic. I won’t rehash the copious literature available on the subject, but dismissing it with a wave of your hand will not do.
But this is all irrelevant. The neuroscience and genetics of intelligence are of interest with regard to gauging the possible effectiveness of particular educational policies, but that’s not what MLK day is supposed to be about, or so I thought. It’s about freedom and equality before the law, and respecting human beings as individuals.
David Blue: “For secular Americans, I think accepting an equation like terrorists=Minutemen is also enough to make further conversation meaningless. There’s no language left after you go for that.
#23 from rider on January 16, 2006 10:18 PM said:
I read this and thought is someone on this list Reagan bashing? The Contras, as you know, were indeed the moral equivlant of our founding fathers. But now I’m not so sure.
I wasn’t Reagan bashing. Even if I was inclined to do that, it would be off the topic of the continuing relevance (or irrelevance) of the rhetoric of Martin Luther King.
My point was: the audience is decisive. Appealing to people on the basis of shared culture, values and symbols only works with people who do share values and culture, and who are primed to respond to symbols and rhetoric in certain ways.
Obviously I think religion is vital to culture and thus to values, and thus to what rhetoric can do. Appealing to people on the basis of church and the acts of the apostles, which is more or less what Martin Luther King did, falls flat with people who are alien and opposed to that culture.
Long ago I had a discussion with Armed Liberal on what gets someone standing at the mosque door, hearing a fiery jihad sermon, to want to go in and be receptive to that. I said: Armed Liberal did not feel that appeal, because he was not primed for it. He was primed to hear the sort of appeal Martin Luther King made (even though he might then reject that appeal). Change the demographics of the population and you change the power of the appeal.
If you think Christianity is dangerous if not evil, and you think it should be pushed out of the public square as much as possible, and that is what you grew up with and you are solid in it, then you are not the ideal audience for a new Martin Luther King.
There are also chasms between secular Americans.
If you appeal to people on the basis of the American civic religion, with stories of the American Revolution, George Washington, the Minutemen and so on, does that give you a basis to make practical moral appeals, the force of which can be felt by nearly everyone?
Not if you’re talking to Michael Moore fans no. Michael Moore used the Minutemen rhetorically to support the terrorists in Iraq. To him, they are the righteous revolutionaries fighting a foreign power, and their numbers will grow and they will win, as the Minutemen won. (Even though they are very evil men who are openly fighting against democracy and against America.) This is to attach such a different significance to patriotic symbols that words fail. With someone who thinks that the values of the Minutemen are best upheld by jihad terrorists, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be doing what George Washington would have done.
At some point, what you need is not a better speaker but a more receptive audience.
That was the point I was making then.
This year I want to make a different point, because I fell to thinking about Armed Liberal’s last sentence in the original post: “Today is the day to look inside ourselves for our own Martin Luther King Jr.”
Sometimes I wish that like Arwen at the ford in Peter Jackson’s film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) I could find magic words to defend the helpless and innocent from the killers who pursue them.
But alas, there are no magic words. (There are only votes, and usually not enough of them.)
Armed Liberal said in post #6: “While I think that the Left has foolishly abandoned both the moral center and style of discourse used by Dr. King, I’d bet that it would resonate still in the right voice. I’m ooking for that voice…”
Armed Liberal, I hope that you never find it. Because three are some people who are responsive to that voice. They are Christian, conservative and the backbone of the pro-life cause.
The Left, which the voice that you are looking for would serve, is committed to “choice”. When all the oily rhetoric about “choice”, “quality of life” and so on comes to a practical point, it is the point of a hypodermic needle piercing the heart of a viable human foetus, to inject it with potassium chloride, to kill it. A voice for the Left is a voice that facilitates the slaughter of helpless human beings.
I think that what you want is a Saruman the White, using the finest words to get people to agree to the worst actions.
I hope you never find him.
1) The discussion of race is totally misguided. If we’re trying to make predictions on the basis of race, then we need universal data — not just American data. The American experience with race is hardly common. In England, blacks do almost as well as whites economically, and Asians (mostly South Asians) are the ones with the low incomes and test scores. Moreover, even in the United States, Carribean and African immigrants have equal to higher stats than whites. Google some of this stuff to get a better idea, or read Thomas Sowell’s book, “Race and Culture: A World View.”
Basically, in addition to all the cultural factors people always talk about (as well as the obvious fact that multiculturalism and inattention to failed public schools have done far more damage to blacks than to anyone else), the descriptive statistics of a given group of dislocated or relocated people are going to be determined mostly by the characteristics that got them there in the first place. These, in turn, will largely be historical accident.
Does anyone really think the Asians are smarter than whites in the U.S. but dumber than whites in Britain, but that British whites are not smarter than American whites. This is logically impossible. To the extent that any innate difference exists, it’s going to be based on the charactertic of the local ethnic group, not the global ethnic group.
And as for Dr. King: all you naysayers should listen better to AL, or just open your eyes. This country responds VERY WELL to the language of morality — King just speaks it better than Bush. But both believe(d) it, and that matters for people. We are not Spain — we know a hawk from a handsaw, and we know evil when we see it. That’s the reason the Dems are getting destroyed politically, even while Bush is weak: they try to talk the language, but can’t quite get it done.
“In England, blacks do almost as well as whites economically, and Asians (mostly South Asians) are the ones with the low incomes and test scores. Moreover, even in the United States, Carribean and African immigrants have equal to higher stats than whites.”
Well “Asians” are a pretty genetically diverse group, so you really have to disaggregate it. When you do this, you find Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Malays doing very well in the UK (better than whites on average). Pakistanis and Bangladeshis on the other hand tend to do very poorly. The latter two tend to come from regions of their contries that are pretty backward and clannish (not to put too fine a point on it, this also tends to mean inbreeding to some extent), so this is more or less what you’d expect knowing that.
The point concering blacks in the UK isn’t correct either. They’re actually at the bottom for high school performance, but contrary to what you would expect based on this, a higher percentage of blacks than whites go on to attain higher educational degrees. This is a bit weird, but I can think of possible explanations (some of which are explored in the link), and am inclined to consider the high school data more reliable. In any case the picture is not as simple as you make it sound.
Alex: “And as for Dr. King: all you naysayers should listen better to AL, or just open your eyes. This country responds VERY WELL to the language of morality — King just speaks it better than Bush. But both believe(d) it, and that matters for people. We are not Spain — we know a hawk from a handsaw, and we know evil when we see it. That’s the reason the Dems are getting destroyed politically, even while Bush is weak: they try to talk the language, but can’t quite get it done.”
Next year, I’ll try to focus on something positive at this time. Martin Luther King does have a legacy worth remembering once a year, and saying something positive about. And there is still some market for what he sold, which is a Good Thing.