Martin Luther King on Steroids

Photo by Madeline Gray/Washington Post for Getty Images via Advocate.

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Former President Donald Trump likened North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to Martin Luther King Jr. in an endorsement Saturday, despite the gubernatorial candidate’s long history of controversial comments about homosexuality, religion and victims of sexual abuse.

“This is Martin Luther King on steroids,” Trump said of Robinson at a pre-Super Tuesday rally in North Carolina.

“I told that to Mark. I said, I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two.” (NBC News)

In my alternative history novel, Martin Luther King on Steroids, I grapple with one of the big questions: What if Dr. King, instead of getting a Ph.D. in theology and following his father into the ministry and civil rights activism, had gone into pro wrestling, hooked up with the young Vince McMahon and medical genius Dr. Zahorian, and crafted himself a fantastic body with the help of drugs?

What kind of dreams would that young man have had? What kind of amazing job would he have done, getting himself recognized more and more? How different would our world be today? Let's just say there's a good chance he wouldn't have thought of organizing a nonviolent civil rights movement based on the principles of Tolstoy and Gandhi, successfully pressured the US government into passing the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Fair Housing Acts, or lost his life to an assassin's bullet during a campaign for fairness to Memphis garbage collectors.

The Wokest of Us All

Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr., LaVerne Watson, and David W. Bridell on Boston Common, ca, 1955, via Boston University. 

Hi, here with a couple of slightly novel ideas for my annual post on the content of your character and the annual Republican explosion of enthusiasm for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as an opponent of anybody ever referring at any time to anybody's race, especially when the subject is college admissions.

First, just to note that the argument is a fine example of what I have called the "Scalian Hermeneutic", the philosophical technique of totally divorcing a linguistic expression from its context before you attempt to analyze it, named after Justice Antonin Scalia's interpretation in Heller of 52% of the Second Amendment as if the other 48%, not to mention an entire history of the right to bear arms going back to the Glorious Revolution in England 1689 and a Bill of Rights that granted gun rights only to members of the established church, did not exist. 

The advocates of Conservative King, similarly, base their case on 2%, 35 words from the 1,667 words of King's fervent appeal of August 28, 1963, for racial justice and equality, a speech that frequently mentions people's races, as right at the opening,

The Lord works in mysterious ways

A piece on Dr. King's theology from this time six years ago holds up well, I think.  

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Panama, in keeping with our annual custom of running a picture of Dr. King in a hat. Via Relaford Club.

Let's not leave the long Martin Luther King Day weekend without our annual tribute visit to the Bizarro Dr. King who usually surfaces in the rightwing media around this time of the year, who if he had been alive would certainly have disapproved of the #BlackLivesMatter movement because they are the "sons and daughters of Stokely Carmichael and, to some extent, even Huey P. Newton" (former moderately good detective novelist Roger L. Simon, via Shakezula), and of the ongoing imaginary War on Police (Fox & Friends, via David at C&L); and Donald Trump, at the Dr. King tributes at Liberty University in the appropriately named Lynchburg, VA., praised the size of the crowd that came to see him as

an honor in terms of Martin Luther King," Trump said. "We're dedicating the record to the late, great Martin Luther King." Trump made no other mention of the civil rights leader.

In my usual stomping grounds at the National Review they haven't been able to come up with anything new this year, but they reran a piece by Lee Habeeb from January 2013:

Hi it's Stupid: Four Little Children

 

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images via Women's Health.

Hi, it's Stupid to say we need to keep responding to this bullshit as if there were a chance that it would make a difference in the world—Kevin Kruse and Imani Gandy are both practically weeping with fatigue at the thought of having to push that filthy stone another half an inch up the hill, and you really can't blame them, because they've been struggling for a lifetime and the opponents NEVER LEARN ONE SINGLE THING, but I thought of a slightly new line of argument I"d like to preserve for the record—

Namely, that when Dr. King said he had a dream that one day his four little children would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, he meant something by it, and in particular he had a reason for using the word "dream": because he knew when he woke up it wasn't going to be true. And he knew it wasn't going to come true in 1964, and in spite of all the ungratifying work he'd put in to elect a Southern Democrat to the presidency to build on the Civil Rights Act and prevent Republican Barry Goldwater from getting the opportunity to destroy it it wasn't going to come true in 1965 either, or 1967. It was going to take more than his own shortened lifespan to get there, and maybe more than those of his children as well, because the problem of racial injustice was so deeply ingrained into the fabric of American society—because it was, as we now call it, systemic. He was a master of critical race studies before they existed:

Moderately Woke

Drawing by David Levine, 27 October 1983.

I'm not annoyed by the main idea of David Brooks's contribution to the Juneteenth commemorations, ("How Moderates Failed Black America"), indirectly evoking Dr. King's frequently quoted castigation of the white moderate in the 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

But that isn't the sort of thing Brooks is talking about at all; 57 years and practically all of his own life later, it still hasn't occurred to him that African Americans might wish to act in their own behalf instead of waiting for the gentry to take care of them. What he's sort of apologizing for is the failure of white moderates to come up with a working plan for liberating black people, unaware that they could find it preferable to get some cooperation in the project of liberating themselves:

Got Paranoia? Street Fighting Edition

One thing that's not being said sufficiently on the subject of the ongoing protests over the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd: nonviolence isn't easy. It's a discipline, and it takes serious training such as used to be offered in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. It's also been a policy from the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, but commentators don't always seem to have gotten that, for some reason suggested by Touré in 2017:

If BLM being described as nonviolent sounds strange to you, then you’re probably watching too much Fox News. The movement has been wildly misunderstood partly because of how it’s caricatured and demonized by right-wing media. “We absolutely don’t consider Black Lives Matter a hate group,” says Heidi Beirich, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence project, which tracks hate groups. “Black Lives Matter is not a racist group; anyone can join. It’s a movement to expand civil rights for the oppressed in this society. It’s a peaceful protest against oppression. There’s simply no equivalence between Black Lives Matter and a hate group. It’s truly offensive to equate them.”

The policy of nonviolence is shared by BLM activists around the country. “I refuse to cede the moral high ground to the supremacy we fight,” says Brittany Packnett, an activist and co-founder of Campaign Zero, which aims to end police violence. “We don’t need to become that which we are fighting.”

Also, BLM isn't necessarily organizing this week's demonstrations, and even when it is, as in Los Angeles on Thursday, it isn't necessarily in control of the enormous crowds of untrained sympathizers. Including, I'm sorry to say, an awful lot of white kids with good-hearted intentions who don't know what they're doing or how to do it and who consistently seem to be getting overexcited and breaking and burning things, and giving evidence to a rightwing suspicion that "Antifa" is in charge (they can't imagine any of the black participants being in charge) or dark allegations, reminiscent of Ross Barnet or George Wallace, of "outside agitators".

News from Satyagraha

My screenshot from Christopher Bouzy's video, see below.

Wanted to say something about the Saturday incident at the Lincoln Memorial of the kid with the arrogant smirk blocking the path of the Native elder drumming and singing, but wasn't sure what until it occurred to me that this is such an MLK holiday story, with the setup of its being that weekend, when hosts from the now divided Women's March to the anti-abortion fanatics of the "March For Life" come to the capital in tribute to the legacy of peaceful protest associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., if not very often to the legacy of nonviolent civil disobedience: and that the performative utterance of the Omaha Nation's Nathan Phillips represents, precisely, a deployment of Dr. King's weapon of nonviolence against the forces of monocultural tribalism and hatred.

That is—I've seen a lot of contextualizing information—

Hey Twitter, we need to have a talk.

Last night I learned & confirmed the name of the "main student" from the #CovingtonCatholic incident. The kid grinning in front of the Native elder.

Hop in this thread because I'm going to walk you through some deep but important stuff. 1/? pic.twitter.com/5NyXFCwJR9

— Arlen Parsa (@arlenparsa) January 20, 2019

and what I think are the relevant portions of all the video, some of it really well curated—

Wait, a socialist?

With Yolanda and Martin Luther III on the Magic Skyway ride at the New York World's Fair in 1964. Via ABC News.

So Sarah Palin was astonished to hear CNN spreading rumors that Dr. King was some kind of non-Republican:

CNN however just set a new low bar for things to be said about the influential figure.

In a tweet, the media outlet said, “He’s an environmental hero. He was a socialist before it was cool. He never let a political disagreement turn nasty.”

Wait, a socialist?...

Appears CNN finally figured out that Martin Luther King Jr. was actually a registered Republican so in their desperation to IGNORE that inconvenient tidbit they decided to make him a socialist hero.

I sent her a note, but she hasn't responded.

KIng's attraction to socialism is very well known. https://t.co/NmdIGEIpvO pic.twitter.com/L5caArjLIH

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 16, 2018

He wasn't "actually a registered Republican" (or Democrat) either, as you might imagine, and took considerable care, as befits a professional religious leader, to remain detached from partisan politics, though he wasn't quite able to do that in 1964:

Dr. King: Honor bestowed on he

It's the day when conservatives who vilified Dr. King as a communist for 40-odd years nowadays come out to tell us he was really a conservative, and "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" somehow turns out to mean that he was against affirmative action. Including Sarah Palin reporting Alveda King's (false) testimony to King's (imaginary) anti-abortion views, with some very stirring prose:

Today, it is uplifting to see honor bestowed on he who will forever be seen as the face of the movement to ensure equal opportunity for all....

As powerful, the movement led by King caused long-overdue cultural change resulting in equal treatment regardless of skin color. It would be the norm. It would be unfathomable to think otherwise.

Unfathomable indeed!

All the troops on our side are out nowadays explaining that this is wrong, so I thought I'd rerun an old piece (January 2013) suggesting King—a real radical in praxis, not a hipster radical with a purist theory—might not have been an opponent from "the left" of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party as it is today either.

Getting stoned before it was mainstream. Sorry, that's pretty cheap. Uncredited image (20th-c. Greek?) from some larcenous Christian's blog.

On Saturday [January 26 2013] came the stately March On or About Washington, the first of two commemorations of the 1963 March On Washington, an often moving ceremony, and a bizarre Internet storm around a series of Tweets from David Sirota, who wanted to tell us how Dr. Martin Luther King would have felt if he had been able, like Tom Sawyer, to attend the service, which quickly degenerated from dumb to dreadful as he stumbled into lecturing black people on the subject of what black people think.

You get the feeling that if MLK was around now and slammed a Dem POTUS like he did LBJ, much of the left would criticize him as an "emoprog"
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 24, 2013

Brooks on Civic Religion: The Radio Yerevan Joke

Update at bottom 9/17

Camilla Williams (1919-2012), first African American to receive a regular contract with a major opera company (the New York City Opera, in 1946), who sang the national anthem at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 27 1963.

From David Brooks, "The Uses of Patriotism", New York Times, September 16 2016:

Martin Luther King Jr. sang the national anthem before his “I Have a Dream” speech and then quoted the Declaration of Independence within it.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Dr. King sang the national anthem before his "I Have a Dream" speech and then quoted the Declaration of Independence within it?

Answer: In principle, yes. But

Martin Luther King, Jr., Day: The Lord works in mysterious ways

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Panama, in keeping with our annual custom of running a picture of Dr. King in a hat. Via Relaford Club.

Let's not leave the long Martin Luther King Day weekend without our annual tribute visit to the Bizarro Dr. King who usually surfaces in the rightwing media around this time of the year, who if he had been alive would certainly have disapproved of the #BlackLivesMatter movement because they are the "sons and daughters of Stokely Carmichael and, to some extent, even Huey P. Newton" (former moderately good detective novelist Roger L. Simon, via Shakezula), and of the ongoing imaginary War on Police (Fox & Friends, via David at C&L); and Donald Trump, at the Dr. King tributes at Liberty University in the appropriately named Lynchburg, VA., praised the size of the crowd that came to see him as

an honor in terms of Martin Luther King," Trump said. "We're dedicating the record to the late, great Martin Luther King." Trump made no other mention of the civil rights leader.

In my usual stomping grounds at the National Review they haven't been able to come up with anything new this year, but they reran a piece by Lee Habeeb from January 2013:

I forgive David Brooks

Rigorously. [Update: Hello fellow Frogponders! And thanks, Boo.]

Buster Keaton in The Electric House, 1922. Via SisterCelluloid.

Or rather, that's what he'd like me to do, forgive him preemptively, without waiting for him to notice he's done anything wrong:

Martin Luther King Jr. argued that forgiveness isn’t an act; it’s an attitude. We are all sinners. We expect sin, empathize with sin and are slow to think ourselves superior. The forgiving person is strong enough to display anger and resentment toward the person who has wronged her, but she is also strong enough to give away that anger and resentment.... 

In this view, the forgiving person makes the first move, even before the offender has asked. She resists the natural urge for vengeance. Instead, she creates a welcoming context in which the offender can confess.

National Review MLK Day Fail: Disparate impact

Update: While I was out doing things today Scott Lemieux literally wrote this piece for me, ten times wittier and more concise, of course, and leading with a remarkably similar joke. It was the first thing I read after posting. But there's a bunch of other stuff in this one anyhow. Besides I've got the picture, and the National Review piece we're writing about is actually a lot worse than Lemieux even realized once you get to the second paragraph.

From somebody else who likes to run photos of Dr. King smiling and wearing a hat, at Relationships Matter Now.

As most conservatives understand, Dr. Martin Luther King uttered only 35 words in the course of his entire life—

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

—and what he meant by those words, oddly, was, "If a white student scores two points higher on the LSAT than some given black student, then the white student should be admitted to the University of Michigan Law School."

This year, though, it was looking different, and I'd begun to think all the conservatives were fleeing from the usual celebration of the conservative Dr. King (Edroso finds a brand-new strain of condemning the liberal-fascist Dr. King, emitted into the ether by Ann Althouse, discussing how LBJ and MLK plotting the push for new civil rights legislation in 1965 took their inspiration from Hitler, because of course Hitler was totally ruthless in his passion for racial integration and voting rights and whatever it took to get more civil rights legislation passed in Germany), but a Roger Clegg at the National Review hasn't given up, and offers a learned legal four-little-children argument to commemorate the holiday:

Happy birthday Dr. King!

Martin Luther King, Jr., had he not been murdered, would have been 86 years old today (yesterday, actually—took me past midnight to get this out), and the right wing celebrates, as is their recent habit, by making up idiotic lies about how he supported their vile agenda or would have done so had he known what it was, as in:

Was an Endless Flow of Immigrant Workers who Take Jobs and Suppress Wages Dr. King’s Dream?

And a very happy Dr. King Day to you too!

Apparently from an anti-Communist, anti-Semitic site called incogman.net that happily no longer exists.

And in That Corner, John Fund, ever the gentleman, spends his Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday not attacking Dr. King. Instead, he attacks the late Nelson Mandela who, unlike Dr. King, held some improper opinions:

“I hate all forms of imperialism, and I consider the U.S. brand to be the most loathsome and contemptible.”

Because our beloved Mandiba was actually totally a Communist conspirator secretly working to destroy America's freedom forever, or at least a member in good [jump]

Sochi poem

#Sochi2014 is almost here. Write a haiku about Sochi with hashtag #sochihaiku - the best will get published on a special blog on RBTH!
— RBTH (@russiabeyond) January 17, 2014

Russia Beyond the Headlines is an international outlet for le poutinisme, somewhat less sophisticated than Russia Today—it features stories like

Put Putin on your fridge door

 and

Olympic beauty: Sochi girls to meet world famous athletes

Their haiku project backfired a little bit, leading to a "special blog" on BuzzFeed instead, and poems quite unlike the ones RBTH presumably envisaged:

Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi. Via Wikipedia.

David Brooks's secret message

Protest marcher. Prophet Amos, from Pueblo de Dios Lutheran Church.

The Yale Professor of Humility, with that uncanny ability he has to root out little-known facts, has learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a well-regarded Christian theologian. And not only that:

It’s also worth remembering that while today we take marches and protests for granted, the tactics of the civil rights movement had deep philosophical and religious roots.

Moreover, King and A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin were not liberals.

The leaders rejected the soft meliorism of more secular activists, the idea that significant progress could be made through consciousness-raising and education campaigns, through consensus and gradual reform. As Rustin put it, African-American leaders like him looked upon “the middle-class idea of long-term educational and cultural changes with fear and mistrust.”

The conclusion is obvious: indeed, so obvious that Brooks leaves it unstated, with his usual sophistication (also known as chronic dishonesty): King was a conservative!

Just like Tolstoy and Gandhi. And St. Francis. And the prophet Amos.

Or maybe just old Mr. Buckley, who had such a high regard for Dr. King, and set the standard for explaining his thinking by distorting what he said.

The unconscious of a conservative

The 1967 Poor People's Campaign, from Ecumenical Women at the United Nations

I've already amused myself more than could be considered strictly necessary, or even entirely sane, with Arizona's attorney general, Tom Horne, who believes that the Tucson high schools' Mexican-American Studies Program was teaching students that they were "oppressed by white people" and therefore "just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it." But I'm not really over it. Anyway, it's Dr. King's birthday...

So what I want to know is: What exactly is it about rightishness [jump]

Young Horne with the Man

Horne warming up for the Rachmaninov second piano concerto, from America's Own Espresso Pundit, who notes that "Rach II was Ayn Rand's favorite piece.  So it's a cult favorite among Conservatives..."

Did Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne really attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as a fresh graduate of Mamaroneck High School, on August 28, 1963? He certainly enjoys saying he did:

I grew up in the civil rights era. In the summer of 1963, having just graduated from high school, I participated in the march on Washington, in which Martin Luther King gave his famous speech, that his son should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. I have held onto this ideal in the face of subsequent fads: political correctness, identity politics, racial preferences, and "ethnic studies." (Letter to the editor, Arizona Republic, 2/3/2007)

Or then,