William Kristol says Bush has been a friend to Israel, even if American Jews don't think so. Roger Cohen, who must be too busy with inaugural balls to do any real writing, threw up a parody of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" using pop culture references from the last eight years. And you thought that we were lazy.The big news, of course, is the most incredible event in the history of race in America since Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, and, possibly, since the Emancipation Proclamation. As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, we are about to inaugurate the first Black President of the United States. You hadn't heard? It was in all the papers.
This is Obama's Op-Ed in today's Washington Times. The Washington Post's coverage starts here.
We are struck by how time can turn people into symbols. In the service of history, real, complex human beings have their edges rounded, their sharp lines made soft. That's how John F. Kennedy became a liberal saint, even though he invaded Cuba and got us into Vietnam. It's how Che' Gueva is reduced to a cartoon for self-styled revolutionaries whose "revolution" is wearing a t-shirt.
Martin Luther King Jr., too, has become a symbol. Dr. King was a hero. He knowingly gave his life so that others could be free. There's no better definition of a hero than that. Dr. King was not, however, an actual saint, and he was nothing if not controversial.
King was a highly political man fighting deeply entrenched racial injustice in a radical time. Extreme rhetoric like "fascist" and "revolution" was in the air and Dr. King, in the tenor of his times, demanded financial reparations for slavery, and a redistribution of wealth with a very socialist tinge. Once infamously King said the United States had "committed more war crimes than any nation in the world," something we would hear today from Jeremiah Wright. (For the record, the Nazis hold the record for war crimes. And they did it in under a decade.)
Would Dr. King be so critical of today’s America? Would he be hanging out with Sean Penn and Huge Chavez in Raoul Castro's Cuba? Maybe. Would he have voted for Obama? We're guessing so, even though King was a Republican. Would he have supported the Iraqi War? It's hard to see how. But what about Afghanistan? Surely, a man of Dr. King's intellect would know that nonviolent protest might not work real well against a group like Al-Queda.
We'll never know. Nor should it matter. We need heroes more than we need real, complex, fallible people. As King has gone from being news to being history, we have collectively agreed to leave the parts of his life behind that don't fit the image we need him to have. But it's still hard not to wonder hat we've lost along the way.
Listen to this. King's philosophical call to go "beyond communism and capitalism," and you'll know what we mean. They don't play this one at the birthday tributes.
