Bobo Brooks goes to Memphis, takes a trip down memory lane and laments how well-behaved black people used to be:
Martin Luther King Jr. at least left behind a model of how to repair the social fabric. He was scholarly, formal, assertive and meticulously self-controlled in public.
The life’s work of a great man and 40 years of historical facts, economics, sociology, politics and policy are washed away with a facile narrative about proper behavior and civility. That is the gist of Brooks’ article. It’s the The Santa-Clausification of Martin Luther King Jr.
The reason for everything that’s happened in the intervening 40 years?
But by the late-60s many felt the social structure needed to be torn down. The assassin’s bullet set off a conflagration.
Who could Brooks be referring to as the “many” in the “late-60s”? You got it: Dirty Fucking Hippies. In this paragraph he’s almost blaming the “angry and reckless” style of “late-60s” activism for MLK’s murder. That’s right. The rude and uncouth hippies killed MLK! Or at least they killed his dream.
Riots commenced, and in the ensuing years, crime rates skyrocketed, cities decayed and the social fabric was torn. Dreams of economic opportunity and racial integration were swallowed up by the antinomian passions and social disorder.
Antinomian (I just found out from dr. Gazoogle) is a fancy word for Immoral. So, immoral passions and disorderly behavior were responsible for denying MLK’s Dream of racial integration and economic opportunity, then.
But, Bobo, what about systemic employment discrimination, housing discrimination, voter disenfranchisement, the underfunding of urban public schools, disproportionate prison sentencing and other factual, statistically measurable phenomena?
All this is irrelevant to Bobo. It can all be explained by the breakdown of a metaphor called the social fabric, which is woven together by politeness and civility. See? Isn’t that easier to grasp than all that scientific stuff?
I would argue that Bobo Brooks and his fellow conservative public opinion manipulators are the primary reason why we are not living Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream 40 years later.
By relentlessly and systematically framing mass social and economic phenomena as individual behavioral problems the conservatives have prevented our society from addressing these phenomena.
***Prophylactic: this is not a post about the Dem nomination pie fight.
This is hard to overlook, though:
If Barack Obama’s presidential campaign represents anything, it is the triumph of King’s early-60s style of activism over the angry and reckless late-60s style.
In this framework, politics and activism are primarily about style and not, well, politics. Bobo ignores the fact that both King’s early-60s movement and the late-60s dirty crazy hippie movement had the same policy goals: fighting racism, injustice, poverty and ending the war in Vietnam. This doesn’t matter. In fact, in Bobo’s retelling these groups are mortal enemies. In Bobo’s retelling Martin Luther King Jr defeats the hippies through Barack Obama.
It’s enough to make your head hurt. Just stare into Bobo’s eyes and feel yourself enveloped in a warm social fabric. Doesn’t that feel better?
###
***Further reading: An actual historian writes about how conservatives did not think MLK was so Santaclaus-like at the time.
***In other news, apparently, all it takes for a conservative to be absolved for rejecting the MLK holiday is to visit the spot where MLK was assassinated and say a few words to his fawning friends in the media. We forgive you!”.
Front page
Bravo, Shystee
I don’t know what you did to that picture but it manages to distill all that is creepy about David Brooks.
Is it just me, or was Brooks actually hinting that King had as much or more to fear from radical blacks than from mainstream racist whites?
What is so dangerous about David Brooks is his knack for making such arguments sound reasonable. Of course it’s easier whenever the subject is race, and in particular, the “Negro” race, because the classic tropes of American racism are still so current, helped to be so by their revival and re-mainstreaming by the right, (See Dinesh D’Souza’s “The End Of Racism”), and far too many so-called liberals, (see The New Republic under Martin Perez through-out the 1980s and 1990s).
It needs to be called out every time. Every time.
I think it's the lips, leah
I think he had one of his interns wipe off the blood… But there’s still a faint residue of color….
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Appalling Misappropriation
This is one of many reasons why it’s important for all liberals to reject conservative framing of that era. Do not talk about the excesses of the 1960s and 70s unless you’re talking about Bull Connor and his ilk. Because it’s about conservatives - who were on the wrong side in that era - misappropriating real heroes like King to make it seem like the conservatives were on the right side. That their only problem was in the “tactics” not the goal, as if the violence that sprang up in the late 1960s wasn’t often in reaction to conservative resistance to freedom, in response to the slayings of King and RFK, to the continuance of that ridiculous war.
It’s appalling. Simply, appalling.
And every time Obama is compared to King, I flinch.* Whoever Obama is - and I think he’s a talented, charismatic, smart politician - he isn’t King. He rarely tells anyone hard truths and he certainly isn’t going to lead any political protest which gets him gassed and jailed (which, of course, is why Bobo and others so often hold him up for emulation). That isn’t an insult to Obama, btw, it’s a tribute to King and his fellow civil rights leaders. Every one of whom took more risks in a week - personal, political - than any current “leader” takes in a career.
For those who might be interested, a very different memory of MLK - Hillary Clinton’s speech in Memphis yesterday. There’s some policy politicking in the middle, but the opening and closing about Dr. King, are really the parts worth reading.
* NOTE - this is not about the democratic primary fight. Unless, of course, MLK is on the democratic ballot. If that’s the case, and I missed it, I made a horrible mistake with my vote and would like a re-do, please.
Robert Kennedy on MLK
McCain on MLK
This is a link to a different viewpoint, from the center of the crowd instead of the view from the side of the stage in the clip shystee kindly links to. It yields a less equivocal impression of the crowd’s judgment, and a clearer view of McCain’s face. He tries to smile, but to me it appears more as a grimace. He doesn’t like being challenged.
More booing, please. Much, much more.
Thanks Leah
That is what I was going for. I think it’s the little vampire teeth combined with the earnest eyes. He is the epitomy of the non-threatening, reasonable conservative who nevertheless pushes the most vile memes to further the conservative movement’s agenda.
Thanks Lb, BDB and BIO for not turning this into a pie fight thread.
BDBlue, What Did You Mean By Your Mistaken Vote
You’ve probably explained elsewhere, but I didn’t pick up on it. Just curious to what exactly about which vote you were referencing?
Sorry for being confusing, leah
I was just underscoring the fact that pointing out that comparisons between MLK and Obama are, basically, bullshit wasn’t meant to be a commentary on Obama in terms of the current democratic race because none of the candidates are MLK and if one was and I missed it, then I’d want to redo my vote because MLK would be my choice.
It was a poor attempt on my part to try to keep the thread from becoming obsessed with the primary and to keep it focused on MLK and his legacy and trying to keep that legacy from being co-opted and watered down. If that makes any sense.
If MLK had run for President...
… it’s very doubtful he would have remained MLK, and extremely doubtful that he would have had a day named after him. Electoral politics isn’t all politics…
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Absolutely, lambert
MLK was only MLK because he was not about electoral politics. He didn’t have to care about losing several states’ EVs for the next several decades. That was Johnson’s problem and, to his credit, it was a price he was willing to pay. It was just my awkward way to try to keep this thread from being hijacked by the primary food fight.
I had a history teacher who used to talk about how remarkable it was that, while the U.S. had had a lot of terrible leaders, we always seemed to get who we needed in a crisis - Washington at the founding, Lincoln at the Civil War, Roosevelt in WWII. All very different people, with very different strengths, but who had the strengths we needed when we needed them, even if they weren’t perfect. I’d say the confluence of MLK, LBJ, and others is another example of that - an extraordinary leader pushing boundaries and creating political pressure through civil disobedience and a president who was happy to use that pressure to do what he felt was the right thing.
Of course, in our latest test we got George W. Bush, so perhaps our luck is over. When I look at Clinton and Obama, I keep reminding myself that FDR hadn’t always been FDR, that it is possible for people to become great, to find their greatness.