I’ve become increasingly concerned at how much my fellow humans have seemingly adopted and accepted artificial intelligence programs that emulate human creativity and output. It’s here, they say collectively. There’s no stopping it, so we might as well play around with the technology and have fun. We now have programs that can write lyrics, poems and essays, churn out songs, emulate famous singing voices and create photography and artwork that so closely resembles manmade projects that many people can’t tell the authentic works from the rendered ones.
Indeed, German artist Boris Eldagsen fooled judges when he submitted an AI-generated image to the Sony world photography awards and later admitted the picture was not a real photograph.
And a band named AISIS recently wrote a record’s worth of songs in the manner of real British rock band, Oasis, using a computer generated voice of singer, Liam Gallagher. Since I’ve been an Oasis fan since the early 1990s, I could definitely tell a difference between the computer voice and Gallagher’s, but the singer himself said the project was “mad as fuck” (whatever that means), and he said that he sounded “mega” on the recording. I guess that means “good.”
While AI-generated artwork, poetry and music is in its infancy, the music industry has been using computers to “fix” defects in live vocal and instrumental performances for the last two decades, starting with the advent of Auto-Tune in 1996, first made famous by Cher’s 1998 song, “Believe.” Starting in the early 2000s, music producers have used a tool called quantization to “line up” drum hits and musical notes along a grid so that the instrumentation perfectly matches the beat in rhythm. Used too heavily, Auto-Tune can make vocal performances sound robotic or otherworldy; even used conservatively, it gives voices a bizarre-sounding “sheen” that does not exist naturally. Likewise, quantization takes the nuance out of live instrumentation. When used together, as is almost always the case in studio recordings this day and age, the music comes out sounding too perfect, too sterile, too sanitized.
Modern music production tools used in the last couple decades aren’t exactly AI, but they prefigured what we are seeing today: human creativity and achievement either being improved or replaced by AI. Chat GPT can generate high school level essays and poems on nearly any topic imaginable. Programs like Midjourney and others have the ability to render extremely detailed and fantastical landscapes or “portraits” of celebrities. And elsewhere in the AI-sphere, pop songs imitating the voices of Drake and The Weeknd can be fashioned out of nothing more than prompts and code. One of the songs in question, “Heart On My Sleeve” — one struggles to imagine a less imaginative song title — fooled millions of listeners and was eventually removed from all streaming services by Universal Music Group when word spread that it was a fake.
For now, humans are still behind the wheel of all this faux-creativity, but in the future, given the rather loaded implications of artificial intelligence, this will surely not always be the case.
As a musician, songwriter and a fan since before digital music production when every vocal performance heard on the radio came from a natural recording — vocalists simply stood in the booth and sang their parts until they got it right — I am particularly interested in the use of computers in music because it’s my contention that even before AI veered us closer to the precipice, something valuable had already been lost.
The mainstream public often can’t tell when a song is excessively autotuned because of more than two decades of conditioning, or, listeners just don’t care whether it was or not. In general, so long as there is a beat — apparently any beat, no matter how much the same beat was used in countless other songs — an uber repetitive melody and vapid lyrics, the public will happily consume it. And now, it is nearly impossible to find a studio recording, in any genre, that isn’t quantized to the hilt and soaked in Auto-Tune.
Further, because many, if not most, mainstream pop songs use very simple, repetitive melodies and beats, people can’t tell the difference between manmade and computer-made songs either.
We teeter at the brink of a fully deceptive world, where truth, creativity and authenticity crumbles and we can no longer trust our senses.
This quote was a rare moment of self-awareness in an article that I thought was otherwise severely short-sided in its view that, while AI may be able to make pop music that is at least as good as its human counterparts and may even take over the streaming industry, there will always be space for manmade musical innovation.
Writer Mark Beaumont imagined a few pathways toward human flourishing in this area. Volume-based streaming services would either become a very large collection of bland human and computer generated pop, catering to people who don’t care which is which, and the “real” songwriters would be free to rise above and make better music:
The established platforms, then, could shrug, tacitly embrace the fact that their sites have become a hyper-speed circle-jerk of robots making music for robots to listen to and eye up their fifth superyacht. If most humans decide they’re just as happy listening to AI music as human music then the streaming dream will have fulfilled its foundational purpose to provide a truly limitless source of cheap, characterless background muzak ringing out across every night bus in the land.
Another potential scenario in this new landscape, according to Beaumont, is that listeners might grow weary of AI content, but if users already can’t tell the difference between computer generated music and human-created works, I find this option to be implausible. Alternatively, record labels might eventually give “preferential treatment” to real artists. I would hope so, otherwise the music industry as we know it would cease to exist.
Beaumont’s rosy grand finale:
In either scenario, one thing actually rises in value: human creativity, and all the inventiveness, imagination, unpredictability and star power it entails. …
If Spotify goes full-on AI, alternative platforms will spring up championing nothing but human music, where the most innovative artists reimagining what music can be will flourish above more formulaic fare that computers are doing better elsewhere. …
Only the most visionary will survive. Music is about to enter a magnificent new phase of man versus machine – it’s time to blow their hive-minds.
While admirable, the optimism here is misplaced and premature.
Judging by how accepting, acquiescent and complacent everyone seems to be about AI, in a man versus machine scenario, the machines — and the machine — will most likely win, and there isn’t a scenario, financially or creatively, in which humans come out on top.
Creativity wont pay in an ai world, if it can be knocked out in cheap mass production line fashion by (effectively) robots. As time moves on the human input level required to create these things will get less and less too. It will be pushed by the execs at top as it will mean less outlaying on labour an maximising profits, which is basically all ai will ultimately benefit… top end profit!
Thomas Hodge, Facebook comment on the NME article
And as far as creativity itself, if AI is currently able to pull off assembly line pop music as well or better than actual human creators of said pop, who’s to say it won’t eventually be able to replicate music on the level of “Dark Side of the Moon,” “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” “Are You Experienced” or Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos?
How does human creativity rise in value if AI becomes capable — and it will — of being just as innovative and inventive as we are? The Beatles, fully human as they were, created new genres of music. Who’s to say AI won’t also fashion new genres of music and push the boundaries harder and faster than humans, in all of our tinkering slowness, ever could?
I worry for our creative future, especially when so few people, hardly anyone, as far as I can tell, is voicing the kinds of concerns I’m raising here. It is true that so far, AI currently needs human beings to input prompts and to tell it what to do, but this will surely not always be the case. And what then? Self-sustaining AI uploading its own music to the streaming services or its own rendered artwork or photography to galleries? Picasso V6.1 Build 10.4.874040a becoming the first AI program to get a plaque in the Louvre or MOMA alongside the greatest human pieces of all time? It’s all light, fun and games now, but this slope is slippery and steep, and it’s probably already too late to pull back the reins. I have a grim feeling that AI will win, and in our acquiescence, we’ll let it.
I will try not to make what I’m about to say here feel disjointed, but I believe that in talking about a professional wrestler who died way too early in life, some common themes about how to move forward in 2021 might emerge. But first, here is a brief look at the life and career of Jon Huber.
***
Although professional wrestling’s sole purpose is to entertain fans and to “put smiles on people’s faces,” as WWE CEO Vince McMahon never tires of saying, those inside the industry and its loyal fanbase have had to grapple with a disturbing number of untimely deaths the last few decades. Whether the conversation inevitably comes back around to complications from steroid abuse, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, wrestlers enduring untold hours of physical abuse in the ring or just bad luck, we wrestling fans somehow find ourselves mourning a new round of fallen superstars year after year. Some of these are the result of the natural progression of time, and some are more shocking.
The death of Jonathan Huber, 41, known as Luke Harper in WWE and Mr. Brodie Lee in AEW, on Dec. 26 shook the wrestling community seemingly to the core. Huber, who is listed at 6-foot, 5-inches tall and 275 pounds, recently succumbed to complications from a “non-Covid related lung issue,” according to his wife, and his death, almost two weeks later, is still being mourned across the industry, as fans, colleagues and friends share memories of the man many say was a genuinely good person, a loving husband and father of two children and a loyal friend.
‘We Fought Like Brothers’
Huber began backyard wrestling in 2003 before debuting with the indie promotion, Chikara, in 2007. Huber bumped around in some other indie promotions up until 2012 when he signed a developmental deal with the WWE to work in the company’s NXT developmental promotion before being called up to the main roster.
On WWE’s main shows, Huber was part of the hugely popular Wyatt Family faction and the Bludgeon Brothers tag team as the character of Luke Harper, and in AEW, he was the leader of the Dark Order under the name, Brodie Lee, which is a combination of his name on the indies, Brodie Bruce, and actor Jason Lee. While he, along with his partners, Bray Wyatt and Erick Rowan, had a lot of success as the Wyatt Family in WWE, perhaps punctuated by the stable’s feud with one of the greatest factions in the company’s history, The Shield, beginning in 2014, the common thought among wrestling fans is that Huber was not given a chance as a singles competitor in WWE.
In AEW, however, he was put at the head of his own group and was given the freedom to shine on the mic and in the ring. He took part in a dog collar match in October against Cody Rhodes, which was one hell of a contest, and he was then taken off TV. This would turn out to be his last match. Fans simply thought he was injured. Much to our dismay, however, the truth was much more saddening, and the reality of such a robust superstar stricken down in his prime has forced a lot of us to reevaluate life once again in the face of our own mortality and the humanity of larger-than-life heroes in the ring that we sometimes mistakenly think are invincible.
His friend and leader of the Wyatt Family, Bray Wyatt — real name Windham Rotunda — penned a touching send-off that deserves a full airing:
You were my best friend. My brother, my partner, my Terry Gordy. We changed this whole game because we refused to do it any way but OUR way. We were always at our best when we were a team I think we both knew it. We fought like brothers because we were. I’m so goddamn pissed. This isn’t how it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be us fat, bald and useless running Wyatt Family spots in high school gyms in our 70’s. Where do we go now? What do I do knowing I’ll never hear your condescending sarcasm as I am riding high.
I miss you so fucking much already. I would do anything just live through our worst moments again I can’t believe you’re gone. I’m so sorry brother. I’m so sorry. You will always be a part of me, whether I like it or not without you everything is different and I hope Amanda truly knows that I am here not just to say it but because I love them too. I will make sure your son knows the incredible man you were. Not the legends people will tell but the real you that very few people got to see. I promise I’ll put him over clean in dark matches when he’s old enough just like I promised. I’m hurting so bad. I wish I had a chance to say goodbye. But then again, it’s Saturday and you know what that means…. save me a seat next to you wherever you are, that’s where I belong. I’ll be there when it’s my time. Goodbye forever Brodie. I love you.
I wasn’t the biggest Luke Harper fan in WWE, but when he came to AEW this past March and I got to see the full breadth of what he could do on the mic and in the ring if given the opportunity, I began to appreciate his body of work and was looking forward to seeing him progress in the company. He had incredible potential.
This past Wednesday, AEW gave one of the most touching and emotional tributes to a wrestler I have ever seen. The entire episode of AEW’s show, “Dynamite,” was devoted to Huber. His son, Brodie Jr., picked all the matchups, and a member of Brodie Lee’s old group, the Dark Order, came away with the victory each time. Brodie Jr., who was in attendance donning a Dark Order mask, was named an honorary member of the group earlier in the week and now holds the name “-1” because each member of the group is assigned a number and that is their in-ring name. The child was also given Brodie Lee’s TNT Championship, and he became the lifelong titleholder.
Begin Again
As I listened to multiple colleagues and podcasters talk about Huber’s life, I teared up more than once when I thought about the fragility of life and that it doesn’t matter how robust a person is, time can claim any of us in an instant. As I have said, his death rocked many people in the wrestling community, and I was certainly not excluded. And for it to come at the end of 2020, a year in which more than 330,000 Americans died from the pandemic; a year in which hundreds of businesses were either shuttered or have struggled to remain open; a year in which the wrestling business, sometimes to a fault, tried to keep people entertained in the mist of so much suffering; a year in which the wrestling world had already lost at least 15 notable superstars, including Pat Patterson, Rocky Johnson (The Rock’s father), famous ring announcer, Howard Finkel, Shad Gaspard, La Parka, Road Warrior Animal, Kamala and others; was all the more stultifying.
Suffice it to say that last night, Dec. 31, 2020, I didn’t much feel like celebrating. I slept a lot. I vegged in front of the TV. I gazed with something like contempt as gleeful partiers cheered and danced in front of screen with a lot of hope but not much else, as if a pall of death and stupidity hadn’t just been unleashed in 2020.
Like almost every other New Year’s on record, we had high hopes for 2020. But we were quickly disappointed as winter bled into spring. Our great and fearless leader was one of the most heartless presidents in the history of the country who contributed to more human misery than he prevented. Beyond the 330,000 people who are now dead because of Covid-19 and the incompetent federal response, millions of other family members have been directly impacted by the virus and are currently grieving for those who will not be around to celebrate this “joyous” holiday season.
And what of the rest of 2020? Many more unarmed, innocent black people were killed by police this year, and despite protest after protest in states all across the nation, only some modest reforms have taken place thus far. Despite a fucking Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the struggle for civil rights well into the 20th century, America is still defaulting on Martin Luther King Jr.’s promissory note and simply cannot wrap its collective mind around that little independent clause, “all men are created equal.” Seditious Republicans are still, more than a month after the election, attempting to subvert the Constitution and our democracy. And finally, something like half of this nation has exposed itself as deeply selfish, unloving, racist and conspiratorial.
So, no, forgive me, given the wreckage of 2020 and Huber’s untimely death, if I was not in a festive mood yesterday with these realities still in view.
Personally, I have spoken to friends about 2020 as a bittersweet affair. I, like many, have gone through bouts of depression, loneliness and anger. As an immunecompromised individual, only in the last month or so have I gotten to see my girlfriend and my family. I have been able to make some good things happen this past year. I have tried to strengthen my relationships. Creatively, I have written about 10 new songs since the quarantine, my most productive single year to date. I have begun recording some of my original songs in a studio in the hopes of releasing some singles and either an EP or full album sometime in 2021. I have listened to about 100-125 albums that I had never heard before and have tried to expand my general music knowledge. Even as I have been limited in where I can go the last nine months, I have taken a considerable number of nature photographs by simply driving around my neighborhood and staying away from people as much as possible. And through all of the Covid scares, I have remained healthy during quarantine by following medical advice and staying cautious and diligent, and no one in my immediate family has been impacted by the virus.
I didn’t want this piece to be all doom and gloom, and I hope it has not been. I’m cautiously hopeful for 2021, but I simply could not forget, or erase from my mind, even for a few hours of enjoyment last night, the severe losses that we have suffered, the immense challenges that we still face and the anger that still bubbles to the surface when I think about the wanton intolerance and ignorance that still threatens to cripple the progress we have made.
Joe Biden is going to take office with or without the support of the seditious House Republicans, and under his leadership, America will renavigate our onward path toward science, reason and progress. Covid will eventually be defeated, and we will slowly get back to normal.
Tragically, though, it’s too late for Huber, and it’s too late for 330,000 Americans, but it isn’t too late for we who remain to set a different course, both personally and nationally, as we strive to heal a broken nation and a lot of broken hearts.
If the events of 2020 have taught us anything, it is that we have the chance to right the ship. The chance to bend the arm further toward justice. The chance to love our neighbors and to care for each other. The chance to really listen to and learn from each other. The chance to reinvite bipartisanship into our public discourse. The chance to bring this nation ever closer to the imperishable ideas outlined by the Enlightenment principles that inform our Constitution. The chance to grow, love and live. The chance to hope when hope was once out of reach. The chance to tell the people we love how we feel, not later, but now.
The chance to start over. The chance to begin again …
“A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. ‘The problem of the twentieth century,’ wrote W.E.B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, ‘is the problem of the color line.’ A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world — here, there, or anywhere.” — James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 1962
***
I barely know where to start. As if the grim reality that more than 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and more than 370,000 worldwide, wasn’t heart-wrenching enough, to see the collective pain and racial unrest across the nation after the murder of George Floyd (and many other black victims of police brutality) at the hands of an overzealous, white cop, has left me in a state of despair and, frankly, hopelessness that things will change any time soon.
My feelings on the current state of affairs barely register on the scale of what it must be like — I can never know and won’t pretend to know — to live in constant fear that your body or the bodies of your friends or family members could be broken — in the year 2020, in the “greatest nation in the world.” That line is in quotes because we are, as it has been proven over and over, by our collective apathy, by our arrogance, by our selfishness, by our disregard for the interests and safety of black people in America, by our failure to reform the justice system, by our failure to hold people in power accountable and by our negligence, that we are far from the greatest nation in the world. In fact, I’m not sure we even rise to the level of “good” by the scale and scope at which we have utterly failed to protect our fellow citizens and our fellow human beings.
I’m aware of my place in this as a white male who grew up in the South. I’m aware that I can’t escape my upbringing, and I can’t escape the white guilt that comes with it. A white person growing up in the South in the 1980s could hardly escape the legacy of racism and bigotry that is almost soaked into the soil in places like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and my home state of South Carolina. The blood and sweat of slaves during the American Civil War and those who suffered and died during Reconstruction is, indeed, literally soaked into the soil.
I’m also aware of the impulse of white liberals to want to swoop in and “save” black people. A white firebrand named John Brown, who was a domestic terrorist for his half-cocked plan to invade the federal stronghold at Harper’s Ferry and for his murderous escapades in Kansas three years earlier, thought of himself as the literal savior of slaves in the run-up to the Civil War, donning the “armor of God” to overthrow the system of slavery. Unfortunately, God couldn’t protect him from the noose after he and his co-conspirators were caught. In any case, Brown’s actions paved the way for the coming war, and he is largely credited with having “seeded civil rights,” in the words of his biographer David S. Reynolds.
A term, “white savior industrial complex,” was coined in 2012 by novelist Teju Cole, who said WSIC refers to the “confluence of practices, processes, and institutions that reify historical inequities to ultimately validate white privilege” and that it includes a “big emotional experience that validates privilege.”
Ultimately, people are rewarded from “saving” those less fortunate and are able to completely disregard the policies they have supported that have created/maintained systems of oppression (i.e. The U.S.’s exploitation in Haiti has contributed to poverty and corruption, yet Americans can feel good about their charity after the Earthquake). The rhetoric around how Americans often talk about Africa—as a continent of chaos, warthirsty people, and impoverished HIV-infected communities, situates these countries as places in need of heroism. This mindset perpetuates the need for external forces to come in and save the day, but what gets left out of this conversation are the roles settler colonialism and white supremacy have had in creating these conditions in the first place.
So, extending this to current circumstances in America, what’s at play here with the saviorism concept is that white people can feel good about sympathizing with the plight of black people, and even support causes that bolster black lives either physically or financially — all the while assuaging their sense of white guilt — but the underlying problems that created the conditions of inequality and injustice remain unaddressed, whatever good intentions white people had at the onset.
Some in the black community have rejected the notion of having “white allies” outright if it does not work in tandem with requisite political change and the annihilation of whiteness itself as a construct.
In a blistering critique of white saviorism, Gyasi Lake, for the Black Youth Project, wrote last year:
In a reality where whiteness affords you the luxury of choosing whether or not to leverage your privilege and be revered uncritically, despite glaring flaws, Blackness can never flourish. Until whiteness is dismantled indefinitely, white voices will continue to be elevated and championed above the voices of the most marginalized communities.
The revolution can’t be sponsored and/or acceptable to those we are revolting against.
As a student at Clemson University, I took a course that addressed this very subject called “Whiteness in America.” One of the authors we explored was Noel Ignatiev, whose book, “Race Traitor,” argued that “whiteness” should be abolished altogether and that white people should eschew opportunities to use their privilege to their advantage. Race, for sure, is nothing more than a construct.
As James Baldwin said in “The Fire Next Time”:
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk — eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.
We now have a disturbingly long and terrible list of black people who were victimized by police brutality or negligence and who did not deserve to die. They include (far from comprehensive):
George Floyd
Breonna Taylor
Ahmaud Arbery
Trayvon Martin
Eric Garner
Dreasjon “Sean” Reed
Philando Castile
Jamar Clark
Botham Jean
Michael Brown
Freddie Gray
Ezell Ford
Tamir Rice
Laquan McDonald
Michelle Shirley
Redel Jones
Kenney Watkins
Stephon Clark
Compounded with these outright injustices, there is a long list of families in the inner city who live under the weight of a system of housing, justice and welfare that do not serve to make their lives better. In many cases, their lives are worse because of systemic racism that now threatens to rot the core of democracy. Indeed, policies under both administrations, but especially the Republicans, during the last five decades have failed to provide adequate and affordable health care and family support services for low-income families, have failed to make the inner cities safe, have failed to root out drugs, have failed to get guns off the street and have failed to offer compassionate economic policies that lift all of the boats, failures that can not be absolved with a $1,200 check. In fact, policies that prop up the rich and benefit inanimate corporations and Wall Street have been put in place at the expense of low-income Americans. And because we have failed the inner cities and because we have failed black people and because we have failed immigrants and because we have failed to take care of the poor and disabled among us, we have failed as a nation, and we have failed as human beings.
After Barack Obama was elected president, some people were ready to declare that racism in America was a thing of the past, but as we have seen, it hasn’t gone away, and maybe it hasn’t even diminished. The period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was something of a wandering in the desert for black folks. Black men finally got the vote through the 15th amendment in 1870, and some were even able to win public office, but thanks to the Ku Klux Klan and other fireeaters in the South, black people were intimidated and forced by compulsion to stay away from the polls. Ulysses S. Grant left the presidency after two terms, and Reconstruction fell apart. Civil rights would essentially be at a standstill until the mid-20th century, and former plantation owners in the South simply re-subjugated their former slaves.
The civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and many others, including a coalition of white supporters, experienced a watershed moment with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society social reform programs in the mid-1960s. The nation showed promise as we were seemingly poised to finally address poverty, economic disparity and social inequality. Unfortunately, while many of LBJ’s programs remain in place to this day, the project of improving life in the inner city fell by the wayside in the late 1970s and early 80s with the introduction of the supposed “War on Drugs,” the gradual privatization of prisons and tougher sentencing regulations for nonviolent drug offenses. These, coupled with a host of policies by conservative lawmakers that bolstered the rich at the expense of low-income workers led to the conditions by which inner city black Americans not only felt economic pressures just trying to make ends meet, but racial tensions and built-in, generational animosity among white people about new rights afforded to black folks, was a noxious recipe for a gathering storm of racial unrest that has spilled across the last four decades.
So, when Obama was elected as the first black president in the nation’s history, the racists and bigots, who briefly came out of hiding to dabble in the newly formed Tea Party in support of John McCain and Sarah Palin, scurried back into their basements to listen to Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and the myriad other far-right conservative voices on talk radio at the time.
Thus, the legacy of racism and prejudice in America is bound up with politics, and at the core, while some racism may be learned or is generational, some of it comes from white animosity that stems from the Civil Rights Era, animosity that is completely unfounded since America was built on the idea of white supremacy and privilege, ideologies by which many in power still operate. White people have always been in charge and have held all the cards.
Just because I am writing about racial injustice and care about black lives doesn’t mean I’m immune from the perils of white saviorism or privilege. As such, I must continually remind myself that I write from a privileged position inside my white skin.
That said, I, like many white people protesting alongside black people, want to help in the cause of reforming the police and the criminal justice system, ending systemic racism and discrimination and holding malevolent officers accountable for their actions. We need extremely harsh sentences for cops who wantonly kill black people with overzealous, dehumanizing behavior. We need every cop to have a body camera, one that they cannot deactivate. We need to end the militarization of police. Studies have shown that militarized policemen only fuel unrest. We need policies that, once and for all, bolster the inner city and increase educational opportunities for children. And people who display hateful or racist behavior need to be marginalized to the fringes of society. There is no place for them in modern America; for, we, white people, must take the following posture in solidarity: when racists speak ill of black people, they speak ill of me and this nation. There can be no tolerance for racism in 2020.
And at the very least, I want to raise awareness about the problems we face as a nation, provide some historical context and support my fellow human beings. Because of my health situation, I’m unable to get out and protest, but will continue to advocate for black lives, for justice and for equality.
The time for change is now — “the fierce urgency of now.”
President Donald Trump’s audacity apparently knows no bounds.
In a recent tweet, he threatened to withhold federal funding, amid a global pandemic no less, if Michigan did not cease its call to send out mail-in ballots to all of its 7.7 million residents so that, in the words of Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, “no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote.”
The first thing that needs to be said is that, even if Trump doesn’t like the decision — it was issued from a Democrat, so, of course, it would raise his ire — there is nothing illegal about a state mailing out absentee ballots to its own residents. That is lie No. 1. In 2018, Michigan voters approved a “no excuse” constitutional amendment to allow any resident to apply for an absentee ballot for any reason.
Trump’s tweet, which has been liked by more than 120,000 people at present, includes two other falsehoods.
Lie No. 2 is that Michigan’s move has anything at all to do with an attempt at voter fraud. Trump has pushed this dishonest claim repeatedly, but it’s well-documented at this point that, while voting in person is obviously more secure than mail-in ballots, cases of absentee fraud have been few and far between. Michigan’s decision is about ensuring that people stay safe during the virus outbreak while being allowed to participate in one of this nation’s most cherished, and important, democratic processes.
Trump also suggested that he has the power to withhold state funding. He almost certainly does not. That might have been true if this was an authoritative regime, and I’m sure some of the people in power would like to quietly move us in that direction and give Trump all manner of unconstitutional privileges, but here in this democracy, the executive can’t simply invent powers. As The New York Times notes, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, issued under President Richard Nixon, requires the chief executive to get approval from Congress before any money is withheld. In any case, a lot of the recently approved funding to states has already been released.
Cutting a state’s funding because they don’t do your bidding would be illegal. By threatening to do so, as Greg Sargent, with The Washington Post said, the president is “abusing his office and betraying the national interest.” Not only would Trump’s threat be illegal if put into action, it’s also undemocratic. Not that either of these bother the president.
Trump knows that in the upcoming election, he might be in trouble in Michigan. Attempts to prevent more people from voting is a tried and true part of the GOP toolkit. Current conservative strategies for limiting votes or asserting more influence in elections, including new restrictive laws and gerrymandering, are certainly more subtle in the 21st century than they were in the 19th and 20th centuries, but they are designed to achieve the same result. Republicans, and conservatives throughout American history, have long known that if they can somehow suppress votes, they have a better chance of winning. And why is that? Because conservatives have historically protected the interests of the few — the privileged and the well-connected (and usually white) — to the detriment of the many, including blue collar workers, immigrants, low-income families and those in the inner city.
Trump and his Republican cohorts know very well that the more they can suppress certain voters, the better chance they have of remaining in power. The president even admitted it. During an episode of “Fox and Friends” on Fox News, Trump was talking about measures that were proposed by Democrats to increase the number of people who could vote during the pandemic:
“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
And in November 2019, Justin Clark, one of Trump’s 2020 election advisors, had this to say in leaked audio captured by a liberal advocacy group:
Traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. …
Let’s start protecting our voters (regarding Election Day monitoring of polling places). We know where they are … Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.
Clark claims this was taken out of context and that he was talking about historic, false allegations that the Republican Party suppresses votes — although the line, “let’s start playing offense” belies this argument — but when you actually do look at the historical record of how the conservative party in America actually is incontrovertibly guilty of widespread corruption at the ballot box, it becomes difficult to believe the president or anyone else in the Republican Party that their intentions are benevolent and on the up and up.
Slow Progress
Before the 15th Amendment became law, of course, the right to vote was more or less limited to white people who owned a certain amount of property. In the early 19th century, this began to change as restrictions were loosened in certain states. The constitutional amendment, ratified in February 1870, only allowed black men to vote. Black folks almost exclusively voted for the Republican Party, which was, crucially, the more liberal party in American politics at the time, while the conservatives mainly inhabited the Democratic Party. These dynamics didn’t begin to shift until around the year 1900 when “The Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryant, a Democrat, began to champion increased economic equality and railed against the robber baron class. Although he would later take an anti-Darwin, anti-intellectual stance and is known to many atheists and secular humanists mainly as a fundamentalist Christian, he set in motion the populist left movement en route to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” platform, which was a kind precursor to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” programs of the 1960s.
But back in the 1870s with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the issue of voting rights for black people was far from settled. Politicians and former slaveholders in the South, who were reeling economically from the devastating effects of war and attempting to set up a form of slavery by a different name, Reconstruction began to take shape. Some black folks did get to vote, and some members of the black community even got elected to state and federal offices, but in many cases in the South, literacy tests and poll taxes were introduced as an attempt to control the numbers of African Americans who could vote. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were formed to assert white influence in the nation and intimidate blacks and their supporters from participation in democracy and public life. [efn_note]”The Volume Library,” Volume II, Page 2239.[/efn_note]
Interestingly, three prominent Southern statesmen, Lucius Lamar in Mississippi, Wade Hampton in South Carolina and Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, said in a public statement that denying black people the right to vote was “not only impossible but undesired,” according to “Origins of the New South” by C. Vann Woodward. Whether it is actually true or not, Hampton claimed to be the “first man at (sic) the South” to support enfranchisement for black folks, and went so far as to say that the black man, “naturally allies himself with the more conservative of the whites.” Lamar defended black voting rights and supported a plan to provide federal dollars to local schools “emphasizing the benefits for former slaves,” according to The Mississippi Encyclopedia. [efn_note]”Origins of the New South,” C. Vann Woodward, 1951, Page 321.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”The Mississippi Encyclopedia,” 2017, Page 704.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”Black Reconstruction in America,” W.E.B. Dubois, 1935, Page 443.[/efn_note]
But as Woodward notes, “The century had scarcely ended, however, before the prophecies of these statesmen were overturned throughout the South” as state after state rolled out disenfranchisement provisions through poll taxes and “other devices.”
That would largely remain the situation on voting rights until passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution when women got the vote.
Full Access?
Probably seeing the writing on the wall and how the arc of history was progressing up to that point, and that they were, in fact, losing, white leaders in the South became even more committed to restricting access to the voting booth for black people, and thus, we have the marches, sit-ins and the battle for rights that ensued in towns like Selma, Miss., where civil rights supporters were hosed and beaten with clubs for daring to challenge the status quo. The crucial moment, 100 years after ratification of the 15th amendment, came with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, presumably giving black folks full access to the ballot box in practice, not just in theory. According to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the bill was important to prevent some of the more egregious voter suppression offenses.
(The act) included provisions that required states and local jurisdictions with a historical pattern of suppressing voting rights based on race to submit changes in their election laws to the U.S. Justice Department for approval (or “preclearance”). In the ensuing decades, the preclearance provisions proved to be a remarkably effective means of discouraging state and local officials from erecting new barriers to voting, stopping the most egregious policies from going forward, and providing communities and civil rights advocates with advance notice of proposed changes that might suppress the vote.
In the ensuing years, young people were able to vote and new protections were put into place for foreign-language speakers and disabled people.
Undermining Democracy
Although both the Democratic and Republican parties have used the tool of redistricting to their political advantage at various times, it has consistently been the conservatives who have sought to strike a blow for voting rights and make it restrictive for more people to make their voices heard.
The blow came with blunt force in 2013 when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision and with a conservative majority, removed the “preclearance” provision of the Voting Rights Act, to which liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg remarked, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” The Atlantic said this decision “set the stage for a new era of white hegemony.”
The Voting Rights Act was only a starting point that was, itself, shamefully, more than 100 years in the making. As Trump is currently predicted to lose the popular vote once again, according to NBC News, we should probably expect more crowing from Trump and Co. about election fraud and additional methods, subtle as they may be, to try to prevent access to the ballot box.
The president may be called a “populist,” but little about the conservative platform or policies suggest that the party cares one whit about the will or interests of the people. They care about obtaining and retaining power. They can more effectively do that by undermining enfranchisement, which in turn, undermines democracy.
The latest polls show that former Vice President Joe Biden is leading President Donald Trump by a five-point margin nationwide, according to CNN and the research firm SSRS, while Trump has a seven-point lead in battleground states. As we know, battleground states have historically been significant in ultimately choosing the winner in our electoral college system.
The 2020 election, which takes place Nov. 3, could be shaping up as another situation in which the Democratic Party candidate wins the popular vote but fails to garner enough electoral votes. In other words, we could be gearing up for another tight race.
This is stunning to me because Trump has spent four straight years brazenly lying to the public, issuing embellishments and half-truths and just generally talking out of his ass — almost all of it documented and written about repeatedly in the press — as well as insulting nearly every voting demographic in the country and being openly hostile to our democratic institutions. Yet, he seems to have carte blanche free reign to do as he pleases inside the Republican Party, which is full of cowards who refuse to stand up to him, and his supporters in the public sphere either don’t care about his unethical behavior or give him a pass because they like his politics.
Trump bullies and insults anyone who dares disagree or question him. He has shown many instances of narcissistic tendencies and crude behavior toward women. He’s flirted with open racists. He and/or his inner cycle most certainly colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. He has shown little to no empathy during the coronavirus pandemic. He unabashedly refuses to wear a mask and set an example for the rest of the country. In one of the many talking-out-of-his-ass episodes, he raised the question about whether people could potentially inject disinfectant as a potential cure for the virus. And lo and behold, some small percentage of the population took him seriously. Of course, as he has done in the past, Trump covers his tracks on this idiotic idea by claiming that he was being “sarcastic.” I watched the press conference, and it sounded as if it was a fairly serious suggestion.
In any case, one can only imagine why millions still support him, but something close to half of the people who have been polled are still on the Trump train despite everything that I have mentioned.
Do they support him because he has made good on his campaign promises? A quick check at politifact.com will reveal that, of Trump’s five major campaign promises, two were broken promises — repeal Obamacare and build a wall and force Mexico to fund it — two were compromises and only partly completed and one promise — the travel ban — was actually kept. The following is a breakdown of all of his promises from Trump-O-Meter:
Remember that the election is six months away, so the likelihood that many, or any, of these will get done in that short timeframe, especially given the national pandemic crisis and Trump’s ceaseless obsession with “fake news” and how he’s being portrayed in the media, instead of, you know, being a leader and actually governing.
So, what is behind the continued support Trump receives, and no doubt, will continue to receive from conservatives heading into the election? In part, blue collar America sees the president as standing up for policies that will help them, although the Republican Party’s platforms the last several decades have been anything but concerned with the working class. And since at least 2008, the rise of the Tea Party and continued influence of Fox News, members of the populist right have lived in a vacuum, an echo chamber of whatever they want to hear. Obama was the reincarnation of the “antichrist.” The Democrats, liberals, progressives, homosexuals, feminists and atheists are all immoral, ill-begotten people who want to ruin the country, or worse and even more ridiculous, are themselves tools of the “antichrist.” Were these folks to read a book, they might learn that, historically, it has been the liberals, progressives and freethinkers who have largely moved society forward and generally cared for the interests of everyday, working Americans.
Trump’s other main voting bloc out in the public, besides wealthy Wall Street banker types who are willing to support any policy that puts the health of our financial institutions and corporations above the health and well-being of people, are white evangelicals, many of whom, according to Pew, still believe that Trump is fighting for their beliefs, even if some of them question his personal behavior. One of the more telling polls by Pew is the percentage of evangelicals who think Trump is either very religious or somewhat religious (12 percent and 52 percent, respectively) compared with the general public (7 percent and 28 percent, respectively). Sixty-three percent of the general public believes that Trump is not religious. But make no mistake about it, white, born-again Christian evangelicals in 2016, despite already having plenty of documented cases of Trump’s racism, sexism and dishonesty, overwhelmingly voted for him by an 80 percent margin, according to Pew. He was their consecrated leader. Remember this photo?
That Republicans have claimed their party holds the moral high ground in America the last half century, couching it in Christian language when their policies have little, if anything, to do with the teachings of Jesus — care for the sick, the downtrodden and the least among us and meet the needs of the poor — is contemptible. The Republican calling card, since the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 70s and even before, has, in fact, been to address the interests of corporations, financial institutions and, of course, privileged white people. The platform goes like this: leverage power from the pulpit and through The Family, leverage power from Wall Street, leverage power and influence from the halls of Congress and demonize those who actually do care about the underdogs of our society: the sick, the disabled, the blue collar workers, the immigrants and inner city families. “Somewhere I read,” as Martin Luther King Jr. would say, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet, while the Democratic Party certainly contains many Christians, it is the Republican Party that has draped itself in the flag and the cross all the while eschewing the very teachings espoused in the Bible.
The populist right, then, has been duped into believing that Trump and the Republican Party has their best interests at heart. They do not. But despite the reality, and decades of evidence as support and four years of outright lies and unethical behavior from the Child-In-Chief, one of the pettiest human beings I have ever encountered, and certainly one of the most ill-fit to ever hold office, conservatives will, once again, lacking a basic understanding of context or history, foolishly vote against their own vested interests and make this a close race.
Evangelicals and white workers in small-town America believe that the Republican Party cares about them. They believe Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is in any given year, cares about them. All are demonstrably false. This is the great delusion of the last 30 years.
Scientists now predict that, because of the various reopening strategies by states across the country, the cases of coronavirus will increase drastically in the coming weeks and months.
This is a “no kidding” kind of statement, as it’s patently obvious that the number of people with the virus will necessarily go up as more and more people get weary of being inside and long to mingle about outdoors. I hear that in some parts of the nation, even some restaurants and buffet joints are beginning to open their doors. So, here we sit, not even out of Round No. 1 of the coronavirus pandemic, and we will very likely cause Round No. 2 and a new wave of illness because of our impatience and selfishness.
Here is the reality. We are currently at 80,000 deaths in the United States. We have now witnessed the equivalent of 27 tragedies on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001. If projections are correct, the peak could be more than 137,000 deaths, or 46 9/11s.
Where is the outrage? Tell me again how the virus isn’t as deadly as we first thought. It only kills 2 percent of affected patients. Only? Who with any moral center whatsoever is OK with the deaths of even 2 percent of patients. Who with any moral center whatsoever is OK with any deaths? If terrorists had killed 80,000 Americans, we would have scorched the earth looking for the perpetrators. Yet, at 80,000 deaths, we just shrug our shoulders and pine for the beaches and retail stores and mumble something about democracy. This is unconscionable, and it needs to be called out as such.
And where, too, are all the selfless “patriots” who rallied together for the common good on 9/11? Where is the solidarity and care from our supposed “moral leaders” for the vulnerable among us? The vice president walks around in a nursing home with no mask. The president, who thinks he’s invincible and godlike, refuses to wear a mask. I drive around and see people at parks in Philadelphia jogging or walking along on a bright and gorgeous day — maskless — without a care in the world, as if we are not in the throes of one of the most tragic and deadly events in American history and the most tragic event on American soil.
Some folks seem so concerned about their precious freedoms and their lost wages or the economy in general. Financial hardships are awful and shouldn’t be minimized, but lost human beings trump every one of these concerns by several large degrees. Getting the economy humming again, I’m here to say, is not more important than the physical health and well-being of people.
We’ve seen several celebrity specials where musicians sing us some songs and give thanks to doctors, nurses and other service workers who put their health on the line for the common good. But what about regular people out there who have eschewed the common good for their own self-interests? If we, as a society, have to look to millionaires and billionaires to set an example and tell us to care about each other, to be good to service workers and to look out for the elderly and vulnerable among us, we have real problems, the virus being only an obvious example.
The most insidious virus is on the inside out of reach of any vaccine or cure.
We have evidently entered full-on panic mode here in the Northeast. I went to a grocery store called Acme yesterday to get breakfast sausage, coffee and a couple other items, and seeing the lines, the nearly full parking lot and hordes of customers scooping up groceries like they had a bomb shelter out back and the Russians were bearing down on us circa 1955, was something to behold. The line to check out extended down a frozen food aisle, blocked the doors to the freezer and ran all the way to the back of the store along the meat section.
Available information changes frequently, but currently here in Pennsylvania, there have been 41 reported cases of the coronavirus and three so far where I live in Philadelphia. Schools were just shut down for a two-week period. President Donald Trump, who recently suggested that he wasn’t concerned about the virus and that he thought it would just go away in a month’s time with the advent of warmer weather — worse and even more tone deaf, he also claimed it was a “Democratic hoax” — has now changed his tune and said the virus is a “horrible infection.” He just declared a national emergency.
According to a report from NBC News, Trump didn’t necessarily wise up and start to take the threat seriously on his own volition, of course. He’s too clueless for that. Aides suggested that he take a more proactive approach in light of his unfortunate and, frankly, nonchalant attitude about the crisis. After a series of characteristically fact-starved statements that had to be rolled back and clarified by staff members who are more qualified to run this nation than he is, Trump was compelled to take a more “presidential” tone:
The stumbles, people close to the White House acknowledged, detracted from the intended effect of the address: portraying Trump as a commander in chief steering the country through a crisis.
On Thursday, Trump’s Twitter account took on a much more serious tone, retweeting warnings from public health officials about how people could protect themselves, as both the White House and his campaign weighed allowing staffers to work from home. But as with many previous Trump tone shifts, his attempt at a more traditional presidential approach was inconsistent and impermanent.
Of course it was “inconsistent and impermanent.” That’s not who he is. He isn’t a president “steering the country through a crisis.” He’s a president who is ill-fit to lead, who blames and insults others and deflects criticism away from himself, and then when the facts don’t comport to whatever message he wants to convey, he lies or simply makes up information off the top of his head.
There are currently more than 1,600 cases of the virus reported in the United States, with 41 deaths.
Symptoms include cough, fever and difficulty breathing.
The new coronavirus is airborne. It cannot live in food but can exist for a few days on the surface of fruits and vegetables at the grocery store.
Health experts are mainly recommending that people wash their hands regularly, use hand sanitizer and refrain from touching their faces. Surgical masks are not full-proof but can drastically reduce the likelihood of catching the virus for those who come in contact with an infected person. Here is a full list of recommendations from the CDC.
In a recent announcement, Trump has said the government will partner with the private sector to increase the number of tests that are made available to the public.
So, with all of this going on at the moment, it’s a little bit of a disconcerting time for healthy people, much less for someone like me who has a weakened immune system, but I don’t really buy into the panic of the moment, or the panic of any moment, for that matter, unless I am in acute danger. Common sense compelled me to wear a mask for my trip into the packed grocery store. As far as I could tell, I was the only customer in the whole place who was wearing a mask, such that I actually looked like the paranoid germaphobe figure at whom I would normally scoff. I felt kind of silly and self-conscious, but if anyone in the place needed a mask and was vulnerable to new infections, it’s certainly someone like me. I had a successful double lung transplant in early 2017 and an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant 10 months later and will be taking immunesuppressant drugs the rest of my life to prevent the new lungs from being rejected by my immune system, so caution in my case is the name of the game to try to stay healthy.
That said, this pandemic is probably going to get worse before it gets better, and as some nations take some rather draconian measures to try to stem the spread of the virus, it will be incumbent on us here in the United States to adopt an even-keeled approach, to not give into paranoia and the-sky-is-falling thinking or to ignore the threat. The virus is a threat, even to healthy people, so it shouldn’t be taken lightly, nor should we go overboard and start hording toilet paper and surgical masks like we’re about to enter a real-life version of “Outbreak.”
I don’t necessarily have a punchy conclusion for this post, so here is Muse’s “Panic Station”:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. — James Madison, “Federalist No. 51”
***
As those who have followed the debate about health care will remember, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts sided with four liberal judges in issuing a majority opinion that the individual mandate behind Obamacare, the key component of a bill that compelled uninsured people to become insured, was constitutional if it was viewed as a congressional tax. This critical moment punctuated decades of failure with regard to health care legislation and positioned Roberts as one of the more moderate, fair-minded judges on the bench in an age when partisanship and compromise were becoming a lost art form in politics. In essence, amid political rancor, when his fellow conservatives were fighting tooth and nail to obstruct Obama and his programs at every turn — indeed, the Democrats rammed through Obamacare without a single Republican vote — Roberts saved the legislation. Although the law was far from perfect, those with a forward-thinking vision realized that health care reform was desperately needed because of runaway costs and the fact that profit-minded, not patient-minded, insurance and pharmaceutical companies had acted with near impunity for half a century.
Life on the Fringe
Now that Senate Republicans have shirked their responsibility and voted to acquit President Donald Trump, despite most of them being in agreement that he committed impeachable offenses, to hold the man accountable and drive home the fact that no one is above the law, now that we have seen three years of the president of the United States attacking the press, attacking free speech, denigrating women and almost every ethnic group in the nation, suggesting that we shoot migrants and laughing about it, courting the support of white supremacists and further ginning up racial tensions across the country, not to mention the sustained threats to the constitutional rights of all Americans, perhaps now it is our democracy that needs saving. While I certainly don’t agree with Roberts on a lot of issues, repairing what has been damaged by Trump and the GOP will take people like him, conservatives and liberals, stepping up and doing the right thing for the betterment of the nation. We have had scant little of that kind of bipartisan action the last 10-plus years.
One could argue that while the political divisiveness has always been a prominent feature of government in America, it really picked up steam in the mid- to late-2000s with the advent of the Tea Party and the populist, know-nothing movement that began to take over the Republican Party and slowly move it away from the center under people like Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., to the fringe under newly christened stars of the GOP, an “every man” blue collar worker nicknamed Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin. Almost in lockstep, as the Republican Party turned away from the center, the far left did the same thing.
One really had a feeling that after Palin and presidential candidate John McCain lost the election and with the lofty “hope and change” message of unity and solidarity that Obama brought to his pre-election and presidential speeches, the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states, it seemed that the nation may have turned a corner. But what actually happened is that Obama, either because of his liberal values, the color of his skin or some combination of those two, precipitated a kind of conservative backlash, made even more heated and insidious by the 24/7 Republican news cycle that piped in commentary that catered, and still caters, to the lowest common denominator of white, blue-collar fear. (The late John McCain, by the way, whiffed on picking Palin to run with him, but he was another example of a Republican leader with courage and integrity who could have worked to turn the nation more toward the center had he won the election. Before he died, of course, McCain also did not escape Trump’s ire, and Trump could not resist insulting the veteran even in death.)
In any case, the idea that we, as a nation, had turned a corner was an illusion, and when Donald Trump entered the national discourse prior to the 2016 election, the stage was already set. Existing quietly under the surface of all the progressive fervor during the Obama years lurked the prejudiced, anti-immigrant, anti-gay demons of our past. The populist right from the mid-2000s never went away, and in 2016, they found a new hero in Trump, despite having virtually nothing in common with the billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star.
The Republican Party has fallen even further into the mire. As if failing to impeach a guilty president wasn’t enough, the current GOP and their president have attacked the country’s constitutional principles and core values at nearly every turn, from tripping over themselves to nominate Trump’s now-multiple picks after illegally refusing to provide so much as a hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court selection, to kowtowing to the president and letting him lie and make outlandish claims without censure, rebuke or recourse, and attempting to roll back protections in the First Amendment and using it as a tool to loosen regulations and increase discrimination.
Ironically enough, shortly before the Senate impeachment trial was about to commence and thus, shortly before Republicans in Congress were about to embarrass themselves again and take another turn away from justice, it was Roberts who offered some instructive words in what has been, by all accounts, a deeply troubling presidential term.
‘Debate and compromise’
In his annual report about the work of the federal courts, Roberts told a “sadly ironic” story about how John Jay, one of the co-authors of “The Federalist Papers,” along with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, was attacked by an angry mob in New York and because of his injuries, was apparently unable to continue contributing to the series of essays, which were written as a vigorous defense of the Constitution and the democratic principles of our republic.
Roberts wrote:
… We have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.
As Adam J. White, with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote about what Roberts had to say, the United States needed to display “self-restraint, goodwill, and moderation” in order to get back to a place of republican virtue,” which, according to the late Irving Kristol, means:
… curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility. We think of public-spiritedness as a form of self-expression, an exercise in self-righteousness. The Founders thought of it as a form of self-control, an exercise in self-government.
And this also includes
probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsch, one of Trump’s nominees, added to these ideas when he said that we should
… talk to one another respectfully; debate and compromise; and strive to live together tolerantly. … (The) essential goodness of the American people is a profound reservoir of strength … cannot be taken for granted (and) … need(s) constant tending. … (We have) the duty of having to listen to and tolerate other points of view … (and) democracy depends on our willingness, each one of us, to hear and respect even those with whom we disagree.
These values have been all but lost in the current political climate, and by quoting conservative sources, I am, as a progressive, attempting to demonstrate that compromise, civility, the sharing of good ideas, no matter where they come from, and, yes, even, virtue, should transcend party allegiance if we are to return to a place where integrity in politics matters.
A Better Way
Integrity in politics matters to Mitt Romney, another Republican who gives me hope that politics in America isn’t a lost cause. Romney, who stood alone among the GOP in his public admission that Trump was guilty, made a stunning speech today outlining why the evidence compelled him to vote to remove the president from office, noting Trump committed “an appalling abuse of the public’s trust.”
If Romney’s actions were just an anomaly and integrity doesn’t actually matter anymore, if decorum and virtue don’t matter anymore, if American politics is just destined to become a vast, wild-west frontier of insults, flame wars and misinformation, then, by all means, we can continue on a path of intellectual dishonesty, tribalism and identity politics, where the national discourse gets more fragmented and where winning an argument for your team is more important than moving the nation forward in an ethical way that benefits everyone.
But if virtue in politics and government does still matter, as I hope it does, then it seems that both our elected officials and the electorate need to walk it back and ask: If this approach isn’t working — and it’s not — what can we do differently and how can we be better, individually and collectively? How can we compromise and work together to change the spirit of the conversation and make it more positive? Conservatives are not the enemy, and liberals are not the enemy. Partisanship and a failure to compromise. Cynicism and apathy. Cowardice. Dishonesty. Hypocrisy. And intolerance. These are the real enemies that haunt our republic.
People are sick of the myths and alibis. — Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”
***
A book that I am currently reading, “120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature” by Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald and Dawn B. Sova, divides the works into four categories: books that were banned for political reasons, religious reasons, sexual reasons and social reasons. The book contains about 20 titles that I have already read and several that I would like to read in the future, including “All Quiet on the Western Front,” about World War I; “Andersonville,” about the Confederate-manned, Yankee prison camp in the Civil War and “The Satanic Verses,” by Salmon Rushdie, which resulted in a fatwa being issued on Rushdie’s life for supposed blasphemy against the Muslim faith.
While I may write additional blog articles on subsequent chapters in the book on censorship, I wanted to add a few thoughts about what undoubtedly is one of the controversial of controversial works in the whole collection — “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry” by Arthur R. Butz. Many books in the collection were flagged by various religious groups or school districts for either coarse language, racial stereotypes, political views or other controversial content. Butz’s work is a piece of revisionist history — to call it “revisionist” is being both generous and polite — claiming that the Holocaust and the systematic extermination of Jews in Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe was a “propaganda hoax.” Butz, who has a background in control sciences and electrical engineering — not history — is currently a professor at Northwest University, which has protected his right to espouse his personal views while condemning those same views.
It is to the credit of the authors of “120 Banned Books” that they don’t make value or moral judgments about the works they are describing. They simply provide a summary of the narrative arc of the novel or thesis of the nonfiction work, whichever is appropriate, and then outline in some detail the censorship histories of each work. The authors’ handling of Butz’s work is no different.
According to “120 Banned Books,” Butz’s contentions about a conspiracy theory related to the Holocaust are far and wide, and the book attacks nearly every major detail we know about the Holocaust — information, in other words, that makes the Holocaust one of the more egregious offenses against humanity in the history of, well, humanity.
Butz argues that the judges who worked during the war crime trials after World War II had already made up their minds about the presumed guilt of the defendants, which implies that the trials were unjust. Butz questions world Jewish population figures at the time of the planned extermination and the sources by which those numbers were devised. He writes:
… in the demographic argument for a five or six million drop in world Jewish population, the sources and authorities for the figures used are Community and Jewish and thus, essentially useless.
Butz contends that about 750,000 people were resettled from Germany to other areas, while many others died because of disease and starvation, not an attempted wholesale extermination. He said it was likely that a “fair number” died during the resettlements, while others relocated to others areas, like the United States and parts of Europe or the Middle East.
Typhus, Butz said,
plagued the German concentration camps since early in the war. A typhus epidemic at the Belsen camp, for example, is cited as the major cause of death, resulting from a “total loss of control” at the end of the war, not a “deliberate policy.”
noting that disease caught the Germans off guard, and they were unprepared to handle such catastrophic loss of life, which is presumably one reason, according to Butz, that so many piles of unburied bodies were scattered across the Germans landscape and the historical record.
Butz discredits the number of Jews the Germans supposedly killed, citing “inconsistencies and implausibilities” in estimates ranging anywhere from 750,000 to 7 million. He alleges that the area did not have enough crematoria to handle such a large influx of bodies.
As the authors of “120 Banned Books” point out, Col. Rudolf Hoss, who ran Auschwitz, confessed that 2.5 million people were murdered at that concentration camp alone. This was a revised figure. He previously claimed the number was 3.5 million. Needless to say, when killing human beings becomes almost as routine as your morning coffee or brushing your teeth, when women and children are treated like dogs, spat upon, called names, murdered and then are unceremoniously tossed into mass graves like their lives meant less than nothing on a daily basis, it’s easy to see how Hoss and other Nazi officials could have gotten confused as to whether the number of people killed at Auschwitz was 2.5 or 3.5 million in lieu of record keeping. In the calculus of human lives in the Nazis’ depraved sense of morals, what’s difference does a million lives here or there make? A million multiplied by zero is still zero.
But Butz goes farther. He claims that the infamous gas chambers were actually used to disinfect clothing in order to kill lice, which carry the typhus bacteria. This might be one of the more shocking and absurd claims. Here is Butz:
… all ‘survivor literature’, sincere or inventive … report the same basic procedure involved in entering a German camp: disrobe, shave hair, shower, dress in new clothes or in old clothes after disinfection.
Far from exculpating the Nazis for their role in the gas chambers, Hoss has testified that this was a lie concocted by the SS to fool the victims into willingly walking into their own death traps so, presumably, the guards would not have to go to the trouble of forcing them into the buildings. That said, I don’t know why this ruse was even necessary. Surely, the victims could see the writing on the wall. They saw the haggard appearances of their Jewish brethren. They saw the rampant sickness and hunger. They heard the screams. They were forced to march all over the German and Eastern European landscape, sometimes with no shoes or in extreme weather conditions, at the whim of the Nazis. The SS had no problems forcing the Jews to do other tasks, and many had to dig their own graves. So, marching or forcing them into the chambers should have been just as routine as the other mindless, inhumane things they did to the Jews.
Finally, Butz traces the figure that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi to various sources in articles from The New York Times and to the World Jewish Congress, which he said gave an estimation that there were 5,721,800 “missing” Jews to the International Military Tribunal. He claims the Americans and British embellished the numbers of Jews that were killed as a “propaganda basis for their war,” presumably as a way to gin up support to attack Germany and oust the Nazis.
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I want to be careful to say that I am not presenting a comprehensive picture of Butz’s views as he lays them out in “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.” Perhaps at some point in the future, I will read Butz’s full thoughts on the Holocaust, if it’s even worth my time — I’m not sure that it is — but in this blog entry, I think I have fully represented Butz’s view as summarized in the book on censorship, and lest someone claims that I have taken his views out of context, I think it’s fair to say these were clearly were Butz’s views, and the views of other Holocaust deniers, at the time he wrote the book, and as I understand it, these are still his views, namely that the Nazis had no state-mandated policy to exterminate the Jews, thus no “final solution;” that the gas chambers were not killing centers; that the Germans did not kill 6 million Jews; that the Jews who did die fell victim to starvation and disease; and that the trials of 24 top officials of the Third Reich after World War II were carried out unfairly on the presumption of guilt and their testimony was largely invalid.
Given enough time and space, I could dispute all of these views, but many people have done this before, and Butz’s arguments have been roundly criticized and debunked since the book’s publication in 1975. On the question of whether the Nazis received a fair trial and whether their confessions were given under duress, and can thus be discarded, I offer the following passage from the BBC:
This, however, ignores the fact that some of the more detailed confessions were written after the perpetrators had been sentenced to death. It also ignores the fact that many of the perpetrators described – sometimes in great detail – what happened, but insisted that they either had nothing to do with it or were forced by their superiors to participate.
Thus this argument fails to take into account the statements of Nazis such as the Commandant of Birkenau concentration camp, Rudolf Höss, who described the mass murders that took place in his camp in a document written after he had been sentenced to death. It also fails to account for Adolf Eichmann who, in the memoir he wrote during his trial, spoke of the gassing of the Jews.
It also fails to take into account, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen does in detail in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” the large number of everyday Germans — local police officers, civic leaders and church officials who either openly supported the wholesale persecution and murder of Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — who were fully on board with the Nazi regime’s plan and even took part in some of the killings themselves, either directly or indirectly. Although Goldhagen’s book was published 20 years after “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” one could conclude, without even considering the reams of first-person testimony we now have about how utterly devoted much of the German collective was or how devoted they eventually became to antisemitism and the extermination project, that it would be impossible to fabricate such large numbers of photos of mass graves, physical evidence attesting to the “final solution” and Nazi propaganda material and meeting minutes that document the Third Reich’s intentions to eliminate the “Jewish problem,” not just to resettle them elsewhere.
More than that, it would be impossible to imagine a scenario in which the Nazis could have carried out their heinous acts in a vacuum without widespread support from the populace. The sheer scale is unprecedented and had to have involved much of the entire country. If that is hard to fathom, that an entire country could be caught up in an antisemitic and murderous fervor, one only need consider the embedded hate against the Jews that began centuries before with the death of Christ and continued into the early 20th century. The Germans and other antisemites branded the Jews as Christ-killers, even though the Romans ultimately killed Jesus, at least as the story goes in the Bible, and in Hitler’s time, they were largely blamed for the economic recession that struck the poor and working class people of Germany. Antisemitism was deeply embedded, not just in Hitler’s Third Reich government, but in the entire nation. It was a powerful, destructive force. The idea that the final solution was a manufactured genocide in order to start the war is belied by the evidence, both cultural and actual.
Nonetheless, as offensive as Butz and the Holocaust deniers claims are, not only to Jews, but to lovers of humanity who think all life is valuable regardless of sex, gender, race or religion, the entire point of a book like “120 Banned Books” is to suggest that we must protective people’s right to be offensive, and we must protect people’s right to, if they choose, counter the offensive material with either mockery or facts. The prohibition of thought does not move society forward; in fact, it acts as a regressive force, and as we know, the repression of thought has led to and fed some of the most dictatorial regimes in history.
Butz continues to be employed at Northwestern because in the college and in this nation, and others that value free thought and expression, supports his right to speak his mind, whether we think he’s wrong or not. I will end with a statement from Northwest University’s former president Henry S. Bienen, who served in that role for 14 years before retiring in August 2009:
Northwestern University Associate Professor Arthur Butz recently issued a statement commending Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s assertion that the Holocaust never happened. Butz is a Holocaust denier who has made similar assertions previously. His latest statement, like his earlier writings and pronouncements, is a contemptible insult to all decent and feeling people. While I hope everyone understands that Butz’s opinions are his own and in no way represent the views of the University or me personally, his reprehensible opinions on this issue are an embarrassment to Northwestern.
There is no question that the Holocaust is a well-documented historical fact. … Butz is a tenured associate professor in electrical engineering. Like all faculty members, he is entitled to express his personal views, including on his personal web pages, as long as he does not represent such opinions as the views of the University. Butz has made clear that his opinions are his own and at no time has he discussed those views in class or made them part of his class curriculum. Therefore, we cannot take action based on the content of what Butz says regarding the Holocaust – however odious it may be – without undermining the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect.
I was inspired by what the artist behind the artwork above had to say about the tragedy of the Holocaust and thought it was apropos to share part of it here:
I drew this, it’s supposed to be in reference to the dehumanization of the Jewish people in the concentration camps and their fight to retain their identity. There’s a lot of tiny things in it inspired by details in the class lectures and the books we read, but the biggest one is that the numbers are supposed to be projected onto the sculptures from a distance, so the viewer blocks the numbers from reaching the figures and instead sees them on their own person, and becoming part of the piece themselves.
Being a product of white America in the South, lacking historical perspective and maybe even some early prejudice, I’m ashamed to say that I did not grow up with a lot of admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. Each February when Black History Month rolled around, and usually at no other time throughout the year, I heard about King’s dream for a more equitable society, one in which, even in the Deep South, black children and white children could play together in harmony and mutual admiration and respect. I heard about his call for equality at the ballot box, in the workplace and in retail stores and restaurants throughout the nation. I heard the high rhetoric and remember actually saying, probably simply parroting the opinion of an adult, that, sure, King dreamed big, but what did he actually do to make the nation better?
The ridiculous arrogance and ignorance of that question became apparent to me when, a little later in life, I began to learn about MLK in college and on my own time thereafter. Consequently, I studied Civil War history, and to whatever extent it is related, Civil Rights Era history at Clemson University in northwestern, South Carolina. Clemson can’t escape its checkered past. It has for one of its founders a racist firebrand by the name of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, along with a hall named in his honor.
The college is home to the Strom Thurmond Institute for Government and Public Policy, which is named for one of the staunchest pro-segregation, anti-civil rights politicians of the 20th century and a true enemy of progress. And for some good, old-fashioned, southern-fried symbolism, as it was pointed out to me by a professor of mine when I was a student there, the sidewalk design near the library that proceeds to run above the Strom Thurmond center, which is underground, is in the shape of the Confederate battle flag’s stars and bars.
And so, as a student, I was aware of the debate surrounding how educators and students, past and present, reconcile what many consider to be the age of the New South — not abandoning the past, but learning from it and fostering a more progressive, inclusive track record on race and culture — in short, how to honor the past but move forward from it into a new era.
After college, I began working at a newspaper about an hour north of Clemson in a quaint town called Clayton, Ga. Here was an interesting mix of wealthy, white Republicans and Democrats, a smattering of black folks, including the chief of police at the time, and a not insignificant Hispanic population. In spite of that eclectic mix of people, the county was mostly populated by local white, low- to middle-class residents, who valued school, church and community. Essentially, this was an even more conservative place than Clemson, but it was here, ironically, that I went even deeper into my research on the Civil War and the push for equality.
I also fully abandoned conservatism because, as I saw throughout American history, it was conservatism that fostered an atmosphere of secession in the 19th century — my home state being the first to leave the union and the last to rejoin after the Confederacy lost the war — it was conservatism that largely led to the failure of Reconstruction, the Black Codes and Jim Crow after the Civil War, and it was conservatism in the early- to mid-20th century which spoke out so vehemently, and sometimes punctuated by violence, against equal rights and equal protection under the law for women, blacks and other historically marginalized groups. I don’t think conservatism alone is a problem, but I think conservatism created the atmosphere, and is still creating the atmosphere, by which some of the most pernicious ideologies in American history could flourish, much to the detriment of our national character and collective conscience.
I had read W.E.B. Dubois’ lyrical work, “The Souls of Black Folk” while at Clemson, but it was here in Clayton that I picked up Dubois’ much longer and detailed book, “Black Reconstruction in America,” which outlined, in painful detail, the part that black people played, as the subtitle suggests, “in the attempt to reconstruct Democracy in America.” I read books and information on people like white abolitionist John Brown, who, terrorist though he was, fought alongside his black brothers for their freedom, which he saw as a right consecrated from on high. I read about white abolitionist newspaperman, William Lloyd Garrison, who wrote vigorously and tirelessly, often at risk to his personal safety, on the importance of racial equality and ending the “peculiar institution.” I read about the lives of slaves and about slave religion and how, just as many slaves found comfort in the story of the Pharaoh’s enslavement of Israel and their subsequent freedom and the story of Jesus, plantation owners and supporters of slavery used the same scripture as justification to keep their property in shackles, since the Bible both condones slavery and offers no rebuke to chattel slavery. I read books on the sometimes tense, but working relationship, between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. in the run-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and LBJ’s “Great Society” programs that were designed to address issues in education, urban development and housing, transportation, employment and other areas.
And finally, with all of this as context, I come to MLK himself. So, what did he do, to answer my own question from 25 years ago, that specifically warrants honoring him year after year, to rewatch or reread his speeches, to shed new tears over the high-minded, courageous path that few people on earth ever walk?
First, this adoration for the man is not in the least an obligatory gesture, and I would say that if we are only thinking of MLK one day out of the year, or at most, for one month — the shortest month at that — we are doing the man, his legacy and what he stood for a grave disservice. Indeed, given the current environment of prejudice in the highest office in the land and the sustained bigoted remarks that began when Trump was a candidate and has continued to this day, the institutional racism that pervades the justice system and the overarching hostile position our nation has taken against legal and illegal immigrants the last few years, the need to remember what King stood for, how he remained above the fray and elevated a nation and what he accomplished in life and death, the need to recommit ourselves individually and as a nation to reclaiming his dream is as important now as it’s ever been.
The following is a short list of reasons why we honor King today and throughout the year.
Nonviolent resistance
King brought the idea of nonviolent protests to the forefront of America’s conscience in the tradition of Mahatma Gandi. Whereas some justifiably angry black and white activists thought the best way to enact change was through a strong-arm approach, King and his nonviolent protesters appealed to and pricked America’s collective conscience with what he called “soul force.”
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.
Cynthia Tucker, a black columnist working at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the same time as when I got my start at the newspaper, has argued that Black History Month is a relic and we should not just remember the accomplishments of black leaders during one month out of the year, and she argues, echoing King, that the history of black folks in America is inextricably linked to American history writ large.
In short, black history is our history.
First president of the SLCC
It feels kind of silly pointing out the more obvious parts of King’s life and legacy, but as the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King was instrumental in helping to start the political action organization after the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s to begin a series of other nonviolent protests across the South to facilitate and support desegregation of public spaces and numerous freedom movements across the nation.
Before the March on Washington, the organization perhaps saw its biggest win come in Birmingham with its goal of desegregating the downtown area. This series of nonviolent sit-ins of businesses that previously denied access and service to black residents was met with a disturbing level of violence by local police under the leadership of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilus “Bull” Connor, who, through his virulent opposition to equality and commitment to segregation, came out looking like a true villain, attempting to squash protests with violence and intimidation. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King writes to local clergy about why that was a time for action in Birmingham:
One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. … Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.
The march
The full name of the famous event, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, drew somewhere between 200,000-300,000 people and apparently went off without a hitch and without violence or skirmishes. It was organized by King, James Farmer Jr., with the Congress of Racial Equality, Roy Wilkins, with the NAACP, John Lewis, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and others as a push toward desegregation nationwide and more equality in the workplace and in culture. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was brilliant for the way in which it positioned America’s highest ideals in, not just religious terms, to which many Americans, then and now, understand and relate, but in foundational terms. It explained that the nation has yet to fully grasp the full measure of Thomas Jefferson’s famous line from the Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream today. … I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountain side, let. freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
King then ended his speech with some of the most stirring lines ever uttered in American history that thundered back through time and continue to reverberate to the present.
So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaeeous slopes of California.
But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountain side. Let freedom ring …
When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,”Free at last, free at last, great God almighty, we are free at last!
In October 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in racial justice and nonviolent resistance, and the next year, he helped organize perhaps the second most significant march of the civil rights era, the march to Selma en route to Birmingham to protest inequality and advocate for voter rights. This is the march in which John Lewis, and many other nonviolent protesters, got hosed and beaten by members of the Alabama state police. The incident became a powerful symbol for nonviolent resistance and led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Fifty years later on March 7, 2015, Barack Obama, the first black president in United States history, delivered a speech to commemorate the famous march. I was watching the moment on CNN that day, and I can tell you, seeing Obama’s presidential motorcade rumble over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was named for a former grand wizard of the KKK, was one of the most powerful and enduring images of racial progress I have ever seen, and it’s something I won’t soon forget.
The legacy
As we know, King was killed April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tenn., as he was in the process of planning an occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People’s Campaign. On April 3, probably seeing the writing on the wall and seemingly foreseeing his own untimely end, based on the hate that had been generated against him from the conservative right in the South and elsewhere, he delivered his final, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” speech, an extremely powerful affirmation of this nation’s First Amendment rights.
… Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.
Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.
And then, like a lightbulb going off in his mind, he turned inward and one could see tears welling up in his eyes as he could see the end peering him in the face.
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.
And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
And in that moment, he looked completely spent, as if all of his emotional fervor and rhetorical power had all been used up in preparation for the next day’s events. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has gone down as the most important of his career, but the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech was the most vulnerable moment of King’s public career in my view.
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King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in civil rights, and MLK Day was established in parts of the nation in 1986. Not until 2000 did all 50 states celebrate the holiday.
So, what of his legacy? Despite the almost obsessive efforts of J. Edgar Hoover to discredit King, expose his supposed marital infidelities and paint him as a communist, King was central in putting pressure on LBJ and other leaders in Washington to get the ball rolling on the Great Society programs and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on sex, gender or race illegal. Shortly after King’s death, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed. It’s hard to underestimate the impact of these programs on American politics and culture. While they weren’t perfect and while racism and discrimination were far from resolved in King’s lifetime — they are still far from resolved now — these were obviously landmark achievements that may not have been possible without King’s persistence, intelligence, courage and unshakable faith in humanity. Working in tandem with his dedication to nonviolence, King was also against the disastrous war in Vietnam.
I have said all of that to say this: I might not have known much about MLK and Civil Rights starting out in high school and the early part of college, but the more I learned, the more convinced I became in adult life that wherever we go as a nation, we must go together as different people unified in mutual respect and understanding and be committed to the idea, even if previous generations were not, that all men, all human beings, are created equal — full stop — without qualifiers and without exception.
We must be committed to the idea, the idea for which King gave his life, that there is no white America or black America. There is only one America. And while in this era of blatant bigotry and hostility to immigrants spearheaded by Trump and his largely white, unlettered supporters, we can’t give in to apathy. We must believe that we will overcome ideologies that attempt to divide us and that we will overcome racial prejudice and injustice and create for ourselves a better tomorrow. Perhaps King’s greatest legacy to us, then, was that he offered more than a dream. He opened a door so that we could begin the long march toward its ultimate realization.