King and His
Times
January 21, 2003
This year, even more than usual, the welkin rings
with inflated praise of Martin Luther King Jr. I understand, I guess. When I
was young I regarded him as a hero, so I have some sympathy with those
who still do.
King spoke for people who were
not so much oppressed as humiliated; and though the two things ought not
to be confused, humiliation is sometimes harder to bear than oppression
and breeds more bitter feelings. This helps explain what Norman Podhoretz
once called, during Kings lifetime, the almost insane
touchiness of many Negroes.
King himself never struck me as
touchy. He seemed above petty feelings, even those that
would have been quite understandable. And nobody should belittle his
courage. He faced the real risk of violent death daily. And not all the
countless death threats he received were empty, as events proved.
All the same, I cant agree
with those who celebrate his eloquence. Early on it came to
seem to me, at least platitudinous bombast. In this he was
typically American. Most of the oratory we celebrate is sorry stuff. The
rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, and John Kennedy is
embarrassing to read now. The only thing we have to fear is fear
itself. Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for
your country. What, if anything, do these things really mean? There
is a fatal whiff of the self-consciously memorable about
them.
Likewise Kings saying
that his children should be judged not by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character. Race is more than skin color;
and who else ever used a phrase like content of their
character? King was straining for alliteration at the expense of
meaning.
Oddly enough, his sentence has
been most often appropriated by neoconservatives who would have opposed
him if he had lived to our day. They insist, implausibly, that King was an
apostle of color-blind individualism who would have opposed the
collectivist swerve the black civil rights movement took after his death.
![[Breaker quote: Remembering 1968]](2003breakers/030121.gif) As his
biographers have made clear, King subscribed to the facile Marxism that
was fashionable in the 1960s. He saw racial conflict in terms of
class struggle. His solution to every social problem was a
stronger centralized state. Its quite probable that he would have
become even more collectivist if he had lived longer. That was his mental
habit to the end, and he showed no signs of changing.
The essential banality of
Kings mind was noticed even by younger black leaders, who
derisively nicknamed him de Lawd, after the character in
the old play Green Pastures. Its startling that King
seemed so old-fashioned so early; he was only 38 when he was murdered.
Yet he already seemed passé. He was past the peak of his influence;
his leadership was waning, his following dwindling.
That was one reason his
assassination was not only shocking, but rather surprising. It seemed odd
that anyone could still hate him enough to kill him. By 1968 hed
become a rather quaint figure.
Like Lincoln and the Kennedys,
King owes his posthumous reputation and symbolic stature to his
assassination. If hed lived longer, hed have been overtaken
by personal scandal or sheer overfamiliarity. A shocking death saved him
from fading into the oblivion of the spent force.
Kings assassination
inspired inevitable parallels with the Kennedys. But so did later
revelations about his boundless lechery and his plagiarized doctoral
thesis, inconvenient as these were to liberal mythology. All three men had
been prematurely canonized as heroic martyrs. We can now see their
actual mediocrity. Their most famous words have become trite, branding
them men of another time, of no permanent interest.
The current encomia of King are
giving todays young people a thoroughly false impression. If
America had a man of the future in 1968, it was not King, but an older
white man: the former movie actor Ronald Reagan, who had become
governor of California and was already being hailed as presidential
material.
It was the anti-Communist
Reagan, not the pro-Communist King, who really caught the temper of his
time. And for some inscrutable reason, he survived an attempt on his life.
Joseph Sobran
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