We're pretty well snowed in here in Pittsburgh--close to two feet fell on my birthday, and we're expecting another foot in the next day or so. Schools closed, kids and wife home, plenty of shoveling and movie-watching and game-playing. When I have a couple minutes I work my way through Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (deeply disturbing but oddly gripping novel) or draft a sci-fi story that's in the hopper. I'm also tinkering with a piece about climate skepticism in relation to the cold, wintry weather we've had these past few months. If anything comes of it, I'll post it here.
For the moment, though, I thought some of you who might be similarly snowed-in would appreciate some fiction. Since my most recently accepted stories and essays haven't come out yet, here's an old story, titled "String," which appeared about a year ago in Word Catalyst Magazine. This one started after I read a short story that contained a single, abrupt point-of-view change; I said to myself, "That would be worth trying!" As it ended up, there's more than one change in my story, and none is as abrupt as in its inspiration, but I still think it's an interesting experiment. If you can hold out till the end, there's a surprise waiting there!
Monday, February 8, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Oddness of Forty-Five
Turned forty-five today. Lots of people are rocked by the decade birthdays, but those I seem to have taken in stride; they feel much more stable than the years in-between. Prime numbers are the worst; when you're forty-three, you're just forty-three. At least with forty-five, I can say I'm nine times five or fifteen times three.
I'm generally healthy (though with a clotting disorder that has to be managed medically), still in good shape, in fact stronger than I've ever been thanks to a regular exercise routine. Little things flare up now and again: some back problems last year, a sinus infection I just got over this winter. I've long since said goodbye to my hair (that's my dad's legacy), which had gone from black to virtually white (my mom's) before vanishing pretty much altogether. Still, I don't feel old, or even particularly older.
I remember my mom telling me years ago that she'd reached a point past which she'd stopped aging mentally even though she kept aging physically. In her mind, she said, she was still eighteen or twenty, in her body fifty or more. That's been my experience too--I suppose it's everyone's--and it's a strange thing, watching one's body grow alien to oneself. It explains why so many of us experience time passing more quickly as we age, at least in retrospect: since we tend to measure time by our memory of who we were, if the self we remember from twenty years ago is identical to the self we experience now, those twenty years might just as well have been a single moment. My childhood self seems a stranger, and the chasm of time between us immense; my twenty-five-year-old self seems like a guy I was just talking to yesterday, even if I can't quite remember the conversation we were having.
Forty-five is somewhere in the middle: not old, not young, half-hale. In half a decade I'll be half a century. Like many people at mid-age, I've been trying lately to come to terms with who I am, where I fit into things, what my life has been or could yet be worth. This blog has helped me to do that, as has my other writing, my job, my family, my activism. I don't expect the journey to come to an end anytime soon.
So, forty-five. When I blew out the candles tonight I set another piece of my life in stone, lost it at the same time.
I'm generally healthy (though with a clotting disorder that has to be managed medically), still in good shape, in fact stronger than I've ever been thanks to a regular exercise routine. Little things flare up now and again: some back problems last year, a sinus infection I just got over this winter. I've long since said goodbye to my hair (that's my dad's legacy), which had gone from black to virtually white (my mom's) before vanishing pretty much altogether. Still, I don't feel old, or even particularly older.
I remember my mom telling me years ago that she'd reached a point past which she'd stopped aging mentally even though she kept aging physically. In her mind, she said, she was still eighteen or twenty, in her body fifty or more. That's been my experience too--I suppose it's everyone's--and it's a strange thing, watching one's body grow alien to oneself. It explains why so many of us experience time passing more quickly as we age, at least in retrospect: since we tend to measure time by our memory of who we were, if the self we remember from twenty years ago is identical to the self we experience now, those twenty years might just as well have been a single moment. My childhood self seems a stranger, and the chasm of time between us immense; my twenty-five-year-old self seems like a guy I was just talking to yesterday, even if I can't quite remember the conversation we were having.
Forty-five is somewhere in the middle: not old, not young, half-hale. In half a decade I'll be half a century. Like many people at mid-age, I've been trying lately to come to terms with who I am, where I fit into things, what my life has been or could yet be worth. This blog has helped me to do that, as has my other writing, my job, my family, my activism. I don't expect the journey to come to an end anytime soon.
So, forty-five. When I blew out the candles tonight I set another piece of my life in stone, lost it at the same time.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The Dems, Part Deux
A good friend sent me a link to a recent segment from The Daily Show that she thought segued nicely with my op-ed on the Democrats. Indeed, the segment essentially mirrors my argument: that for the past year the Democrats, rather than acting like a party swept into office by an immense popular mandate for reform, have been cowering like a bunch of marginalized, impotent pantywaists. So where’s my cut of the scriptwriting money?
This same friend, though--and she's not alone--has also challenged my analysis of the Democrats’ woes, suggesting that my indictment is too extreme, too sweeping. Is it, these friends have asked, the Democratic Party as a whole that has failed to live up to its promises, or is it certain rancorous elements within the Party—Joe Lieberman and the so-called “Blue Dogs” most prominently—who have derailed what the Party leadership might otherwise have sought to achieve?
Now, I’d be the first to agree that my analysis was anything but nuanced. I’ve never considered the op-ed form (or the blog form, for that matter) a place for hedging and niceties. But above and beyond the expectations of the form, I believe there is considerable value in radical analyses (in the root sense of “radical,” which means, in fact, “root”): analyses grounded not in the often distracting complexities and elaborations of the quotidian world but in first principles, in the solid substratum of what the writer takes to be the truth. The Democrats’ failure, I believe, is at root a failure of such principles, a concession to Beltway business-as-usual. And if so, then applying a Beltway analysis to this failure will not get us very far in breaking the paralyzing stalemate in which the Party currently finds itself.
Let’s consider, in this light, the Party’s treatment of the rogue Lieberman. A perfectly simple solution to his antics has presented itself all along, and if the Party leadership had the slightest notion of core principles it would have put this solution immediately into effect: call the silly monkey’s bluff. Let him caucus with the Republicans, participate in their filibusters, obstruct the reformist agenda the electorate who put his party in power charged that party to carry out. Let him hoist himself on his own petard. And then let him explain to the people why he was the one who took it upon himself to hijack their demands and their dreams. He wouldn’t have dared.
The Blue Dogs are a similar story. It serves their purposes very well, of course, to represent themselves as the true core of the Democratic Party, the “moderate” core, the “centrist” core, even the conservative core. But begging their pardon, that’s a bunch of bull. The Democratic Party’s core is no more conservative than the Republican Party’s core is liberal—the only difference is that the Republican Party recognizes this, and pursues an extreme right-wing agenda with scant regard for the naysayers among its ranks. The Republicans give those folks a place at the table, I suppose. But they don’t let them carve up the pie and shove it down everyone else’s face.
Without principles, without convictions, without courage, without vision, without conscience, no political party can hope to achieve anything of value or import. There has always been a deep well of populist, collectivist, socialist radicalism in this country, and when it gathers itself and comes to a full awareness of its power, it rocks the world: in the New Deal, in the Civil Rights and antiwar era, in the environmentalist movement, in the birth of labor unionism, in the kind of social collectivism toward which the ideal of universal health care points. In the past century, the Democrats have proved best able to tap this radicalism, to recognize it, energize it, call its core principles to light and fruition. That the very party that should be embracing, defending, and advocating such principles is now in full flight from them exposes the hollow charade the Democratic Party has become.
Should the Democrats ever come into full self-possession and self-consciousness, should they ever recover the root principles on which they rely, they might yet be what they should be. Failing that, they will remain what they are: a rudderless motley of hacks and masochists, a disgrace to the very legacy they should claim as their own.
This same friend, though--and she's not alone--has also challenged my analysis of the Democrats’ woes, suggesting that my indictment is too extreme, too sweeping. Is it, these friends have asked, the Democratic Party as a whole that has failed to live up to its promises, or is it certain rancorous elements within the Party—Joe Lieberman and the so-called “Blue Dogs” most prominently—who have derailed what the Party leadership might otherwise have sought to achieve?
Now, I’d be the first to agree that my analysis was anything but nuanced. I’ve never considered the op-ed form (or the blog form, for that matter) a place for hedging and niceties. But above and beyond the expectations of the form, I believe there is considerable value in radical analyses (in the root sense of “radical,” which means, in fact, “root”): analyses grounded not in the often distracting complexities and elaborations of the quotidian world but in first principles, in the solid substratum of what the writer takes to be the truth. The Democrats’ failure, I believe, is at root a failure of such principles, a concession to Beltway business-as-usual. And if so, then applying a Beltway analysis to this failure will not get us very far in breaking the paralyzing stalemate in which the Party currently finds itself.
Let’s consider, in this light, the Party’s treatment of the rogue Lieberman. A perfectly simple solution to his antics has presented itself all along, and if the Party leadership had the slightest notion of core principles it would have put this solution immediately into effect: call the silly monkey’s bluff. Let him caucus with the Republicans, participate in their filibusters, obstruct the reformist agenda the electorate who put his party in power charged that party to carry out. Let him hoist himself on his own petard. And then let him explain to the people why he was the one who took it upon himself to hijack their demands and their dreams. He wouldn’t have dared.
The Blue Dogs are a similar story. It serves their purposes very well, of course, to represent themselves as the true core of the Democratic Party, the “moderate” core, the “centrist” core, even the conservative core. But begging their pardon, that’s a bunch of bull. The Democratic Party’s core is no more conservative than the Republican Party’s core is liberal—the only difference is that the Republican Party recognizes this, and pursues an extreme right-wing agenda with scant regard for the naysayers among its ranks. The Republicans give those folks a place at the table, I suppose. But they don’t let them carve up the pie and shove it down everyone else’s face.
Without principles, without convictions, without courage, without vision, without conscience, no political party can hope to achieve anything of value or import. There has always been a deep well of populist, collectivist, socialist radicalism in this country, and when it gathers itself and comes to a full awareness of its power, it rocks the world: in the New Deal, in the Civil Rights and antiwar era, in the environmentalist movement, in the birth of labor unionism, in the kind of social collectivism toward which the ideal of universal health care points. In the past century, the Democrats have proved best able to tap this radicalism, to recognize it, energize it, call its core principles to light and fruition. That the very party that should be embracing, defending, and advocating such principles is now in full flight from them exposes the hollow charade the Democratic Party has become.
Should the Democrats ever come into full self-possession and self-consciousness, should they ever recover the root principles on which they rely, they might yet be what they should be. Failing that, they will remain what they are: a rudderless motley of hacks and masochists, a disgrace to the very legacy they should claim as their own.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Fantasy Cinema and Social Critique: The Case of District 9
I recently watched the film District 9 on DVD. (I avoided it in the theater after hearing it was ultra-violent, and I handle that sort of thing better on the small screen.) It actually wasn't all that violent: lots of distant shots of exploding bodies and blood spattering the camera lens in keeping with the film's pseudo-documentary style, but no real gore by your average horror film's standards. As someone who's fascinated by the processes of social alienation that are explored, exposed, and reinforced in fantasy/sci-fi films, though, I found its commentary on the subject intriguing, if a bit inconsistent.
The plot of the film is simple: an alien mother ship filled with nearly two million crustacean/insectoid creatures stalls above Johannesburg, South Africa, and--in a grotesque parody of the apartheid system from which that nation has only recently distanced itself--these newcomers become the victims of prejudice, speciesism, isolation, recrimination, and violence. The derogatory name "prawns" is applied to them; they dwell in slums separated by fences from the human population; crimelords move into their territory, further straining an already fragile social structure; and an unholy alliance of government officials and corporate interests seeks to exploit their advanced technology after permanently resettling them to what one spokesman finally admits are de facto concentration camps. The film's action unfolds from these events, as some of the aliens resist violently, others are slain by private military forces working for the resettlement agency, and the human head of the operation becomes infected by a virus that slowly transforms him into one of the "prawns." His desperate pursuit of a cure, and his uneasy allegiance with the alien revolutionary who promises to deliver one, provide the film some of its most unnerving and uncanny moments.
But they also pull the film away, to a certain extent, from the social commentary I had taken to be its core. To begin with, these events force the film into a violation of its own stylistic principles, as action involving the infected human and his alien ally necessarily takes place in scenes no documentary camera could capture. And this is a not insignificant concession to form, inasmuch as the documentary style was itself, in the film's early movements, the principal vehicle by which it represented the alienation of the "prawns" as a systemic social practice rather than an individualized or isolated instance of intolerance. I'm reminded of the film Iron Man--a far inferior film, by the way, but one that shares District 9's tendency to personalize the political, in the case of the lesser film by retreating from a promising critique of entrenched militarism into an indictment of particular individuals operating outside the licensed military apparatus. Being, as I said, a far better and smarter film, District 9 never goes as far as Iron Man in whitewashing the political structures of inequity it exposes--but by morphing into a kind of alien buddy-movie, it does tend to displace or soften the critique.
At least, that was my impression on an initial viewing; maybe I'll see it differently next time. But I do wonder why it's so hard to sustain political critique in popular media; I'm not fully satisfied with the usual explanations having to do with the corporate allegiances of the culture industry. I wonder whether there's simply something incompatible between cinematic fantasy and social critique. And if so, I wonder whether as a lover of fantasy film, I'm once again looking for social change in the wrong places.
The plot of the film is simple: an alien mother ship filled with nearly two million crustacean/insectoid creatures stalls above Johannesburg, South Africa, and--in a grotesque parody of the apartheid system from which that nation has only recently distanced itself--these newcomers become the victims of prejudice, speciesism, isolation, recrimination, and violence. The derogatory name "prawns" is applied to them; they dwell in slums separated by fences from the human population; crimelords move into their territory, further straining an already fragile social structure; and an unholy alliance of government officials and corporate interests seeks to exploit their advanced technology after permanently resettling them to what one spokesman finally admits are de facto concentration camps. The film's action unfolds from these events, as some of the aliens resist violently, others are slain by private military forces working for the resettlement agency, and the human head of the operation becomes infected by a virus that slowly transforms him into one of the "prawns." His desperate pursuit of a cure, and his uneasy allegiance with the alien revolutionary who promises to deliver one, provide the film some of its most unnerving and uncanny moments.
But they also pull the film away, to a certain extent, from the social commentary I had taken to be its core. To begin with, these events force the film into a violation of its own stylistic principles, as action involving the infected human and his alien ally necessarily takes place in scenes no documentary camera could capture. And this is a not insignificant concession to form, inasmuch as the documentary style was itself, in the film's early movements, the principal vehicle by which it represented the alienation of the "prawns" as a systemic social practice rather than an individualized or isolated instance of intolerance. I'm reminded of the film Iron Man--a far inferior film, by the way, but one that shares District 9's tendency to personalize the political, in the case of the lesser film by retreating from a promising critique of entrenched militarism into an indictment of particular individuals operating outside the licensed military apparatus. Being, as I said, a far better and smarter film, District 9 never goes as far as Iron Man in whitewashing the political structures of inequity it exposes--but by morphing into a kind of alien buddy-movie, it does tend to displace or soften the critique.
At least, that was my impression on an initial viewing; maybe I'll see it differently next time. But I do wonder why it's so hard to sustain political critique in popular media; I'm not fully satisfied with the usual explanations having to do with the corporate allegiances of the culture industry. I wonder whether there's simply something incompatible between cinematic fantasy and social critique. And if so, I wonder whether as a lover of fantasy film, I'm once again looking for social change in the wrong places.
Monday, February 1, 2010
I Want to Par-TAY
After reading my op-ed, a few people have asked me why, if I'm so thoroughly disgusted with the Democratic Party, I end the piece by predicting or hoping for some new party to emerge. Maybe, these friends have suggested, it's futile to look to political parties at all to heal our society's ills.
Part of me is very responsive to this argument: the part of me that agrees with Thoreau, Gandhi, and King that civil disobedience, protest, and other forms of direct citizen action are the best (or only) way for citizens in a stiflingly complex sociopolitical system to "break through" and effect real change. Such an argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would dispense with political parties (or government itself) entirely: for what possible use could it be to align oneself with a preconstituted party (or even one of one's own devising) if the point is to liberate oneself from the very structures that exclude, or at least distance, citizens from direct participation in the political process?
So in that respect, I sort of wish I'd ended not with a plea for a new party, but with a plea for a new social consciousness, conscience, and conviction among ordinary citizens. That might have made the article stronger.
But at the same time, there's a large part of me--call it Socialist if you want, or if you must--that believes in the fundamental power of social collectives to multiply the clout, and soften the selfishness, of individuals. Political parties, of course, aren't the only such collectives; the organized, grassroots movements of Gandhi, King, and others are too, and may be even more powerful examples of the form. And yet I continue to find the promise of political affiliation, if not its practice, appealing; I continue to find myself believing that there must be a place, however small, for politically constituted collectives to guide and shape the political process.
Maybe this makes me wishy-washy, an independent not worth his name. Maybe it shows I'm still very much a child of my parents' New Deal legacy; maybe it says I've been drinking our political system's Kool Aid so long I can't imagine a true alternative to the junk it's been selling me. I'm not sure. I'd like to hear what others have to say about this, though. Maybe, together, we can figure out a way to party without parties.
Part of me is very responsive to this argument: the part of me that agrees with Thoreau, Gandhi, and King that civil disobedience, protest, and other forms of direct citizen action are the best (or only) way for citizens in a stiflingly complex sociopolitical system to "break through" and effect real change. Such an argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would dispense with political parties (or government itself) entirely: for what possible use could it be to align oneself with a preconstituted party (or even one of one's own devising) if the point is to liberate oneself from the very structures that exclude, or at least distance, citizens from direct participation in the political process?
So in that respect, I sort of wish I'd ended not with a plea for a new party, but with a plea for a new social consciousness, conscience, and conviction among ordinary citizens. That might have made the article stronger.
But at the same time, there's a large part of me--call it Socialist if you want, or if you must--that believes in the fundamental power of social collectives to multiply the clout, and soften the selfishness, of individuals. Political parties, of course, aren't the only such collectives; the organized, grassroots movements of Gandhi, King, and others are too, and may be even more powerful examples of the form. And yet I continue to find the promise of political affiliation, if not its practice, appealing; I continue to find myself believing that there must be a place, however small, for politically constituted collectives to guide and shape the political process.
Maybe this makes me wishy-washy, an independent not worth his name. Maybe it shows I'm still very much a child of my parents' New Deal legacy; maybe it says I've been drinking our political system's Kool Aid so long I can't imagine a true alternative to the junk it's been selling me. I'm not sure. I'd like to hear what others have to say about this, though. Maybe, together, we can figure out a way to party without parties.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
In Case You Missed It....
In case you missed it, here's an op-ed of mine that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The piece with which my article was paired--about the Republican Party's habit of turning a blind eye to its own racism--is worth a look too.
There's been a lot of hand-wringing--as well as mud-slinging--following the election of the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in nearly 40 years and the Democrats' consequent loss of the supermajority they briefly enjoyed in the Senate. But personally, I'm not surprised by the Democrats' meteoric fall from grace. And maybe, instead of wringing our hands, we the people should be wringing their necks.
I'm an independent, but like many progressives I voted for the Democrats--including Barack Obama--in the 2008 election because I hoped they'd keep their promises concerning the issues that matter to me most: global warming, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the policies of torture and detention pursued by the previous administration, the lack of universal health care, the profligacy and criminality of the financial industry, the corruption of Washington politics, the devastating effects of the recession. But with a year in office, most of it spent with their vaunted supermajority in place, what have they done?
They've derailed international climate-change negotiations by failing to get climate legislation off the ground. They've escalated one war and extended the other. They've kept in place effectively the same wartime policies of their predecessors. They've watered down the health care bill to the point of meaninglessness and still failed to see it through. They've made feeble stabs at corralling the most egregious sins of Wall Street (CEO perks, credit card rate hikes) while utterly failing to address the system's fundamental inequities. They've done nothing about the lobbyists who swarm around them--indeed, it's their incestuous dependence on those money-peddlers that has squelched the other reform legislation I hoped to see. In order to achieve all of this nothing, they've thrown around so much cash (but none of it to you and me) you'd think they were on a year-long holiday shopping spree. And still the economy is reeling.
One might expect such monumental failures to produce not excuses and accusations but soul-searching. If, that is, the Democratic Party still had a soul left to search.
The Massachusetts election, in short, has only driven home what was already painfully evident from the past year: The Democrats are a failed party in every conceivable way. They no longer stand for anything coherent or meaningful, they no longer feel any responsibility to the people they serve, and they are no longer capable of achieving anything of consequence no matter how many votes or offices they hold. A party so ideologically, morally and politically bankrupt has no business existing.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama asserted that "it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength." I couldn't agree more. But I no longer believe the Democratic Party has a part to play in creating such a government.
Historically, political parties arise to meet a great but unfulfilled need: The Democrats emerged in the 18th century as the "party of the common man," the Republicans in the 19th to oppose the extension of slavery. I don't know what new party will rise from the ruins of the Democrats. All I know is it can't rise too soon.
There's been a lot of hand-wringing--as well as mud-slinging--following the election of the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in nearly 40 years and the Democrats' consequent loss of the supermajority they briefly enjoyed in the Senate. But personally, I'm not surprised by the Democrats' meteoric fall from grace. And maybe, instead of wringing our hands, we the people should be wringing their necks.
I'm an independent, but like many progressives I voted for the Democrats--including Barack Obama--in the 2008 election because I hoped they'd keep their promises concerning the issues that matter to me most: global warming, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the policies of torture and detention pursued by the previous administration, the lack of universal health care, the profligacy and criminality of the financial industry, the corruption of Washington politics, the devastating effects of the recession. But with a year in office, most of it spent with their vaunted supermajority in place, what have they done?
They've derailed international climate-change negotiations by failing to get climate legislation off the ground. They've escalated one war and extended the other. They've kept in place effectively the same wartime policies of their predecessors. They've watered down the health care bill to the point of meaninglessness and still failed to see it through. They've made feeble stabs at corralling the most egregious sins of Wall Street (CEO perks, credit card rate hikes) while utterly failing to address the system's fundamental inequities. They've done nothing about the lobbyists who swarm around them--indeed, it's their incestuous dependence on those money-peddlers that has squelched the other reform legislation I hoped to see. In order to achieve all of this nothing, they've thrown around so much cash (but none of it to you and me) you'd think they were on a year-long holiday shopping spree. And still the economy is reeling.
One might expect such monumental failures to produce not excuses and accusations but soul-searching. If, that is, the Democratic Party still had a soul left to search.
The Massachusetts election, in short, has only driven home what was already painfully evident from the past year: The Democrats are a failed party in every conceivable way. They no longer stand for anything coherent or meaningful, they no longer feel any responsibility to the people they serve, and they are no longer capable of achieving anything of consequence no matter how many votes or offices they hold. A party so ideologically, morally and politically bankrupt has no business existing.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama asserted that "it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength." I couldn't agree more. But I no longer believe the Democratic Party has a part to play in creating such a government.
Historically, political parties arise to meet a great but unfulfilled need: The Democrats emerged in the 18th century as the "party of the common man," the Republicans in the 19th to oppose the extension of slavery. I don't know what new party will rise from the ruins of the Democrats. All I know is it can't rise too soon.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
King's True Dream
In the week following Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I've made it a habit to introduce my students to a speech of his that practically no one knows about, a speech that's been almost entirely eclipsed by "I Have a Dream." Not that I have a problem with the latter speech, of course. But I feel that the obsessive focus on this speech does a disservice to King's legacy, a legacy that was far more radical than his words at the Lincoln Memorial suggest. "I Have a Dream" is a speech that, these days at least, it's hard to disagree with; who but hardcore racists could object to King's vision of interracial harmony? In that respect, the endless replaying of the "Dream" speech serves a stultifying rather than a galvanizing function in our current historical context; the speech allows us, especially with a black man in the White House, to congratulate ourselves on how far we've come, rather than to ask ourselves how far we still have to go.
And of course, we still do have a ways to go. From New Orleans to Haiti, we still live in a world of radical inequality grounded to a great extent in skin color; we still have color-coded systems of education, justice, economics, employment, residence, health, environment, and all the rest. We have a black president, yes, but also a black record that has yet to be addressed.
And we also, as I've noted in many an earlier post, have a black president who is waging (indeed, escalating) two wars. To bring this up might seem irrelevant to a discussion of King--but that's only because we've forgotten his other speech, his more radical speech, the speech in which he made clear that dismantling racism is neither sufficient nor possible without dismantling the systems of economic injustice and military imperialism on which racism is founded.
I refer to King's speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," which he delivered on April 4, 1967, a year before his death. In this speech, King argued that domestic racism was only one symptom of a larger social malaise of international reach, a malaise reflected both by the criminal war in Vietnam and by economic inequality at home and abroad. This speech, not surprisingly, turned many of King's former supporters against him; he was upbraided for dabbling in matters about which he knew nothing, vilified as anti-American, decried as a Communist. He was treated, in short, the way antiwar protestors are always treated: as traitors to their nation.
But his words remain as resonant today as they were over 40 years ago. Just listen to them:
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. . . . One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
That's the message I take from King's dream: the radical message of revolution not only in the arena of race relations but in the way our entire global social, political, economic, military, and environmental system is structured. We are far from realizing that dream; indeed, we are arguably farther from it now than we were in King's day. But if we truly wish to honor King's legacy, we must see that legacy in its full and true dimensions and do as he says: "rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter--but beautiful--struggle for a new world."
And of course, we still do have a ways to go. From New Orleans to Haiti, we still live in a world of radical inequality grounded to a great extent in skin color; we still have color-coded systems of education, justice, economics, employment, residence, health, environment, and all the rest. We have a black president, yes, but also a black record that has yet to be addressed.
And we also, as I've noted in many an earlier post, have a black president who is waging (indeed, escalating) two wars. To bring this up might seem irrelevant to a discussion of King--but that's only because we've forgotten his other speech, his more radical speech, the speech in which he made clear that dismantling racism is neither sufficient nor possible without dismantling the systems of economic injustice and military imperialism on which racism is founded.
I refer to King's speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," which he delivered on April 4, 1967, a year before his death. In this speech, King argued that domestic racism was only one symptom of a larger social malaise of international reach, a malaise reflected both by the criminal war in Vietnam and by economic inequality at home and abroad. This speech, not surprisingly, turned many of King's former supporters against him; he was upbraided for dabbling in matters about which he knew nothing, vilified as anti-American, decried as a Communist. He was treated, in short, the way antiwar protestors are always treated: as traitors to their nation.
But his words remain as resonant today as they were over 40 years ago. Just listen to them:
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. . . . One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
That's the message I take from King's dream: the radical message of revolution not only in the arena of race relations but in the way our entire global social, political, economic, military, and environmental system is structured. We are far from realizing that dream; indeed, we are arguably farther from it now than we were in King's day. But if we truly wish to honor King's legacy, we must see that legacy in its full and true dimensions and do as he says: "rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter--but beautiful--struggle for a new world."
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