Was the first time I saw anyone or anything officially mention the upcoming Martin Luther King holiday. I heard a brief allusion to it about a week earlier, but wasn't sure the context. I just remember it being referenced in some vague way. On the 15th, there was one story on the local news about a gathering for MLK Day, and a mention of some basic details. That was it. Since then I've heard and seen some other references to it, but nothing spectacular. A couple on the morning news on Saturday, including mention that the MLK parade was cancelled due to cold.
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but in some ways this shows what we are up against with that thing we call the Left. Something is true today, false tomorrow. Something is nakedly evil today, no big deal tomorrow. A person is a veritable god today, who was that? tomorrow. We just have to admit that the 'here today, gone later' today approach to truth has been a tough nut to crack for those trying to oppose what the modern progressive movement has to offer.
So in my younger days, it was Kennedy who was the messianic god figure of the 1960s. It seemed that not a week went by that I didn't hear or see referenced the famous line 'Ask not what your country can do for you.' By the end of the 1980s, however, that sacred line was quickly being replaced by 'I have a dream!'
By the 1990s, MLK had become in many ways our substitute Jesus. As Christians were being told to put it under a bushel and happily complying, and as the J-Word was increasingly barred from polite society, MLK became that important person we could all quote, reference or appeal to in the most mixed of company, including in the highest profile media outlets. By the time I was in ministry in the mid-90s, it wasn't anything to hear entire sermons where MLK would be quoted or referenced more than Jesus. That was especially true among African American ministers I knew.
When my sons were in public school in the 2000s, I can still remember when they would begin prepping for that year's MLK celebration festivities. Often those preparatory activities began even before they broke for Winter Break (again, by then the C and J Words no longer part of our national discourse). In fact, it almost became one of those cultural signposts that told me Christmas was just around the corner when I first began hearing about the upcoming MLK celebrations in January.
In ministry, I remember being part of various groups and, even before Christmas, being asked that most crucial of all questions - what are my plans for MLK day? Is my church doing anything? Am I doing anything? I remember in an ecumenical group I served in, that question was poised once in our year end November meeting (we didn't have a December meeting, so that was always our final for the year). I shocked them when I said I didn't get into the whole MLK thing. I spent most of that meeting fending off questions about my real motives for not paying proper dues to the man.
All of this is to say that, since 2021, it's nothing for me to forget about the holiday until about this time. A week, possibly two, ahead of time. Mostly references to this or that community gathering and that's about it. Used to be I couldn't watch the news or read publications or turn on PBS without seeing someone quoting or referencing MLK in an interview, speech, lecture, or sermon at least twice or three times a week. I can't remember last time I heard that sort of a reference now.
Why? Because of 2020, that's why. Apart from Deacon Greydanus, who insists the 2020 protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, nobody was really harmed or killed, just some unfortunate coincidences with a little harmless vandalism and graffiti, most on the Left embrace the violence. Oh, they shed a tear. But it was destruction, and even death, to serve the righteous cause. Sometimes, it turns out, violence is a darn good answer.
Same with things like White Privilege or Whiteness as only a pejorative. We now know the only racist is the one who won't judge, exonerate, condemn or discriminate based on proper skin colors. Just like so many things that post-war liberalism called evil that are now called good, and vice versa.
So with that, where does the myth of MLK fit in? Oh, in 2021 there were some attempts here and there by activists to insist we had the MLK legacy all wrong. Turns out he was never averse to a little bit of the ultra-violence. Leading my boys to start referring to him as MLK: Ninja Warrior! And some of his family said that MLK knew sometimes you just have to judge based on the color of someone's skin as opposed to that content of character gibberish. But on the whole, it's just been tough to maintain the MLK myth in light of its growing inconvenience to the new BLM iteration of the postliberal Left.
After all, if you think about the idealized, almost deified picture that MLK enjoyed for the 80s through the 2010s, it goes down tough now that we're being told to embrace condemnation based on skin color and the occasional butt kicking for the cause. Even if it includes the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. I mean, do those famous quotes of MLK that were repeated so often for so many years really help in this context? I don't think so. Which is probably why, long before I heard any actual reference to MLK activities this year, I knew it was coming around the corner only because of this:
(Tom New Poster)
ReplyDeleteAll MLK Day means in retirement is that I don't have move my car for street cleaning, don't get mail and can't go to the library.
He (and JFK) were "canonized" too quickly and countervailing voices were never even entertained. One can regret (and avenge through the law) the violent death of any man, but violent death does not of itself make a true martyr. We waited decades after the deaths of Washington and Lincoln before considering national holidays in their names, and everything they did was up for examination and criticism. Too many of us felt MLK Day was shoved down our throats without a chance to dispassionately examine the man's character and legacy (although to be fair, some of those same folks leaped at the chance to idolize Kennedy; hypocrite thy name is Man).
Of course, the Left just wanted a national holiday for a Negro (what King called himself) because it gave them a bloody red shirt for politics beyond the end of Jim Crow (which legally died some years before King). Well, now they have a bloodier one in George Floyd, who couldn't stand a whiff of a comparison to King.
I remember how it went down. Our school system simply made us go to school on Presidents' Day so we could have MLK Day off without missing an extra day. Because just saying they would eventually accommodate it wasn't enough, and across the country were protests, threats of walkouts and boycotts for anyone who didn't comply with the celebration. Back in the 90s was the first time (on that burgeoning thing called cable news moving beyond just CNN) I heard someone float the idea that planning for Civil Rights marches wasn't the only thing going on in those hotel rooms. The retaliation was swift and brutal. As was anything that failed to present MLK as nothing short of a messianic god figure. And that went for those who didn't only criticize (I never had a problem with the great things he did), but who didn't give enough praise and adoration to the man. It was clearly a case that our country would simply buckle and do as we are told, with even our religious leaders blindly going along with it. In my own convention, I think I was the only one who ever dared suggest we went a bit overboard with MLK celebrations. And I heard about it. The hilarious part being that one of the liberal mantras I grew up with was that we had to stop lionizing old, dead people and treating them like flawless gods. We needed to focus on the ugly, the warts, and the dirt just the same. Again, a defining trait of our post-war progressives was to literally talk out of both sides of the mouth knowing that the institutions that should call them out were there helping them along.
DeleteIf there was funny business by the "powers that be" that caused the death of these two men of which you speak, then perhaps the best way to hide that somewhat is to lionize them in that death.
DeleteYou've overstated matter mightily. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to strike attitudes in 1983 when Jesse Helms brought up King's transgressions on the floor of the Senate. The cat was out of the bag. Both Ralph David Abernathy's memoirs and Taylor Branch's biography offered granular details about sexual misconduct quite damaging to the reputation of King and his camarilla. Betwixt and between, it was a matter of mention in major media that those examining his doctoral dissertation had discovered a large chunk of it was plagiarized from the work of Paul Tillich and John Boozer. (This last was in 1990).
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James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. He was a 40 year old bachelor who had three stints in prison under his belt and whose most discrete skill was tending bar. Not one of the powers-that-be.
I'm sure there were others who brought it up, but the first time I remember hearing about it, or at least hearing people react, was in the 90s, on Fox I believe (though it may have been CNN, I can't recall for sure). And I remember not just pushback there, but as more were tuning into cable then, I recall around the seminary water cooler people upset that someone would float such things. Not that they denied the accusations. It was just verboten to bring them up. Go beat up on Lincoln for being a racist instead. MLK was already off limits.
DeleteIt would be agreeable if federal holidays applied only to federal employees and (perhaps) enterprises which employed people outside the jurisdiction where the charter of their parent company was issued. It would also be agreeable if they were limited to Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, the Fourth of July, Easter Monday, and the day after Thanksgiving, along with half days on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and the day before Thanksgiving. (State and territorial governments can prescribe their own holidays). Recall Anthony Esolen's distinction between popular culture and mass entertainment. Popular culture encompasses the music people play on their own instruments and sing with their own voices. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Easter, and the 4th of July are not official contrivances. They did not get turned into bank holidays in 1970.
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My evangelical 4th grade teacher had a picture of MLK tacked up on a bulletin board the back of the classroom. It was a statement of sorts. She wasn't voluble about it, however.