Late in his life, in April of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. once famously or—as the case may be—infamously referred to the Government of the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. He did so in spite of a record of having put to use this selfsame government as a bulwark in the Civil Rights Movement—a role which, suffice it to say, it should have been unlikely to take on in his absence. He did so in spite of a Peace Prize, moreover, in spite of an image and reputation by force of which Dr. King could well have claimed status as the conscience of an entire generation of Americans. King, more than one person in the 20th Century, brought conscience to power in America. If hated by a reactionary sector within said generation—a sector resentful of not only this feat but the unleashing of broad-based demotic power (sometimes understood as ‘democracy’)—he was hated as person of stature, which is to say, as an authority… a situation that made the statement I’ve referenced the cause for alarm that it was (and still is). King’s was one of the first voices of authority in this nation’s history to call it out for what it was, for what it had become his lifetime, in fact. His act, in this regard—of, not just ‘free’, but authoritative speech—a calling out of violence, it was itself an act of violence. As put by cultural critic (and supreme ironist) Slavoj Žižek, King was a ‘violent’ actor in the sense that Gandhi was such: Gandhi, whose manner of resistance to the workings of the colonial state was so disruptive to it that it rendered British rule of India, for the most part, a futile endeavor. (Is it not in the case of Gandhi, if not also in that of Dr. King, that we find instantiated precisely the violence of the political Christ—not the myth and not the real idea of Christ but what I have called elsewhere the ‘Christ of the swarm and the desert’, perhaps the world’s first significant utopian politician?) King’s violence—as a man of peace—of what, however artlessly, we may be tempted to christen ‘true peace’: that which, being neither profitable nor meritorious nor qualified by a semblance of honor, remains the legacy of successful political action—how is this to be understood in comparison with violence of a more conventional nature: that, for instance, which imbrues the record of another Nobel laureate, one Henry Kissinger? Tempting is the impulse to link the two as opposites, historically and meta-ethically speaking. It was stone cold Realpolitik, wrought by Kissinger’s political genius—and several million tons of bombs—that brought the questionable peace of the Paris Accords, as well as an equally questionable means of saving face. As styled by Dr. King, on the other hand, it was simple Christian agape—agape, a notion which, applied to a theory of action, remains as close in equivalence to Gandhian satyagraha as any I can presently bring to mind—that powered the Civil Rights Movement and brought us its crowning achievement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As terms, the two fit neatly—nay, illustratively—in an argument that persists to this day, its theme being ‘how peace is won’.
(In truth, do we not still seek peace in war in the manner in which Kissinger and Nixon brought it in the 70s? The ‘strange liberation’ we have offered Iraq and Afghanistan and—who knows?—soon, a pre-nuclear Iran, does this not attest to the intractable nature of our manner of ‘strategic thinking’?)
Tempting is the impulse to link the two—as it were, agape and thanatos (or whatever model of human aggression one would choose to pursue)—tempting, if not a little delusive. One who—as King did—truly wants to think ethically, even as he acts… stakes claims, stands his ground, makes war… who wants to base action in ethos, he has to learn to eschew the temptation to facile reduction. He has to learn empathy moreover, even under the influence of his personal hatreds. From the ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech of April 1967:
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.Here is a political thought certainly as alien to contemporary American political discourse as any one could fathom up. (After all, post 9-11, who is really willing to hear what the other—political or otherwise—would tell us about ourselves?!) Articulated almost 45 years ago by an actor whose memory is, for the most part, sainted even by those who, in 1967, should have likely branded him a terrorist, it is a thought that isn’t given even passing mention by its thinker’s ostensible 21st Century political descendants, not least of which is the man who, today, will be sworn in for his second term of office as President of the United States.
Tempting is the impulse to oppose the ‘violence’ of Dr. King—the violence of agape—with that of the practitioner of American Realpolitik—with that of the advocate of American ‘benevolent’ hegemony, for that matter… Yet such is far too Manichean an association. Spent in the context of a polemic, it means nothing. If force of violence is necessarily one’s approach to the other (the enemy), of course bloodless warfare—of which Gandhism is the purest and least impeachable form—enhances the status of military intervention as a failure of pragmata, as ‘evil’, for lack of a better word. Even a neocon with JFK’s faith in the benevolence of American hegemony would have to admit that. (Of course, less principled and more cynical neocons—of which, I suppose, Donald Rumsfeld is an exemplar—may learn to accept such failure.)
No less meaningless a work of thought is speculation as to how peace should have been brought had not either King or Bobby Kennedy been slain when they were, had our policy makers—as well as the public—been made to know the enemy’s “assessment of ourselves” in the case of Vietnam. The act of ‘making to know’ (of taboo thoughts and ideation), if—for the makers of our foreign policy in particular—it should constitute the most ‘violent’ aspect of bloodless warfare, it is not one that cannot be compensated for, whether by media efforts (propaganda), or smart demagoguery, or simply America’s well known sweet-tooth for jingoistic revenge fantasies (of which the film Zero Dark Thirty is the latest and a very pertinent example). If it is nothing else, ours is a nation ruled by two concepts: the profit motive and the thought terminating cliché. Had King lived until 1970, had Bobby Kennedy managed to reach the Oval Office, it is doubtful the Vietnam War would have been liquidated in a morally acceptable fashion—as it is doubtful this nation’s policy makers would have somehow grasped the ethical and geopolitical ‘lessons’ of Vietnam. (Some did, of course, learn well this conflict’s military lessons. Since Vietnam, it does seem as though our military strategists have been steered from the kind of ‘business model’ war of attrition that not only proved ineffective in the case of Vietnam but lost the morale and the commitment of American ground forces. Since Vietnam, American effectiveness at guerilla warfare: at destroying enemy infrastructure and starving out enemy populations—without significant American casualties and without direct exposure to American troops of the kind of carnage that, as it were, ‘lost the troops’ in Vietnam—this has been improved to a remarkable extent. With American advancements in battle technology have come comparable advancements in ‘sanitizing’ war, the notable mistakes of the Second Iraq War notwithstanding.) The nature of the United States’ engagement with Afghanistan since 9-11 is ample indication of that. (Rich is the irony here. Having previously lured the U.S.S.R. into a contentious, ten year, economy-crushing war against the mujahideen in Afghanistan—in what Zbigniew Brzezinski is alleged to have called ‘the Soviet Union’s Vietnam’—the United States, post 9-11, albeit with a reckless President, allowed itself to be drawn into a similar conflict in the same place against virtually the same enemy with scarcely dissimilar economic consequences… by none other than bin Laden, what is more, a man whom, as anti-Soviet guerilla in the (first) Afghan War, the United States, via the CIA, directly or indirectly supported. )
Eschewing idle speculation—and resisting ideological temptations—were I asked to link King’s work and his legacy (including his paradoxical manner of warfare) in comparison with an equal if differently motivated actor, I’d do so, not with Nixon or Kissinger, but with someone like JFK or—better still—with yet another Nobel laureate, President Obama. JFK and Obama, indeed they do bear comparison (as ‘cool’ presidents, as political rock stars, as peculiarly conservative democrats), especially when drawn in a differential comparison, not with each other, but with King.
JFK was important to King; as President, Kennedy furthered the Civil Rights Movement by acting in support of Brown v. Board of Education, and with a vigor that Eisenhower hadn’t, a vigor to which Nixon should have likely been ill-disposed had he been elected in 1960. It is hard to image that passage of the Civil Rights Act would have been feasible had not the Kennedy Administration enabled King and the Civil Rights Movement as whole in JFK’s years as President. At the same time, as a Cold War hawk and a fiscal conservative he was integral to problems—and not solutions—as regards two other cardinal aspects of Dr. King’s agenda, to wit, nonviolence and economic justice. He was integral, not just because he was President, but because he was the kind of leader—the kind of man—who, when it came to acting against either of two social evils, poverty and aggressive foreign policy, knew better but sometimes acted otherwise. Reading King’s books and culling his speeches—two in particular, both from 1967: the book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? and King’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ address—one gets the impression that, more than the abject racial bigot, the Third World rent seeker, or the lunatic Curtis LeMay type militarist, the actor that most got under King’s skin was the hesitant progressive: he who does know (for instance) that
• poverty in the world—in the United States in particular—when there is so much wealth in so few hands, is not a necessary but a tolerated evil,
• the arms race and the ‘domino theory’ are as much driven by capitalism as they are national security,
• propping up hated Third World dictators in the name of ‘freedom’ is not a way to win hearts and minds,
yet is unwilling, for personal and political reasons, to act on this knowledge in order to further change. It clearly was politics that brought the reluctance of the Kennedy Administration to proceed—in JFK’s first term of office—with the reforms that were to constitute the War on Poverty later that decade. Just as clear is the fact that, beneath flirtation with disaster in Cuba, the fueling of the nuclear arms race, the gradual build-up in Vietnam, and the Administration’s continued support (until it came time to give him the boot) of the unpopular and repressive Premier Diem, lay JFK’s own hardened ‘Cold warrior’ bias. King’s frustration with the Kennedy Administration—notwithstanding its value to the Civil Rights Movement—was apparent in his communications; it was subtly revealed in the address just mentioned: ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence’, of which a few paragraphs bear mentioning here.¹
Toward the beginning of the address, employing a veiled Camelot reference, King explains his linkage of anti-war activism and economic justice:
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the Poverty Program. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political play thing of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
A few paragraphs later, he makes reference to the poisonous nature of the United States’ support of Diem—whom, if authentic elections had been conducted at any time during Diem’s reign, Ho Chi Minh would have likely defeated.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.Here, King reaches perhaps the most profound thought to be culled from the address; he asks for something like an ‘empathetic’ approach to understanding the enemy.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the NLF, that strangely anonymous group we call VC or communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?Toward the end of the address, ironically quoting JFK himself, King fairly well encapsulates the gist of United States foreign policy circa 1967. (Regrettably, it hasn’t changed much since.)
In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible’… in the context of King’s speech, the pronoun here points (again, ironically) to U.S. policy makers, including the original speaker of this phrase. To the extent that JFK gainsaid a hypothetical “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war”, to the extent that he made overtures toward a “conquest of poverty”—which he was even willing to correlate with the “conquest of space”!—he was also unwilling to break with standards established by his immediate predecessors, two of which were an aversion to the expansion of New Deal era safety nets (for example, FDR’s ‘Second Bill of Rights’ and MLK’s own ‘Citizen’s Dividend’, a proposition that may well have been what got him killed) and the Truman Doctrine.It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Had Kennedy not been assassinated, popular fantasy tells us, he would, in his second term, have abruptly reigned in military spending, signed off on some form of the ‘Second Bill of Rights’, and pulled the United States out of Vietnam. In accomplishing such, he would have ensured the continuation of the ‘Golden Age of American Capitalism’—which officially ceased in 1978—until at least the end of the millennium. (Presumably, all would have been right with the world.) Of course, popular fantasy, like a screen memory, omits much of the reality; any scenario in which JFK lives for a second term and effects such a grand transformation is likely to be hard to swallow if, in it, one cannot account for the means by which this hero should have resolved his own tragic flaw, which was neoconservative hubris. To have met popular expectation, not only would Kennedy have had to defuse prevailing Sino-American and Soviet-American tensions (both in rather short order), he would have also had to alter radically his own, deeply ingrained geopolitical thinking. He would have had to unlearn his own manner of ‘heroism’, a state that, clearly, was dear to this actor. (He would have had to reorient both the terms and the processes of American capitalist expansionism as well, but I suspect the latter should have been child’s play in comparison with losing hubris.) Little evidence exists to suggest that President Kennedy would have easily abandoned the neocon pipe dream of benevolent hegemony. More so than even Lyndon Johnson, who, truth be told, was more of a hard-nosed Realpolitiker in the Nixonian mold than a genuine believer in nation building, Kennedy was sold on the need for the United States—or, more exactly, American free market capitalism—to dominate the Third World. His was an imperative that was—and still is—as much of a hindrance to Third World development as a catalyst.
The history of United States Third World diplomacy is littered with cases of U.S. intervention that have resulted, not in the inculcation of democracy and the creation of viable free market economies—the stated desiderata of most undesigning advocates of nation building—but in inevitably troublesome dictatorships fed by economic oligarchies. Of such dictatorships, to be sure, the reign of Ngo Dinh Diem was a pretty good example. “I believe in duty above all”, said Premier Diem in a phone call to Henry Cabot Lodge, just before he was deposed (with JFK’s approval) and summarily put to death. He meant duty to the United States, to his handlers and to the mission with he had been charged. And he may well have been sincere in this assertion, however much he’d botched the mission. In giving the green light to Diem’s removal, Kennedy did, of course, express concerns. Among these were, not so much the legally and ethically problematic nature of removing a foreign leader—or having propped him up in the first place—but how U.S. recognition of Diem’s replacement would play in the press and throughout the Third World. (The U.S. had, a few weeks earlier, refused to recognize an insurrectionist government in Honduras.) There was also the concern for Diem’s safety. Kennedy evidenced surprise and considerable dismay at news of Diem’s execution, reaction that was itself surprising—given the empirically demonstrated nature of Third World regime change—to a few of the President’s foreign policy advisors.
Here is a snapshot of the ‘mystery wrapped in an enigma’ that was President John F. Kennedy. It is a picture that, in spite of this president’s considerable virtues, does cast doubt on the Kennedy brand (at least in so far as JFK is concerned), and that should have left an activist of MLK’s conviction—and MLK’s theory—distrustful of all like brands: Camelot, the New Frontier… the Great Society, for that matter. To speak of brands here—sleek, well-crafted, and finely tempered ‘progressive’ brands—of course, this does raise questions with regard to a fairly obvious hypothetical vis-à-vis Dr. King. What, in some kind of final analysis, would MLK have made of ‘Brand Obama’?
Here is, to some degree, a loaded question. The obvious—and obviously loaded—answer?
At Obama’s First Inauguration, King would have wept alongside other surviving civil rights activists. (Here, after all, was Dr. King’s legacy brought to an early and uncanny fruition. The nation’s first black president… an impressive man, to boot. King had had a ‘dream’; was not Obama said dream realized?) King would have supported Obama throughout his first term—much as has the Reverend Al Sharpton—notwithstanding a few ‘unchristian’ peccadillos on the Administration’s part. (Sins of commission: Wall Street bailouts; a few extrajudicial killings; a few thousand civilian victims of signature drone strikes; still an immoderate military budget…Sins of omission: four more years of Bush Tax Cuts; the cave on the public option; given the bailouts, rather a dearth of accountability for Wall Street; still is there a Guantanamo…Sins of sheer pusillanimity: the NDAA; total inaction on gun control; the ‘tragical‘2011 Budget Control Act and its ‘farcical’ revisitation, the 2012 Taxpayer Relief Act.) King would have campaigned vigorously for Obama in the 2012 General Election, and when Obama put his hand on King’s own Bible in January of 2013…
Here, Dr. Cornel West—for all his eccentricity—provides what may be an apposite response to such pie-eyed speculation. Dr. West is outraged that President Obama—who, politically speaking, now does have little to lose—should so shamelessly invoke the memory of Dr. King for overtly political reasons. He’s got a point, does he not? How is it, why is it, that Obama would invoke Dr. King, 1—given the President’s ‘vindication’ in the general elections, 2—given the extent to which he no longer needs—and needs to indulge—the so-called democratic base (a base he may never really have respected), and, 3—given a first term that should have allowed him to run to the right of both George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan? It is either the case that this President is signaling a policy ‘reverse-course’ to which the legacy of MLK is relevant (which Dr. West doubts), or this measure is simply a gratuitous gesture… an exercise in aggrandizement, what is more. Be the latter the case, of course, the outrage of a Dr. West—which is to say, any committed leftist—is very much warranted (or, at least, to be expected). What, after all, is the President doing—besides inflating ‘Brand Obama’—if not furthering an ideological appropriation of King by an interest, the Democratic Party, which, if it frustrated King in the Sixties—when it was still center-left and, for the most part, grassroots oriented—would have appalled him today given its blatant corporate focus? (For the human rights activist, can there be anything worse than the ambitious business-minded ‘liberal’?)
Either Obama is—politically speaking—un vrai (faux) naïf, an activist at heart who, for the most part, will be tilting at windmills throughout his second term, or he is—as, I gather, Dr. West suggests—an ambitious, petit-bourgeois egoist who wants to be the next Bill Clinton. Both cannot be the case. And figuring which is the case—figuring Obama, as it were—is not as easy as task as the reader might be lead to believe.
Who is Barack Obama?
Here is a peculiarly silencing question—one that is almost rhetorical it so lacks definitive answers. Like JFK—in fact, very much like JFK—President Obama is a sphinx: morally, politically, intellectually speaking. He does—as Kennedy did—present a singularly stellar image, one that would seem bring to mind the Platonic notion of arete. (It is an image that positively infuriates his partisan detractors. Being wont to portray Obama—in some cases, at once—as a communist, an anarchist, a terrorist, a crypto-racist (or kinder, gentler Willie Horton), it is always this image that frustrates their efforts, often making them look like fools.) And he has—as Kennedy had—a reputation for inaction on certain issues, one that tends to leave one suspecting a lack either of moral or political courage (if not both). Obama is, as Kennedy was, the actor who knows better but sometimes acts otherwise. Who is Barack Obama?
There have been indications that he is the man whom Cornel West—among others—would seem to suggest he is. On the President’s so-called ‘Apology Tour’ of 2009, for example… Considered analysis of the text of the speeches given by Obama on said ‘Tour’ (in April 2009 and the first week of June 2009) does provide the impression that, rather than indicating his intention to break with a longstanding tradition—of hegemonic U.S. foreign policy, that is—the President simply was sanitizing… doing so, however, in a manner that was both pedantic and (politically) self-serving. However wantonly hysterical, critics of Obama in the halls of Fox News were in some sense right to read an apology into these speeches—if, by ‘apology’ what is meant is the kind of tactical apology for which PR consultants are typically employed. Obama was indeed ‘cleaning up after Bush’, but in manner that hardly betokened real change in U.S. foreign policy, a manner, moreover, that was crafted more to impress than assure. (Similarly, the Nobel Prize awarded to Obama in 2009, I submit, should be understood as much a tacit affront to the Bush Administration—a parting, tardy, and (in my opinion) far too understated ‘F you’—than a legitimate bestowal of honor.²) The President’s Cairo Speech of 4 June 2009 is, for the most part, a stellar example of what I am talking about.
I’m grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. And I’m also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: As-salam alaykum.The President begins the speech thus, throwing in, for good measure and in fine ecumenical fashion, the Arabic greeting ‘Peace be with you’. Proper, PC, finely tempered: Obama sets the tone of the speech from the outset, but then, for the most part, does little else of substance. Skillfully wrought, weaving in just the kinds of memes and motifs an able rhetorician would be expected to hit…
• Pithy and poignant lines from scripture: “Whoever kills an innocent has killed all mankind.”Check.
• Anecdotal bon-bons: how, as a boy growing up in Indonesia, Obama—though a Christian—would hear “the call of the azaan” at dusk and dawn. Check.
• Fine lines from exalted founders: “I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”Check.
…ending, moreover, with the PC speech writer’s equivalent of the perfect golf swing: three scriptural references from three disparate religious traditions…
The Holy Koran tells us: “O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.” The Talmud tells us: “The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.” The Holy Bible tells us: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”…the speech is, nonetheless, fundamentally vapid and perfunctory, offering to seasoned observers of international politics scant indication that Obama has a vision for U.S. foreign policy that differs significantly from that of any of his immediate predecessors. To his credit, Obama does acknowledge—albeit with weasel words—the U.S. orchestrated overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 (to my knowledge, the first time an American statesman of Obama’s stature has done so); he also named Iraq as a “war of choice”. And, yes, he restated his prohibition of torture—which, apparently, has precedence in the Geneva Conventions. However, more than anything else, what was done in this speech—in the entire ‘Apology Tour’, for that matter—was to put a new and ‘prettier’ corporate face on United States foreign policy: to sell Obama as Commander in Chief and, with him, the United States—to be sure, as ‘kinder, gentler’ world hegemon. Little done by this President in this role—as Commander in Chief—supports the notion the U.S. is any less militaristic under his leadership than it was under that of George W. Bush.
Which is where admirers of ethical thinkers like MLK should begin to have problems with Obama… as well as JFK… and Bill and Hillary Clinton… leaders whom—if they have in no wise overseen human rights violations as profound and egregious as those advanced by, let us say, the Reagan Administration—we do need to hold accountable when it comes to interpreting history. Which author, in which age of man, first offered the suggestion that one’s accountability for history—as well as one’s own life—doesn’t end with one’s physical death?
Rumor has it that President Obama—no slouch as scholar and a philosophical thinker—often gleans passages of ‘Just War’ philosophers St. Augustine and John Rawls before signing off on such actions as signature drone strikes (which strikes, as of the date of this writing, have resulted in as many as 5000 civilian casualties since 2004, several hundred of which have been children). As Kennedy read poetry, so Obama reads philosophy; neither man is or was a moral and ethical imbecile in the category of a George W. Bush. The question that we, as ethicists, must ask ourselves—at least when passing judgment on actors of such consequence—I suspect it is this.
If the worst of our historical actors tend to bear the most blame for those most notorious of our crimes—and, here, I speak of crime for which accountability falls, not just on actors (our decision-makers) but, to some extent, on all of us—how are we to pass over the best of our actors when history finds them holding the bag during similar crimes for which neither the law nor the court of public opinion is willing to indict them?
Who is Barack Obama? Who was Jack Kennedy? More pertinent to the topic at hand—to violence in the world and its ‘greatest purveyor’—is the question ‘Who is MLK?’ The latter question, of course, is more precisely phrased, ‘Who would MLK have been, were he alive today?’ More likely than not, he would have been put on a terrorist watch-list. More likely than not—and even with the name—he would have been stopped at airports and banned from curricula; he would have been as marginalized as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. And as to his manner of ‘violence’—King’s agapeic violence—that would have been received with at least the zeal and the hysteria with which the proprietors of Wikileaks have been prosecuted (formally and informally). We would have thrown the book at him as we have at one Aaron Swartz. If time and some reflection should have likely caused Martin Luther King to modify his ’67 assessment as to ‘the greatest purveyor’—to my mind, he would have come to understand private equity as the “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”—there is little doubting to whom (to what actor) he would have assigned the burden of enacting change. Clearly, the burden would have been ours. Obama, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon… to the extent that they have been leaders, they have always—and without question—been our leaders. To the extent that they have ‘taken the country to Hell’, so have they taken us.
Notes:
1—The entire text of the address can be found here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/...
2—In a move that would seem to augur an increasing—and increasingly perverse—sense of humor on the part of the Nobel Committee, Obama’s 2009 Nobel Prize was actually trumped last year by that awarded to the EU.
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