At Saturday's Beck-a-Thon, Sarah Palin turned out to be little more than an afterthought. But that was partially because months of pressure forced Beck to scale back his attempt to steal Martin Luther Kings's vision. Nonetheless, in a round-about way, Palin tried her darnedest to not only claim the mantle of Martin Luther King, but George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as well. And she did it all in the name of honoring our military-a truly bizarre move, given not only that King was the most prominent anti-war activist of his time, but also that one of the things that Washington is most noted for is his key role in restraining the influence of the military and supporting the strength of civilian government. Here, then is how Palin began her speech, followed by a direct bebuke of her ignorant attitiudes and those of Beck himself in a signicant passage of one of King's most important speeches, "Beyond Vietnam".
Thank you so much. Are you not so proud to be an American?
What an honor. What an honor.
We stand today at the symbolic crossroads of our nation's history. All around us are monuments to those who have sustained us in word or deed. There in the distance stands the monument to the father of our country. And behind me, the towering presence of the Great Emancipator who secured our union at the moment of its most perilous time and freed those whose captivity was our greatest shame. And over these grounds where we are so honored to stand today, we feel the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who on this very day, two score and seven years ago, gave voice to a dream that would challenge us to honor the sacred charters of our liberty - that all men are created equal.
Now, in honoring these giants, who were linked by a solid rock foundation of faith in the one true God of justice, we must not forget the ordinary men and women on whose shoulders they stood. The ordinary called for extraordinary bravery. I am speaking, of course, of America's finest - our men and women in uniform, a force for good in this country, and that is nothing to apologize for.
Abraham Lincoln once spoke of the "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land." For over 200 years, those mystic chords have bound us in gratitude to those who are willingly to sacrifice, to restrain evil, to protect God-given liberty, to sacrifice all in defense of our country.
They fought for its freedom at Bunker Hill, they fought for its survival at Gettysburg, and for the ideals on which it stands - liberty and justice for all - on a thousand battlefields far from home.
It is so humbling to get to be here with you today, patriots - you who are motivated and engaged and concerned, knowing to never retreat. I must assume that you too know that we must not fundamentally transform America as some would want. We must restore America and restore her honor!
While Palin's speech was typically disjointed and devoid of logical argument, it's clear that she wanted to argue that somehow everything could be reduced to America's military--even its foremost opponent of militarism and proponent of nonviolence, Martin Luther King, whose actual philosophy she seems to know absolutely nothing about.. She also wanted--in those last two lines--to take a very slightly veiled poke at President Obama. But inadvertently, she took a roundhouse punch at Martin Luther King, and made an utter fool of herself... one more time.
For King's vision was the exact opposite of hers and of Becks: what America needed most of all, in his view, was a profound transformation of values and institutions to bring its everyday lived reality in line with its highest promise, which has never been realized, either at home or abroad. It was hardly surprising that a descendent of slaves should be aware of this shortcoming as a central historical fact, and in part of his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, King directly quoted the most eloquent expression of this awareness in American literature, Langston Hughes' poem, "Let America be America again.":
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
It should be clear, not only that King is diametrically opposed to Palin's reactionary politics, and her desire to resist all change--particularly that which would life up the downtrodden--but also that she is totally and utterly oblivious to virtually everything that King is about. And here there is a deeper level of irony, because, of course, it's one of the hallmarks of white privilege to be able to utterly ignore, or alternatively, to totally misrepresent the content of black ideas and aspirations, and that's precisely what Palin--and Beck, and all the rest of their lily-white congregation are doing. And this attitude is precisely what King is taking aim at.
Indeed, it's even made more explicit by Hughes in his poem--which I've quoted here before on several occasions. Its very structure is that it starts off with a central voice expressing the desire--Palin- and Beck-like for America to "be America again" and with a hushed, marginal voice (parenthetical, no less) objecting that there never was such a time for them:
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Finally, at this point, the outsider's voice gains a response, and makes its replym gradually revealing itself to be not so marginal after all, at least in terms of the broad diversity of people who make up America:
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
And for all that abuse, as in the Bible, the one rejected is the cornerstone:
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
While Hughes focused primarily on the domestic side, King's speech was about those same values and issues as they play out on the world stage. And here his accounting of the role of American intervention overseas is a great deal more realistic than Palin's. For exmaple:
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 now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. 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 investment.
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 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, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. 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.
So, no, Sarah Palin. You really don't get who Martin Luther King was, not by a million miles.
You say, "[W]e must not fundamentally transform America as some would want," and Martin Luther King said that fundamental transformation is utterly necessary.
You say, "We must restore America and restore her honor!" and Martin Luther King said--along with Langston Hughes:
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
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