The Dream Re-visited

This is a column I wrote sixteen years ago, in the wake of the L.A. riots. In light of Barack Obama's rise to national prominence, and the insipient racism it has revealed in the hearts of the Clinton Machine, what better day to introduce some fresh (and edited for topicality) perspective on this issue than the birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.?

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"DR. King rose to speak, and as he talked, he went into rolling cadences about his `dream,' that `one day, this nation will rise up and live out the meaning of its creed,' that `one day, on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood...I have a dream today!'

"`Let freedom ring,' he rolled on, `from every mountain top in America. When we allow freedom to ring...we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children -- black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics -- will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"'

"No one there was unmoved. I knew I had just heard from a few feet away one of the memorable addresses in American history. What made King's oration so powerful and affecting was that it was a passionate appeal to the best in America, delivered without rancor or malice or warning of retribution for past wrongs. King had evoked pictures of an America everyone knew and loved. His cry came in a Gospel rhetoric, in the resonating cadences that Southern and rural people, black and white, so well understood." So wrote a spectator and participant at that historic 1963 occasion - Patrick J. Buchanan.

That Dr. King's dream is light-years from realization was made sickeningly apparent by the collective knee-jerk reaction to the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial, and the subsequent rioting. Nowhere in the whole sordid mess was there the slightest inkling of the lofty and noble aspirations that he evoked. Instead, we were treated to rhetoric such as that of Tacoma [WA] Black Collective chairman and now former Safe Streets Coalition director Lyle Quasim, who declared that "The time for calm is over...It [rioting, looting, arson, murder] is a sober, sane, rational reaction." So much for safe streets.

It was in the name of "justice" that liberals, black and white, defended the orgy of anarchy that followed [the Simi Valley verdict]. While they, of course, deplored the violence, it was an understandable reaction to an "unjust" verdict. It demonstrated once again that minorities cannot get a fair shake in America's inherently racist, white-dominated society. And, naturally, the ultimate underlying causes were the economic and social policies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. The proposed solution? Massive new social spending programs to "help" the poor so that they will not burn down any more cities. Will nobody besides Rush Limbaugh condemn this thuggery?

This whole episode is another rigamortic spasm of the decaying corpse of indigenous American socialism. The outrage of liberal black leaders was not because of injustice; it was because they did not receive the pound of police flesh to which they felt entitled. The uplifting days of Dr. King are nothing but a fond memory. The Civil Rights movement, like the rest of liberalism, has degenerated into a cadre of vicious, intolerant leftist ideologues which seeks to demolish free, democratic capitalism while hiding beneath a cloak of nobility. Their minions, so prominent in the streets of Los Angeles, have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the liberal ethic, which states: society owes me a living; I am entitled to be enriched at the expense of everyone else. The minority corollary to this is that such entitlements are reparations for past injustices for which "white America" is to blame.

"Most of the...working and middle class has an altogether different sense of shame, a different sense of guilt, and a different sense of remorse than liberal America," Mr. Buchanan writes. "To us, sin is personal, not collective; it is a matter for personal confession, personal contrition, personal reconciliation with God. Our sense of shame and sense of guilt are about what we have done ourselves, our own trangressions against our own moral code. We have no sense of guilt about Wounded Knee because we weren't at Wounded Knee...Collective guilt is an affliction from which liberals suffer acutely; we do not."

Comments former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, "The runaway torrent of Great Society programs and money...have been badly mismanaged for the past twenty-five years, wasting billions of dollars while creating a rolling tide of false expectations. This has given rise to two new American classes - well-paid federal managers of poverty, health, education, and other social problems, and masses of people who have accepted dependence on government and virtually turned their lives over to the bureaucracy. The result has been a managerial, financial, and moral monstrosity.

"The nation must rediscover the simple truth that throwing money at problems doesn't solve them. Nor are the American people so rich that [they] can engage in unproductive and unresponsive giveaways - creating and even enforcing welfare addiction through a contradictory system of rules pitting husband against wife and family."

Concludes Mr. Buchanan, "One night, in 1967, watching on television the riveting footage of the riots tearing apart Newark, New Jersey, my anguished colleagues from the Nixon office were saying, `We've got to get some money in there.' My reaction was, `We'd better get some troops in there.'

"Their feeling was that the only conceivable explanation (and justification) of this collective rampage had to be some collective injustice - of which we were surely guilty, and which we had a moral obligation to redress. My feeling was that the root cause of the riots in the 1960s was the rioters in the '60s. The burning and looting of Newark no more created some moral obligation upon me to meet the looters' `demands' than did the student rampage at Columbia, the `Days of Rage' in Chicago, or the May Day hellraising in Washington, D.C....

"[The Civil Rights movement] argues, with anger and passion and conviction, that America has been an unjust country and remains a racist society; that because we are white, we have a moral obligation to hear them out, to redress their grievances, to accept their demands, to use the power of government to make us all equal in result. We do not agree. For us - despite the sins in America's past, whether slavery or segregation, mistreatment of the Irish immigrants or Native Americans - America is among God's great gifts to mankind. She is a good country - for all of us - and deserves to be defended, by all of us. Here, 28 million black people have achieved a measure of material prosperity and human freedom they have found nowhere else on Earth. While [race-baiters'] stance toward America is accusatory and condemnatory, ours is reverential. That is why the collisions have come, and will continue to come. Our disagreement is far more fundamental than race; it is about America."

Goldwater and Buchanan are, in liberal eyes, the devils incarnate of their respective generations, but they speak the truth. It is liberal Democrats who do not want real solutions to urban problems because their power and influence are in part derived from the maintenance of a permanently impoverished constituency which they can endlessly exploit toward near-absolute, lifetime rule like the absolutist kings of old.

Reconstruction of the black family, a return to Judeo-Christian values, economic opportunity and empowerment, shutting down the poverty industry - these are the steps toward the colorblind society Dr. King envisioned. But their realization depends upon cleaning the obstructionist Left out of government, and even more, our prayers and supplications. Only then will the progress and healing begin.

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Sixteen years haven't changed much, other than to render the Black Klan even more shrill. Proposals to abolish racial quotas such as the California Civil Rights Initiative enjoy 2 to 1 public support and have sparked panic on the liberal plantations. Such upheavals show how far the Reverend King's own disciples have drifted from the vision he bequeathed them.  Yet even the supposedly Bushified Supreme Court, with dismaying support from the Bush Administration, has kept Affirmative Action firmly entrenched.

What made the civil rights struggles of mid-century so galvanizing and transcendent is that they didn't just seize the moral high ground, but held it before the first slave was unloaded onto American soil. The movement didn't shrink from underscoring the biblically-derived rightness of its cause; religious fervor helped to drive it forward, to convince a nation that segregation and Jim Crow were the dark shadows of the racial serfdom that had been abolished a century before. Politically and, far more importantly, culturally, America was transformed.

And then Reverend King was assassinated. James Earl Ray's bullet slew more than he or anyone else realized; once decapitated, the civil rights leadership gradually forsook the spiritual for the temporal, and, without realizing it, traded the moral high ground for a seat at Caesar's table. Scales of cynicism now cover their eyes, and they behold the country that is most of what they originally dreamed and see phantom racism everywhere. And who stakes claim to King's throne? Louis Farrakhan. It's almost funny.

Or, now, Barack Obama.  Whose potential national viability is no laughing matter, for a number of reasons going far beyond the scope of the civil rights issue.

One can only imagine what Reverend King would say were he to be resurrected today. He'd probably be jeered as an "Uncle Tom" and relegated to dissident status by the very colleagues he once led. His death, as great a tragedy as it was, had at least one consolation: he didn't have to watch while his legacy was twisted and debased.

Or, given his leftward drift over his last few years, perhaps he'd have been right at home with the ebony grand wizards, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, that he left in his wake.  Of whom Barack Obama may well be the, well, "slickest" of all.

But as with JFK and RFK, the other two lib icons martyred during a decade of upheavals they themselves did so much to ignite, the reality of MLK has long ago been subsumed by his legend.  Cut down in his prime, he has become a secular saint, a publicly-mandated icon against whom it is impermissible to speak an anything-less-than-worshipful word.

Still, it would have been fascinating, had Dr. King lived to the present day, to see a meeting between him and Senator Obama (or Senator Clinton, for that matter).  How much more so putting both 2008 Donk presidential contenders in the Wayback Machine for an audience with the Dr. King of 1963, whose inspiring words - and the edifying spirit that underlay them - they and their party have so utterly and completely forgotten.

Rest in peace, Dr. King; and take comfort in the fact that your demise came before your legacy could be destroyed by your movement's degeneration into a vassal of the "powers and authorities" of this world.

UPDATE: Here, though nobody knew it at the time, was Dr. King's farewell address (h/t: the Admiral):