Posting Regularly

I sleep in a shack. It can get cold at night, so I sleep under a pile of blankets. That works pretty well, but I can get too hot. Getting too hot is what accounts for remembering a dream the other night. I don't often remember dreams and generally when I do they're no account.

This dream bothered me. I suppose the details really do matter, but the gist of it was that in my dream I extricated myself from a situation where strangers, I was sure, were going to do something really bad to another stranger. I escaped but was left wandering in unfamiliar surroundings.

Yesterday was the Martin Luther King holiday. I read his I Have a Dream once again, and dd posted King's last speech and that speech made me think more about the dream I had. King spoke:

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

He followed with a remarkable telling of the parable of The Good Samaritan. It's really worthwhile to read King's speech. King drew from the parable a lesson:

And so the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

In my dream the first question I asked was: "What will happen to me?" and skedaddled out of harms way. Sensible enough, but I was haunted by the second question and tossed and turned trying to get back to sleep after removing a layer of covers.

Why do we need to question what will happen to that other stranger anyway? Well for one reason King so clearly stated earlier in the same speech:

Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.

It's forty years now and the urgency of that existential terror is even plainer now. Naturally, I care very much about my own existence, but my end is a puny consequence in the bigger view of a our collective doom.

The markets opened today with a pretty clear sense that our financial crisis is a big deal. So there's been plenty of gloomy posts to read in the blogs about that. Stirling Newberry in a comment on his own post today at The Agonist wrote:

Right now the international consensus is that the rich own the world and the rest of us just make trouble.

It's safe to say, seeing how I sleep in a shack, that I'm one of the rest of us. With the memory of King's speech still fresh in mind, something that Bayard Rustin said came to mind with Newberry's comment. Here's Martin Mayer writing about Rustin in The Saturday Evening Post in 1964:

"I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble," Rustin says; and within these categories he specializes in imagination and invention. The man is an artist as well as an organizer—he made his living for some years as a nightclub singer, working with Josh White and Leadbelly at the old Café Society in New York, and he could make a living tomorrow as an interior decorator specializing in antiques. To Rustin, a demonstration is a piece of theater which will be a memorable experience for the spectators (which is what most people are); and it is an opportunity to find a soft spot where concerted action can make a dent in society.

I may not be as creative as Bayard Rustin was, but if I'm trouble anyway, I might as well be creative.

The prodding to post regularly came from leaving a comment at a blog new to me, Daisy's Dead Air. Daisy is fine writer and creative trouble. Trouble making is dangerous, and I'm not brave. Daisy said that I need to post regularly. Although her blog is new, I know she knows we're all in bunch of trouble; I know she knows I know too. So the "need" in this admonition is we better be creative, at least; have you a better idea?

Potash is creative. Leaving his blog posting aside for other projects he's back writing about the current political crisis in Kenya. It's not just at his blog I see him, but in comments at other blogs, encouraging writers towards creative trouble. Not destructive and incitement to destruction, rather to be creative. The writers have written at Kwani?,but the servers are down, so Potash is leaving comments for writers to write and writers are writing.

A long while ago Potash left a comment saying that as a kid he questioned Martin and Malcolm weighing in his mind their approach. The really useful discovery he told me was satyagraha the word that Mohandas Gandhi use for his philosophy of resistance. The word can be rendered in to English as grasping onto truth. Martin Luther King referred to it as "soul force." The application of Gandhi's philosophy on non-violent resistance was in part an American invention with inclusion of Christian theology. But the core of moving away from error with patience and compassion towards truth remained integral.

Opinions vary, naturally, and anything I say about the situation in Kenya as a middle-aged American needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Potash's most recent post is Why I Blame Kibaki. He echo's Stirling Newberry's observation that the powers that be see the rest of us and nothing but trouble. Like Gandhi, King and so many others well understood, Potash avers that the rest of us together cannot be ignored. Together we can create a kind of creative soul force.

Grasping towards the truth requires patience and sadly is dangerous. Not one of us wants to be battered, beaten and burned. We cannot take those dangers lightly. While violence may sometimes offer some protection to us individually, together violence will only perpetuate the human folly that's gotten us into this mess in the first place. We can't dismiss the danger; King clearly knew. Yet in calling us to develop a "dangerous unselfishness" his words are empowering. We've got soul force, bigger than any of us once we turn the question around from "What will happen to me?" to "What will happen to him?" We're in this world of trouble together and it's only grasping that soul force as creatively as we can that will get us trough.

The Quality of Love

I was trying to upload a photo in various ways I finally got a message that made sense to me: "Bloggerbot is dead." I not entirely sure, but pretty sure that means no photo today.

Several of my online friends in Africa wished me "Happy Martin Luther King Day." And there were questions about what I would do on that day. In some way or another, I wanted to say something about why we honor Dr. King. The conversations were nice because there was no sense of embarrassment about not knowing a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr. and his life like there sometimes is with Americans.

A very accomplished professor at school told me that she never was very clear about the difference between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War in school. I don't remember the context of the conversation really, but it probably had to do with how difficult it is to arrange things in order of time and significance when trying to get certain ideas across to school students. I welcomed the opportunity to make the distinction between Martin Luther the German priest and Martin Luther King, Jr. the American Civil Rights leader, but just sorting that out made me quite aware how hard it is to convey to others Martin Luther King's importance to me.

The picture I wanted to put up was a picture of a billboard reading: Impeach Earl Warren. It's an AP photo and blogging it is probably against copyright law. I found the photo at Wired accompanying an article about permissions needed to re-release Eyes on the Prize a documentary about the Civil Rights Movement created by Henry Hampton. Copyright is a complicated issue, but fair use is enormously important to protect our ability to meaningfully discuss the nature of the world around us. So that Wired article is an interesting read and a useful antidote for the often heavy-handed moral tones used by opposite sides of the debates over copyright. Also you can see the photo of the billboard there.

It would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 78th birthday this year. 1968 seems a long time ago, but not so long that I don't remember. And I remember Impeach Earl Warren signs too. It's commonplace for Republicans to shut people like me up by referring to our "pathological and irrational hatred of George Bush." I'm loathe to imagine myself as full of hatred, but I'll admit not liking President Bush's policies very much, and disliking so many of the people who make up his administration and many who constitute his biggest supporters. My dislike grows out of memory; memories like those Impeach Earl Warren signs.

A Virginia lawmaker, member of the House of Delegates, Frank Hargrove in a debate on the House floor the day after this year's King holiday said that African-Americans should "get over it" about slavery and then pondered:

"Are we going to force Jews to apologize for killing Christ?"

That really hit a nerve. I've mentioned that our family moved to Greenville, South Carolina the very summer that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. I started forth-grade that year. As a shy and vulnerable kiddo my exposure to virulently racist talk made me quite fearful. So much hate, then surely they must hate me too. Del. Frank Hargrove's words have an all too familiar ring.

When the first President Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush first sought elected office he used the support of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 of his opponent senator Ralph Yarbourgh as his main line of attack and plea for votes. According to this biography of the first president Bush, he called senator Yarbourgh an "extremist" and a "left wing demagogue." In fairness, the Wikipedia article on George H. W. Bush reports that Yarbourgh called Bush a "tool of the eastern kingmakers" and a right-wing extremist. All that may seem like ancient history now, and indeed it seems so improbable to imagine a liberal senator from Texas today.

Still, it amazes me to look back over the intervening years to see how many in public life have scaled to power using vicious racism on their ascent. Even more bizarre is the polite fiction we here in America we seem to enforce that racism never played such a vital role. Such that Vice President George Bush could vouch for president Reagan, "He hasn't a racist bone in his body" and somehow we were suppose to believe it?

When I was a kid listening to pop radio in the car was a great joy. But when Life Line would come on the air the color would drain out of me and I still remember feeling such dread. Life Line was a radio show by H. L. Hunt, a Texas oil billionaire. Among Hunt's notions was a cashocracy where the more money you had the more votes you'd get.

Obviously the road to present day conservatism headed by George Bush and Dick Cheney has it's twists and turns. Rick Pearlstein's book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus is widely lauded. I haven't read it, but I can recommend Robert Sherrill's piece in The Nation a while back Conservatism as Phoenix. A consistent thread in all of this has been to limit public participation in electoral politics and other instruments for democracy, consistently race has been exploited by the conservative movement to do just that.

All manner of powerful corporate leaders have actively participated in the conservative ascendency. Many of them are fairly well-known to the public, for example Howard Ahmanson, Jr. and Richard Mellon Scaife. Still, its interesting how we here in America are quite comfortable saying about Bush and Cheney "our government is in the hands of the oilmen" without really having names to place with those oilmen.

The tight veil of secrecy surrounding Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 has always struck me as a bit over the top. When the energy chiefs were summoned to testify in Congress in 2005, I marveled at their inability to recollect. I suppose I'm just not cynical enough to think it's okay to lie if you're rich and powerful enough; that is, my presumption is that while clearly not admitting to anything they didn't absolutely have to, I'm hard pressed to think they lied outright. Their testimony about these meetings made me realize they really were especially secret. Nonetheless, given my lingering resentments from childhood, I feel quite certain that members of the Koch family and members of the Hunt family were able to make their views known.

The "who" in the rise of the present configuration of conservatism in the USA matters because of the bodies buried, and not just in a figurative sense of the expression. The great JohnHouston playing the character Noah Cross in the film Chinatown quipped:

'Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, public buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough

Martin Luther King was gunned down not yet forty, yet somehow we mark the anniversary of his birth for the ages, or until, our collective memory fails us. The kind of "respectability" accorded politicians, public building, and whores, or for that matter the conservative ideology presided over by President Bush today, won't suffice for Martin Luther King, Jr., if we are to truly remember his accomplishment. He was hardly "respectable" and he was hated by those whose power and wealth the kind of respectability Noah Cross knew matters the most.

On the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday I read King's April 4, 1967 speech at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence. I had that page open as I talked about Martin Luther King, Jr. with a Ugandan friend. King spoke about love not "as a weak and cowardly force," but and "absolute necessity" for our survival.

The radical love, love to the root, that Dr. King showed was so essential is a quality contested. That's why it's so important to impute hatred, "pathological and irrational" hatred upon those who protest the President Bush's policies. So I've admitted my long resentments of this current political movement, ideology and hubris. I'm angry too. Dr. King told us that we must act, it is absolutely imperative we do, and that we must act with love. He even said it was a "conundrum."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

So picture, if you will, my attempts to tell my Ugandan friend why Martin Luther King Day matters to me. I'm reading the speech as I talk. Rather than point my fingers outward, or to try to draw distinctions between me and other Americans; I heard Dr. Kings word directed to me.

"John, John. What will you choose? What will you do?

My answer is in a feeble voice, but such as that may be: I will create something good.

I am angry, I am very sad. I am a bit of a coward. To the extent that I can create something good, that creation will not emerge from hatred, rather emerge with love. So love is what I want to know about, love is what I aim to embody. so my Ugandan friend says to me, "He was a great man." True enough, but he called me to be great, and that's what makes my knees knock.

Everyone can be great.