proteanme

Sometimes I am amazed that I inhabited this world at the same time as Martin Luther King, even if only for a scant 6 years. And I’m saddened the image of him commonly celebrated on MLK day is so sanitized. He’s been de-radicalized for public consumption, wrapped up in the “I have a dream” sound bite. It’s as though we want to forget what led him to speaking about having that dream – that to be an African-American in the U.S. during that time and long before was nightmarish.

Thinking of King this week I read Letter from a Birmingham Jail and I cried a bit: When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society . . .

I encourage you to read or re-read it for yourself. Note this is PDF.

I was reading Ty’s commentary on Hillary Clinton. And frankly his comments got under my skin. I’m not saying I’m a Hillary fan, but calling her Bush light is a cheap shot (or at least not very nuanced), and echoes of the whole 2000 election rhetoric about there being no difference between Bush and Gore. Thinking about this I was reminded of an interview with Tony Kushner where he said something like the lesser of two evils is really less evil.

Me, I want a democrat president, imperfect, probably compromised, needing all of us to hold his or her feet to the fire, and certainly not ideal. But I’ll take anyone from election’s crop of democrat candidates. Tony convinced me.

I don’t see how anyone can read that history and then turn their back on the system — how anyone can think it’s not important who our justices are, who the president is, who’s in Congress . . . Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this . . . The system isn’t about ideals. The country doesn’t elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great.