Republican invocations of Martin Luther King yesterday, though infuriating and insulting, were not at all surprising.
Surprise should have ended when Republicans let slide the ridicule of the handicapped reporter–or, at the latest, the “very fine people” in Charlottesville. What is truly surprising no matter how often we see it is how they keep a straight face. As a teacher for 25 years and a Renaissance faire performer for nearly as long, I am well-schooled in that most practical, deceptive art. But Republicans’ ability to do it while attaching an icon of Civil Rights to the monstrosity of voter suppression makes me perversely envious of an ability to do something I’d never want to do.
That’s just one of my recurring thoughts in the two weeks that have passed since the Republican Party aided and abetted The Loser’s most dramatic attempt to turn America into the Fourth Reich. During this time, I have been tuning into news as soon as I awake to know what happens ASAP.
Quite a departure for me. For years I have kept both television and radio off until after dinner, after dark, and even then a good football or baseball game is more to my liking–not to mention more suited to the needs of someone who spends much of the day on a laptop trying to make sense of current events, their historical roots, and what they might mean for the future.
This recent dependence on television ended yesterday even though the Republican Horror Picture Show warps on.
It ended when, yet again, I heard the two owners of a local furniture company screaming: “Martin Luther King Day Blowout Sale!!!” Perhaps I’ve tolerated it that long as just another 30-seconds of commercial noise that we all “tune out”–or think we tune out–but the holiday is intended to observe King’s legacy. The word “blowout” doesn’t just mock a legacy of peace, justice, and reconciliation, it reminds us of the act that ended it.
What we need are reminders of what necessitated it. As he once declared, “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
We think of the two-month Republican effort to overturn the vote as targeting four states, but it was more specifically aimed at four cities. Many of the 121 Republican representatives and seven Republican senators who cast votes for the cause of insurrection had already expressed contempt for “urban” populations during the impeachment hearings last year. Ironically, it is the Electoral College they were trying to suppress on Jan. 6 that they have counted on to protect them from, as many of them put it, “urban coastal liberals.” And who lives in cities?
It served them well in 2000; in 2020 not at all.
But the irony doesn’t end there. To disrupt a constitutional process intended, according to the Federalist Papers, to protect America from mob rule, they themselves formed a mob. And for those of us for whom no amount of irony is ever enough, they did it under Confederate flags. And who was enslaved under that banner?
And we wonder why African-Americans might not have wanted to join in a chorus of “what so proudly we hail” in recent years? Or why many of them can’t help but say “we told you so” in recent weeks?
January 6 was a last-gasp effort to deny the Black vote. Martin Luther King Day recognizes the struggle to gain that vote.
Let it be just one of 365 days this and every year when we tell advertisers that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are not cartoon car salesmen. That the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore are not props for insurance companies. That, per the United States Flag Code, the Stars and Stripes should never be used for commercial purposes. And that Martin Luther King did not make the bed on which the “My Pillow guy” can lay out a proposal for martial law.
But let it also be a day we realize that ceremonial straight faces do not cover twisted voting records. That the “thoughts and prayers” lip-service to Civil Rights no longer masks the wink-and-nod politics of civil wrongs.
And let us never again “become silent about things that matter.” Let honesty ring. Let us ring.
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Mouth of the River 