Not Too Soon To Tell

“I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

“It is imperative to abandon the unconditional non-violent concept expounded by Dr. King and adopt the position that for every Martin Luther King who falls, 10 white racists will go down with him. There is no other way -- America understands no other language,” United Black Front chairman Lincoln Lynch --1968.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It's the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d'oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons . . . The butler will bring them their drinks . . . Deny it if you wish to, but such are the pensées métaphysiques that rush through one's head on these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York. For example, does that huge Black Panther there in the hallway, the one shaking hands with Felicia Bernstein herself, the one with the black leather coat and the dark glasses and the absolutely unbelievable Afro, Fuzzy-Wuzzy-scale, in fact—is he, a Black Panther, going on to pick up a Roquefort cheese morsel rolled in crushed nuts from off the tray, from a maid in uniform, and just pop it down the gullet without so much as missing a beat of Felicia's perfect Mary Astor voice . . .” -- Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic


Following Martin Luther King’s murder in Memphis in April 1968, and fueled by the riots that followed across the nation -- in Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C. -- many gave up on King’s “constructive non-violence” in favor of a different tack. For example, in 1970, composer, maestro, and painfully-relevant leftist Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, threw a fundraising party, what we would now call a “meet-and-greet,” at their Park Avenue duplex apartment for the radical Black Panthers. Attendees were reminded that donations to the Panthers were non-deductible; generous donations with no tax advantage were a measure of the donor’s sincerity and dedication to the cause. It was a sign of those raucous times.

This division within a division highlighted a key crossroads in American civil rights history. The rednecks had to retreat or entrench. Those within the civil rights movement had to determine whether they would stay King’s course, or choose the violent route. Those who had previously remained aloof from the civil rights conflicts, or had considered it an intramural conflict between leftist rabble-rousers and southern rednecks, saw in the widening, violent conflict a need to enter the debate, at least in political terms.

When asked by Richard Nixon in the 1970’s to describe the impact of the French Revolution, Red Chinese Premier Chou En Lai replied, “It is too soon to tell.” But perhaps it is not too soon to tell the effect of Martin Luther King on the American civil rights landscape.

As it turned out, the racist rednecks turned tail, like the cowards they always were, and today are viewed as almost quaint and pathetic caricatured cranks, relegated to afternoon appearances on Jerry Springer, where they react with shocked, semi-toothless silence when confronted with a daughter who is dating a young black man -- an unsanitized, dirty-fingernailed version of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

The Panthers chose fear and the threat of violence, and tried to settle scores and give vent to their hatred and anger. Some died trying, for a while, blowing up mailboxes or robbing banks or staging courthouse hostage scenes with sawed-off shotguns duct-taped to judges' necks. Others wrote Soul on Ice screeds or rotten poetry. Some now give speeches for $15,000 a crack or are in political office or may even be settling into tenured positions, or have turned to running corporate shakedowns, to the extent they can get the time of day from Sixties-stunned reporters.

The Radical Chic, of course, we always have with us.

Those who picked up the flag from King -- the Ralph David Abernathys, the Hosea Williamses -- are mostly gone now, or old and enfeebled. To their eternal credit, they set aside disappointment and anger, and chose a principled continuation of King’s most basic philosophy, even in the face of slurs from former allies and proteges.

And the bulk of the American public -- black and white -- put aside personal disputes over their own hardships and affronts, and paused in their debates over King’s personal flaws -- his plagiarism, his marital infidelities, his association with radicals and communists -- long enough to debate in the mainstream of the political process. They made common cause, in a broad sense, in order to have an equitable peace. They have pursued, over the intervening 35 years, a generally peaceful course. It has been, and is today, by no means perfect, but we, as a society, have broadly common goals, and have a degree of racial harmony that would have seemed very unlikely in 1968. By any reasonable, objective standard, it is admirable progress less than four decades after colored-only water fountains.

In the end, these last two groups -- not the bigots, or the radicals, or the radical chic -- most clearly and intuitively understood King’s importance and greatness, and the monumental message behind his faith in the American system. What they accepted, and based their consensus on, was what King was saying all along: that the ideals and the inherent, transcendent moral strength and goodness of the American system is powerful enough to join disparate political elements of goodwill in order to acknowlege the essential value of each human life and to dwarf and render impotent powerful forces of self-interest, raw ideology, and hate.

That, in black and white, is why King really matters.

A Broken Record

Honor isn't about making the right choices.
It's about dealing with the consequences.
-- Midori Koto

Well, here I go again.

It was recently revealed that conservative columnist and television show host Armstrong Williams took a $240,000 fee from the Department of Education to run an ad on his program supporting President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program and to write a syndicated column supporting the initiative.

In an open letter published Monday, Williams apologized for his conduct and promised it would never happen again. He pointed out, however, that he had long supported such school choice initiatives and that his support for this program was co-incidental with the fee paid to him by the Education Department.

He also indicated that he accepts “full responsibility” for his lack of good judgment, and that he is “paying the price” for his actions. “Tribune Media,” he writes, “has cancelled my column.”

Of course, having a well-deserved beating forced upon you is not the same as taking “full responsibility.” But Williams at least is honest enough to recognize that his actions breached whatever shards are still standing in the increasingly oxymoronic “wall of journalistic ethics.” Williams sees that his behavior compromises his credibility as a journalist.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out again recently that, on the other side of the political street, two prominent liberal bloggers, Daily Kos and MyDD, took monthly payments from Howard Dean’s campaign in the months prior to Dean’s embarrassingly puerile self-immolation in the Democratic primaries. This fact -- the payoffs, not the self-immolation -- has been substantially overlooked in the media.

In any event, these incidents again prove two things: (1) the improper behavior exists on both sides of the spectrum; and (2) neither side is willing to be truly accountable.

Williams will apologize and he won’t cry "unfair treatment," but apparently will not do much else. He certainly won’t return a quarter of a million dollars. He may be sorry about all this, but he’s not that sorry.

The two Dean bloggers are even worse than Williams. They, like many liberals today, believe they are beyond good and evil -- their cause is just -- and they need not even acknowledge that they did anything that might have compromised journalistic standards.

They argue, instead, that their hands are clean because they disclosed their financial ties to the Dean campaign to their readers. In other words, everybody knew they were bought and paid for. You know, a sort of red light in the cyber-window.

They also try to distinguish their own hired gun status from Williams’ by arguing that the money they took was not taxpayer money, as was the money paid to Williams. That, of course, is a stinking red herring, a distinction without a difference, inasmuch as the key issue here is journalistic integrity and not the appropriate use of tax dollars.

No one -- in this case, neither Armstrong nor the Dean blog mouthpieces -- is willing to do much to illustrate that they are serious about taking responsibility for improper behavior. Williams will only apologize; the Dean folks won’t even do that. This unwillingness to take the consequences is probably predictable in an age much more familiar with Hari Krishen than hari-kari.

The Eye Winks

After reading this space last Friday, CBS Chief Leslie Moonves today broke silence and “took responsibility” for CBS’ discredited story on President Bush’s national guard service by firing three CBS news executives and the story’s producer. Those directly responsible for the airing of the piece -- CBS anchorman Dan Rather, CBS News President Andrew Heyward, and Moonves himself -- all remain in their respective positions without official censure or consequence.

Some questioned Moonves’ failure to hold Rather, Heyward or himself accountable for the false national guard story and particuarly for his unwillingness to acknowledge the longstanding anti-Republican political motivations of CBS, Rather and others in breaking the unsubstantiated story. But Moonves denied such bias and sloughed off the criticism, saying, “What kind of boss would I be if I started to blame other people for every tiny little thing that goes wrong? Who do I look like, Joe McCarthy? Warren G. Harding? Herbert Hoover? William Casey? Lee Atwater? Newt Gingrich? Richard Nixon?”

But Moonves did acknowledge that the entire controversy “raises questions about accountability at CBS News - questions that will have to be addressed both by Andrew Heyward and me. We intend to do so.”

Related to this, sources inside CBS indicate that Heyward and Moonves plan to terminate at least two cafeteria workers and a night watchman in a second phase of firings to follow the independent investigation. “Almost no one is completely innocent,” Moonves said, as he left CBS offices today on his way to his bi-monthly retreat at his Bahamian winter home. “If people think that they’ll be able to hide behind their aprons or brooms, for example, to avoid responsibility for this, they’ve got another think coming.”

News of the firings came as reports surfaced that Rather had been held off Monday’s CBS Evening News broadcast as punishment for his role in the Bush attack piece. CBS denied the story, saying that Rather's absence was attributable to the fact that Rather was too exhausted from his trip to Indonesia to handle the broadcast. Rather had been in Asia reporting on the recent deadly tsunami, during which time, internal CBS news leaks reveal, he received documents from refugees indicating that President Bush, while AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, took part in underwater nuclear tests in the Pacific basin region that caused microscopic cracks in the earth's geological plates and led to the recent tsunami.

Meanwhile, following the release of the independent commission's report and the harsh criticism focused on his news division’s ties to the Kerry campaign , Moonves appears aware of the treacherous line he must walk to prove the extent of his dissatisfaction: he must fire as many underlings as possible, without actually ridding the company of those most responsible for creating and perpetuating the culture that engendered the irresponsible, politically-motivated attacks that led to the crisis in the first place.

“Let me repeat,” said Moonves, as he climbed into the back seat of his company limousine: “Nobody is safe here.”

I Feel So Responsible

The Senate Judiciary Committee took up yesterday the nomination of White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales as U.S. Attorney General. With this action, the Judiciary Committee again gives the American public an opportunity to see craven grandstanding and hypocrisy at its worst.

In one such example, Committee Democrats apparently even considered resurrecting at the committee hearing the photos and other images related to the torture of Abu Ghraib.

Aside from the genuine issues raised by these claims of torture (i.e., e.g., whether the torture was as widespread as claimed, whether certain actions are really even torture, whether Gonzales really tried to shield such actions from being disclosed) and the Democrats' willingness to make political gains based on empty but inflammatory posturing, the issue of the torture of terrorists and terrorist suspects brings before us again the concept of “responsibility,” more specifically, what it means to “take responsibility” for something, whether in the personal or political context.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield indicated last spring that he took responsibility for the torture. Does he really? Sure, his blame taking might have resulted in a loss of personal stature and perhaps some political fallout for the president, but what did it cost him? What actions accompanied his “taking responsibility”?

The Democrats, of course, jumped all over Rumsfield's essentially painless mea culpa as a hollow gesture. But it in no way absolves them and their consort of leftwing phonies (the ACLU, Move-On.org, e.g.) for their own actions or inactions when their side has been faced with similar allegations.

For example, those screaming about the hollowness of Rumsfield’s actions in “accepting blame” related to Abu Ghraib were completely silent when Janet Reno made the decision to incinerate the Cranks of Waco. Certainly she bore much more direct responsibility for the deaths of the Texas holdouts than Rumsfield does for the torture of POWs in Iraq. And while she shed tears, allegedly, over the literal immolation of the Branch Davidians, she certainly took no action that imposed any cost on herself or her Department, leading to the following clerihew:

Waco Janet Reno
Began the Great Inferno
Took responsibility
But stayed with us eternally

Perhaps there is no real solution to this tendency to such empty and painfree sorrow. But it is not surprising that most sensible people smell hypocrisy when politicians and officials claim to “take responsibility” without paying any real price. I, for one, would take such blame-grasping more seriously if it were accompanied by some of the political hari-kari we see on occasion in Japan’s political arena.

Until politicians get the stomach for such meaningful political shiv diving, maybe the process as a whole, and the American public’s cynicism quotient in particular, would benefit from a little less empty rhetoric. Officials would earn more respect if they would stop using phrases like "taking responsibility" unless they actually mean it -- and are prepared to act as if they do.