I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a member of the extended family of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—what it must be like to see your illustrious ancestor, one of the two or three most consequential citizens in American history, honored every year with celebratory fustian and professional basketball, only to be reinterred in marble a day later. I can’t imagine what it must be like this year, when this annual dynamic takes place in a political and social context in which Dr. King’s actual life and work is under active assault within the institutions of government. Voting rights protections stalled in the Congress. Voter suppression pushed over into de facto Jim Crow, actively abetted by a Supreme Court now captured by the forces of what was called “white backlash” while Dr. King was alive. And the very history that produced Dr. King, and to which he added indelible chapters, erased by fools and yahoos one classroom, one library, one school board at a time. They must want to throw things, the King family, all the time.
Small wonder that the family has called for a moratorium on empty self-congratulations this year. Usually, it’s just annoying. This year, a week after the country traded voting rights for mossbacked Senate courtesy, with a weightless tool from Arizona closing the deal, it’s flatly disgusting. From CBS News:
"Be engaged. Right now, it is about protecting, preserving and expanding voting rights," Martin Luther King III told CBS News. "We're calling for no celebration without legislation," his wife, Arndrea Waters King, added. "We can't celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. without having the legislation, the cornerstone of his legacy, the cornerstone of our democracy, solidified.”
"We've seen what happens when the White House puts its full weight behind an issue," Waters King said, referring to passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill last year. "What we also are saying to the president and Congress is that you delivered for bridges, now deliver for voting — whatever it takes to get that done.”
It’s not quite that easy, of course, but the people in the trenches fighting to keep Dr. King’s practical legacy alive are fed up, and it’s impossible to blame them. The institutions of American government are in the hands of the impotent, the cowardly, and the utterly mad. Senator Mitt Romney was on television over the weekend, and he explained that there had been no movement on voting rights, besides some bipartisan tinkering with the Electoral Count Act aimed at keeping future vice presidents safe from threats of hanging, because the White House hadn’t contacted him. Why in the hell should Mitt Romney, the walking embodiment of both white and privileged, have to be asked to support voting rights? His father never waited for an invitation. From The Atlantic:
In 1963, George Romney was able to forge a bond with Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King that seems virtually inconceivable across today's political divide. The year was a pivotal one for both men. In between launching his spring campaign in Birmingham and delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington at the end of August, King led a march in Detroit in June.
Romney had just become Governor of Michigan and declared the occasion "Freedom Day in Michigan." He sent an emissary to join the crowd of about 120,000 (had the march not been on a Sunday, he likely would have been there himself). The following year, in his State of the State address, the governor said that "Michigan's most urgent human rights problem is racial discrimination--in housing, public accommodations, education, administration of justice, and employment.”
In 1964, when the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater—another pestiferous pol from Arizona—and the very first, faint symptoms of the prion disease manifested themselves, George Romney refused to endorse him. More significantly, George Romney’s stance put him crossways with his Mormon religion. His son is a U.S. senator and needs to be asked, nicely, to protect voting rights against the bigots and lunatics who are presently running the Republican asylum. It is to weep. On Tuesday, as white America puts its pantomime Dr. King back in his marble coffin for another year, there will be another futile Senate debate on an omnibus voting-rights bill that a non-entity like Kyrsten Sinema likely will kill deader than Julius Caesar.
There will be angry, righteous speechifying from the Democratic senators. The Republicans will engage in what could legitimately be called Hypocritical Race Theory. I may throw something myself.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
