Positively Puzzled

And we think of Dr. King—Dr. [Cornel] West, in this special, Amy, uses this phrase that only West could use it—I call it, it’s Westian to the core—but he talks, Amy, about the Santa Clausification, the Santa Clausification of Dr. King. I’ll let him unpack that Wednesday night. What he means by that, though, is that we have tamed and defanged and manicured and deodorized Dr. King so much that we’ve reduced him to a dreamer, in many ways the same things—the same thing that’s being done to Mandela now in South Africa, as if these men, Mandela and King, were not freedom fighters who were willing to pay a cost—indeed, in Martin’s case, the price of death, for standing in his truth. But to have that kind of pushback for being a truth teller and then to tell to your daddy, your co-pastor, that on Sunday morning you’re going to preach a sermon, with all the hell you’re catching still, entitled “Why America May”—emphasize the word “may”—“Go to Hell,” speaks again to how powerful Martin’s work a...

President Barack Obama delivered this speech in Springfield, Illinois, February 12, 2009. If you missed it, I recommend you check it out. Skillful, eloquent, moving, unifying. Obama at his best. Here is the video link courtesy MSNBC and Keith Olbermann. Here is an excerpt: I cannot know if I am right. But I suspect that his devotion to union came not from a belief that government always had the answer. It came not from a failure to understand our individual rights and responsibilities. This rugged rail-splitter, born in a log cabin of pioneer stock; who cleared a path through the woods as a boy; who lost a mother and a sister to the rigors of frontier life; who taught himself all he knew – this man, our first Republican President, knew, better than anyone, what it meant to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. He understood that strain of personal liberty and self-reliance at the heart of the American experience. But he also understood something else. He recognized that while each o...