The Hideous MLK Memorial

By Alan Caruba

I was a young working journalist during the era of the Civil Rights movement and one evening I was covering a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the campus of Drew University in Madison, NJ. I was accompanied by Vivian Braxton, a civil rights activist who said, “Let’s go backstage and meet him” when the speech was finished.

Backstage, Dr. King stood alone while others stood at a respectful distance, afraid to approach him, so overwhelmed by the power of his words and personality. Vivian, however, headed straight for him with myself in tow. My first reaction was that he was shorter than I had thought and my second was a smile that was an embrace.

I introduced myself as a freelance journalist who was there to cover the speech for a local black newspaper and Dr. King found that very amusing. We chatted briefly and I tucked away a great moment in my memory, never anticipating that he would fall victim to an assassin’s bullet or that, years later, a Washington, D.C. memorial would be created in his honor.

Opened to the public on August 19, a statue of Dr. King stands thirty feet tall and in an irony that boggles the mind, was carved in China, the work of a Chinese sculptor, working in an Orwellian, totalitarian society.

It is also one of the most hideous works of “art” imaginable for anyone who recalls the times and the character of a man who said, “I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I am interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.”

The statue depicts a scowling figure, his face fixed with the look of every despot whose statue is intended to instill fear or awe in those who gaze upon it. His arms are crossed over his chest as if protecting himself or preparing to pass a harsh judgment.

It is hideous because it completely obliterates the gentleness of Dr. King, the heart that strove against injustice. The awfulness of the statue reminded me of another of his quotes, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

I have no idea what the memorial committee had in mind when it sanctioned this statue, but I have little doubt that Dr. King would have been mortified by it. He was a man who, on that long ago evening on the Drew University campus, greeted Vivian and me with a big smile in the midst of a great struggle to secure the rights of blacks in America.

In these times in which Arabs in Syria, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia have put their lives on the line to overthrow their tyrants, Dr. King had anticipated that human aspiration saying, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

So, now, on a four-acre site on the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, a huge intimidating statue stands where a life-size statue would have permitted visitors to marvel at the power of love over hate, morality over oppression, and the struggle for justice that is the birthright of all men and women.

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking,” warned Dr. King. “There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

Dr, King’s life was devoted to making all Americans think about the kind of society, the kind of nation, in which they wanted to live.

“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”

The memorial will be dedicated on August 28 by President Barack Obama, a man who was elected more for the color of his skin, than the content of his character. The date marks the 48th anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, “I have a dream”, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Dr. King surely would be appalled that young blacks would be rioting in the streets of American cities, looting, attacking people, nearly a half century after the achievement of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts for which he gave his life.

I think he would have been appalled by a thirty-foot-tall statue that resembles those of tyrants like Mao tse Tung, Stalin, or Saddam Hussein.

For my part, the King Memorial completely misses his message of humility combined with tenacity, of spirituality linked to non-violent struggle, of faith that great wrongs can be put right by people of faith and of courage.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Black America's Gains and Losses

By Alan Caruba

You know that Barack Obama is in trouble when even the Congressional Black Caucus begins to criticize him.

Maxine Waters (D-CA) recently told a gathering that the CBC is “frustrated” with regard to unemployment, a problem that has hit blacks harder than whites. The only thing holding the CBC back from being more vocal, said Waters, was its fear they will lose the support of the black community.

It says something about Congress and politics in America that the only race-based caucus is the Black Caucus.

Like many Americans, I watched the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s unfold with the feeling that, a century passed the Civil War, it was long overdue.

The movement had a leader of remarkable talent, Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr., plus others from the ministry and labor movement. It was a time of turmoil that ended with the assassinations of Dr. King, President John F. Kennedy, and of Bobby Kennedy.

Others died too in the struggle but they have become relegated to being minor historic players. When the dust settled President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The changes in American life since then have been extraordinary. Afro-Americans were assured their voting rights, equal housing, and other opportunities that had been routinely denied.

Whites accommodated themselves to the changes, having already accepted the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that "separate but equal" schools, a widespread practice in the southern and border States, were unconstitutional.

While many blacks have achieved middle class status and risen to levels of real achievement, the vast bulk has not. These comments acknowledge individual success stories, but address the larger black community.

As a general observation, blacks in America have chosen to ignore the gains in legally protected civil rights equality.

By most indices the black community has not changed. In U.S. cities they remain ghettoized, as much from choice, as external circumstances. Instead of moving forward, integrating and assimilating into the larger white population; blacks have emotionally remained apart, nurturing a sense of being victims, holding onto an animus for whites.

Social failures are so rampant among blacks that it is appalling to contemplate how many are born into single-parent families, often raised a mother or grandparents because the men are absent. They drop out of school. Unskilled and often illiterate, employment opportunities are limited. Blacks and crime have become synonymous to the point where they fill the nation’s prisons far in excess of whites and Hispanics. Drug use ravages black communities.

To say whites are disappointed is an understatement. It is a source of resentment that is rarely expressed aloud to avoid being deemed a racist or engaging in hate speech.

So how does one explain the phenomenon of the first black President?

Observers attribute it to a large turnout of younger voters, born well after the 1960s, to union members, many of whom were government workers, to 98% of the Afro-American community, and, of course, Democrats in general. Many white voters who wanted to affirm their belief that equality was an American value pulled the lever for Obama.

Barack Obama has exacerbated white disappointment and it is likely that many blacks, too, are experiencing buyer’s lament.

Among whites, there’s a feeling that scores are being settled with incidents like Obama’s condemnation of a white Boston police officer, the appointment of Eric Holder as the first black Attorney General, and of others like Van Jones as Obama's “Green Jobs Czar.” Jones is a self-identified Communist and a radical environmentalist who resigned and is now safe in the bosom of progressive organizations.

The latest affront to a predominantly white population is an executive order, issued on August 18, titled “Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workplace.” In other words, whites need not apply.

When whites became aware of Obama’s preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying “God damn America”, they had to actively ignore the fact that Obama had spent many years in his church, that Wright had married him and Michelle, and baptized their children. Theirs was no casual relationship, nor were others from any earlier point in his life such as the Communist Party member, Frank Marshall Davis, who advised young Barack that his white grandmother had a right to be scared of blacks because “She understands that black people have a reason to hate.”

It will be a long time before the majority white and Hispanic populations forget or forgive the legacy of Barack Obama.

Obama has wreaked economic havoc on America since taking office and this time people—black, white, Asian and Hispanic—have taken notice.

© Alan Caruba 2011

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Flash Mobs: Being Young, Black, and Male in America Today

By Alan Caruba

Those who follow my commentaries know that I rarely discuss race in America. I find it an unhappy topic at best and, from my readings in U.S. history, I feel safe in saying there was never a good time to be Black in America.

Slavery before, during and after the American Revolution was a stain on the nation and, though some were slave owners, the Founding Fathers knew it. To get the new Constitution ratified among the thirteen States, they had to trim their sails to the point where Article One, Section Two refers to “those bound to service” and, for the purpose of taxation of “free persons”, the slaves were counted as “three fifths of all other Persons.” Ugh.

It would, of course, take a Civil War to end slavery, though Lincoln’s preferred solution was to put the slaves on a ship back to Africa. That was not likely because by 1861 when the war began, there were 3,954,000 slaves, the majority of whom lived on plantations where, from Virginia to Texas, they often outnumbered whites by 13 to 1.

My awareness of Blacks was limited in my youth, growing up in an upscale New Jersey suburban community where they were quite scarce. You could count the number of Black students in my high school on one hand. When I was drafted in the Army most of my service in the early 1960s was on a base in the Deep South. It gave me a close up view of segregation. When I was discharged, I became a journalist on a weekly serving a small New Jersey city neighboring Newark. I was there when the city’s first Black mayor was elected.

It was the time of the Civil Rights movement, filled with marches and tumult. I met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1967 Newark erupted in rioting, the result of poverty, and of sense of being powerless and disenfranchised. The Italians who had run the city gave way to Black politicians and, five decades later, they still are in charge, but the social problems remain.

If anyone would have told me that America would elect a Black President, I would have said that was impossible. I was wrong and so were the many Blacks who rejoiced in the election of Barack Obama, confident that he would take the lead, representing them, paying particular attention to their issues. Obama proved to be more concerned with Islam.

I got to thinking about that when several commentators, referring to how he would be remembered, said that Obama would no longer be remembered as the first Black President, but rather as the first Downgrade President. When he addressed the nation on August 8, his cool detachment seemed alarmingly at odds with the tumult on Wall Street and around the world that had been triggered by Standard & Poor’s decision.

How do Blacks perceive Obama, I wondered.

A friend, Milton, a retired Black corporate executive, attorney, business owner who edits and writes for BlackQuillandInk.com, a website for Black conservatives, responded to my question noting that Black support for Obama’s candidacy was about 98%, but has slipped since to around 86%.

It was his view that the Blacks “have been poisoned to dislike non-Blacks” and to see themselves “as victims.” I understand the victim part, but was surprised by his observation regarding the animosity, if only because White America has gone to fairly extraordinary lengths to redress the ills of the past.

As America’s most famous minority, Blacks are now outnumbered by Hispanics and are being by-passed by virtually all other minority in America in terms of achievement and upward mobility. The chains may have been removed, but, as the syndicated columnist. Walter E. Williams, noted in July 2010, “The pathology seen among a large segment of the Black population is not likely to change because it is not seen for what it is. It has little to do with slavery, poverty and racial discrimination.”

“Today’s black illegitimacy rate is about 70%,” said Williams. “When I was a youngster, during the 1940s, illegitimacy was around 15%...Today, only 35% of black children are raised in two-parent households.”

And it gets worse. In an August 2010 Washington Post article by columnist George Will, he wrote that “By the early 2000s, more than a third of all young black non-college men were under the supervision of the corrections system. More than 60% of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s go to prison. Mass incarceration blights the prospects of black women.”

In recent weeks, from the Wisconsin State Fair to Philadelphia, from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, reports of flash mobs of young Blacks attacking whites are stirring racial fears. The most dangerous factor in Black cities and neighborhoods are the hordes of young males, raised by one parent, dropouts from school, no skills, no jobs, no prospects, and lots of angry energy that is too often diverted into crime and violence.

Barack Obama’s economic policies have failed the nation, but they have been especially adverse on Blacks. Black unemployment and foreclosures, for example, have skyrocketed under Obama and remain disproportionately high as compared to other communities. In short, Obama has done nothing for Blacks in America either on the macro and micro level to improve their opportunities or attitudes.

He has nothing in common with them; a half-white Columbia University graduate and Harvard educated lawyer, former instructor at the University of Chicago, married to a Princeton and Harvard graduate, herself an attorney. They have two girls that go to private school and their inner circle of friends, Black and white, are dedicated Marxists.

The editor of BlackQuillandInk.com says. “The Black community refuses to admit how wrong they were in voting for Obama.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Good Old Days

By Alan Caruba

It started with a haircut in the morning. I sat in a barber chair I had sat in initially around the age of five. In those days, the 1940s, four Italian gentlemen cut hair and it cost 25 cents for a kid and $1.25 for an adult. Same shop, but my haircut cost $16.00 not counting the tip. Except for the owner, some lovely gals cut hair there these days.

When my parents moved to an upscale suburb of Newark, New Jersey in 1942, they paid $11,000 for a three-bedroom home with a stand-alone garage. I sold it for many multiples of that and it was essentially the same house with a few improvements. I sold because, in 2000, the town had reevaluated the property and literally doubled the taxes. Ten years later, a second reevaluation was deemed worthy of an article in The Wall Street Journal.

My parents put two sons through college on the earnings of my Father, a CPA with vivid memories of the Great Depression. He was a liberal, a Democrat, and advocate of the United Nations. Starting in the 1950s Mother taught gourmet cooking in the adult schools that sprang up after the war, earning enough to purchase the family cars and otherwise contribute to the budget. They remained married for over sixty years. He never learned to drive.

After the haircut, I topped out the gas, a little under a half-tank, and paid $21 for a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, the latter mandated by the government and heavily subsidized. The cost included state and federal taxes. I can recall when gasoline in the 60s and 70s was around 60 cents a gallon. I can also remember long lines at the pumps in both 1967 and 1973-74 when the Saudis, angered by the U.S. support for Israel, implemented oil embargoes.

A visit to the supermarket these days is a carnival of sticker-shock. The price of food has been rising thanks in part to the increase of the cost of energy to produce it and the diversion of corn to produce ethanol that reduces the mileage you get from the gas you purchase and likely harms your car’s engine. Corn is a major feedstock so the cost of a steak is rising too.

During WWII, the milk was delivered to my home by a horse-drawn wagon. Before refrigeration became widely available, we kept it in an ice box that required the delivery of large blocks of ice. There was radio, but no television. If you wanted air conditioning, you had to go to the local movie theatre. Price of admission, plus popcorn cost a kid about twenty-five cents. I saw my first television program in the 1950s. Within no time, everyone had a TV.

When I attended elementary, middle and high school there was zero talk about illegal drug use because there was none and I cannot recall any mention, let alone the teaching of heterosexual or homosexual sex of any kind. The school day began with a pledge of allegiance and a prayer. We did not have a politically correct curriculum or have to listen to fantasies about the planet heating up.

We did not recycle because everyone knew it was just the garbage.

It was the rare child who came from a family that had experienced divorce or who was being raised by a single parent. There was no segregation in the north, but my high school was almost completely white. That ratio has been reversed.

The Draft ensured that every able-bodied young man would serve a minimum of two years in the military learning the arts of warfare. We had all been born early enough to have passed through World War Two as very young children. This was followed by a conflict in Korea in the 1950s when we were teens. By the time the Vietnam War came along it was a new generation of conscripts fighting it. After that, the military became entirely staffed by volunteers.

The biggest scandal of the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower involved a vicuna coat his chief of staff had accepted as a gift. It would take Watergate to stain and end Nixon’s presidency, an ugly sexual dalliance to undermine Clinton’s, and a parade of congressional felons that constitutes a non-stop perp-walk these days.

Since I was a lad the government added a Department of Education, a Department of Energy, a Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others I cannot recall. Regulation of everything has exploded. Borrowing and spending has exploded. If anybody had told me back then that the government was broke, I would have thought he was crazy, but the debt ceiling kept being raised until there is, in effect, no ceiling.

In my memory, American society began to shift from traditional values and patterns in the 1960s. The century-long failure of the South to rid itself of the aftermath of the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, eventually found expression among blacks, but it also caused riots in U.S. cities.

In time, gays in New York would rebel against police harassment and a whole new movement would be sparked, culminating in the demand for same-sex marriage, along with an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military. The lives of women changed with the advent of “the Pill” and demands for more equality.

Sex, drugs and rock’n roll became the order of the day. We have gone from Frank Sinatra to Lady Ga-Ga. Later generations than mine share a more chaotic vision of society and a far more costly one in which to live.

It has taken the emergence of the Tea Party movement to capture and focus the independent voters who have seesawed back and forth between the comfort of Eisenhower's conservatism to the free-spending of Lyndon Johnson, the conservative values of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama’s effort to force European-style socialism on America.

In my life, we have gone from the Great Depression to an era in which whole nations have discovered that a highly centralized government inherently cannot function without bankrupting its citizens whether they live in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Portugal, Greece or in the former Soviet Union.

As international organizations have flourished, from the United Nations to the European Union, the more unwieldy, corrupt, and grasping they have become.

We live now in the Age of Terrorism. No one in authority seems to want to acknowledge the source, the threat to civilization called Islam. Few Americans knew anything about Islam before 9/11. Now you can’t get on a plane without a full body scan and search.

If your grandpa or grandma say they miss the “good old days”, keep in mind that in many fundamental ways, they really were good.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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