Arizona Murders: Obama’s Chance for Martin Luther King Moment
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10 January 2011. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com.
Ever since the regime of Ronald Reagan, American political discourse has been in steep decline.
His allegedly “sunny” disposition aside, Reagan was a master of rhetorical invective and radical oversimplification,
never failing to use the most divisive possible terms to describe people and policies he disliked.
10 January 2011. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com.
Ever since the regime of Ronald Reagan, American political discourse has been in steep decline.
His allegedly “sunny” disposition aside, Reagan was a master of rhetorical invective and radical oversimplification,
never failing to use the most divisive possible terms to describe people and policies he disliked.
In so doing, he also gave his Republican party a guidebook for how to continually smash the weak / directionless / corrupt Democrats,
enabling the RPBs to dominate public discourse even on the — relatively few — occasions they didn’t hold total institutional mastery in Washington,
forcing the Democrats into constant “triangulation” —
another word for giving the RPBs nearly everything they want —
even when Dems supposedly held power, as during the Clinton and now Obama years .
This near-total control of the topics / terms / and substantive content of those terms, of course,
reached its high point during the Rove / Cheney / Bush years,
Supposedly, the election of Obama was going to change all that.
But, as we have continually pointed out, with no satisfaction, Obama has completely avoided — until this point, at least —
ANY attempt to transform the dynamics of American public discourse.
Instead, he has followed what we have sadly chronicled is a policy barely distinguishable
from the insanely pro-corporate Rove / Cheney / Bush years —
a tendency pathetically reinforced by the recent appointment of Clinton-era re-treads
Bill Daly as Chief of Staff and Gene Sperling as head of the National Economic Council.
Despite Obama’s evident willingness to give credence to even the most outlandish pro-corporate demands,
But in the wake of the brutal and blatantly rhetorically-incited murders in Arizona,
Obama has a chance to reclaim whatever shred of both legitimacy and power he has left,
and use this horrific moment to dramatically reverse the destructive dynamics of discourse
that have not only wrecked America, but left it, in the words of Richard Nixon,
a pitiful helpless giant in the eyes of much of the rest of the world.
In seizing this rare moment, he has, moreover, a model to whom he can authentically claim allegiance:
Martin Luther King, whose birthday, auspiciously enough, will be celebrated this coming weekend in the US.
But there are a whole range of things Obama can and should do, harking back to the spirit of King,
who, as many non-Americans may not realize, must be understood not as a black, but as an AMERICAN, hero —
one whose legacy has been buried in the years after Reagan —
along with those of many others who took and take their inspiration
from the greatest US president of the 20th century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
What would this mean concretely ???
First and foremost, Obama must NOT retreat into what Americans calls a “Rose Garden strategy”:
that is, simply making pronouncements from the White House.
Rather, he should follow in King’s footsteps,
and be PHYSICALLY PRESENT at the site of the murders themselves.
Put bluntly, he needs to show the whole world his identification with, and connection to, the victims of this barbaric act.
He should visit Gabrielle Giffords in the hospital,
no matter how much his advisers and her doctors inveigh against such a move.
While it would clearly be ghastly to photograph him with a brain surgery patient,
there is no reason for him not to show his solidarity with her family and loved ones,
as well as the other surviving victims of the random slaughter.
He should also go to, and speak at, the funerals of the people who did not survive, not turning it into a circus,
but, rather, a respectful and heartfelt reflection on the tragedy of young and old lives cut down by inhuman cruelty.
Then, he should go to the site of the shooting itself,
and give the speech of his life,
combining the hopefulness of the “I Have A Dream” speech of the March on Washington in August 1963,
with the incisive analysis and sheer courage of his
April 4 1967 “Beyond Vietnam – A Time To Break Silence” speech at Riverside Church in New York,
where he laid out, in the words of one admirer, “the interconnection of everything.
“Just getting the right to vote, or being able to ride the bus or eat at a lunch counter was NOT going to be enough.”
Obama needs to stop mincing words, and make a speech that lays full blame on those responsible —
not just for the atmosphere that legitimated the shooting itself,
but for three decades of creating a climate of rhetorical violence and intimidation
that spawned not just the terror in Tuscon,
but the devastating mass murders of Oklahoma City —
an act of domestic terrorism with which Americans are often loath to compare the outrage of 9/11,
but whose substance is hardly different.
Obama needs to make clear the issue is not the insane actions of a clearly sick individual,
but the entire framework of discourse that led a twisted young man to think he would be doing something “great”
by shooting down in cold blood — at an open and unguarded political event —
not just a Congressman and Federal district court judge,
but a little girl and several senior citizens,
drawn to Arizona by the warm climate that makes the infirmities of their old age easier to bear.
He needs to name names,
and not be afraid to call down the wrath of the God in which he so often proclaims his belief
on those who have consistently brought forward the worst in American political culture, rather than, as King did, the best.
To be sure, King was a man of peace and love — but he was also a man of courage
who never feared to speak out IN PERSON when he saw injustice and outrage,
whether it was the bombing of four little girls in a Birmingham church,
or the plight of garbage men fighting for a decent wage in Memphis.
As the photo shows, King was not afraid to live those stirring words,
to have his actions manifest the courage of his convictions.
Great leaders never seek out tragedy, but they don’t run from it either.
There is little doubt King would marshal the “better angels” of which Lincoln spoke,
and use his moral and ethical standing to SHAME not simply those who pulled the trigger,
but those who have — sadly, for decades now — felt they had free rein to encourage
the kind of thinking and speaking that legitimizes such unspeakable actions.
We would ALL be better off if Arizona had never happened — but it did.
The question now, then, is how to use this terrible event to strike a decisive blow against the forces
that legitimated the motivation behind — and, in that way, created — it.
If Obama remains behind the White House walls,
and refuses his evident duty to speak out clearly —
today, tomorrow, and every day for the rest of his life —
against the forces that have brought America to this sad pass,
then he will miss the opportunity to show the greatness
that make the names of FDR and Lincoln resonate to this very day.
And while that would be a personal tragedy for him as a person and public figure,
it would be no less tragic for America and the rest of the world as well.
No one except some very sick people wanted something like this to happen.
But now that it has, it can be transformed into something positive ONLY with a sustained campaign
against the people and forces who deployed the virulent rhetoric that fostered this inhuman violence.
Anything less than an on-going / principled / and committed attack against these forces
would be to cede the field to those who promote this hate-filled atmosphere —
and a violation of what Martin Luther King so valiantly embodied:
the very best of what it means to be an American.
David Caploe PhD
Editor-in-Chief
EconomyWatch.com
President / acalaha.com
