listening to nitwits talk about martin

[click picture]
Maybe it's from listening to survivors bestow Kennedy-tude on an unworthy successor -- though I suppose they're not likely to find another more fit in the time they have left on earth -- and maybe I'm too touchy, but I wonder can I ever listen to anyone on the subject of Martin without wanting to smack them? I've been listening to Chris Lydon interview Reverend Haynes about his days with Martin and, beside the truly annoying and almost ceaselessly whining dog in the background, Lydon liked to have hauled me off my chair with irk a few times.

At one point, referring to the bit linked with Martin's picture here, he talks about having watched and listened to this over and over and over and trying to fathom what must have been in Martin's mind. So unfathomable to him it seems. And the Reverend had to mention that Martin always knew he was in danger of being killed at any moment. I submit to you that Martin had been told in no uncertain terms that he would be assassinated if he did not immediately sit down and shut up. He did not, and he looks in each moment in this clip as if he were expecting the bullet to enter his face while he issued these immortal words. Lydon wondered too about his swift and purposeful departure from the podium. He was getting out of probable rifle sights, you dimwit.

He stood up and said maybe the most deeply meaningful words spoken in history, knowing they might very well be his last, they might very well not even get all the way out, and Lydon yimmers his mystification about it to Martin's old friend tonight in front of someone who would have given her life to save him then and would still give it to bring him back now.

I was fifteen when they murdered him. He'd been my hero already for some years. He was the one who put the truth in front of me so I could know it, answered my bewilderment over coming face to face with darker strangers who seemed to both hate me and fear me, even as a very little girl. He spoke of the same country the Kennedys did. He spoke to all humanity, for blessed once not to one side or the other of one made up thing or another. I haven't even been able to think the words "I have a dream" without tears welling and my fist shooting up to pump the air since he first said them to the world at the Lincoln Memorial.

There's another netcasting guy who has pissed me off so badly I want hotly to do something so violent upon him in person that he will never open his mouth in public again. Bob Kincaid. He's so fixated on dissing "the religion industry" he does stuff like insult Islamic women in their "beekeeper suits" -- which I understand is a Robin Williams joke and it was funny as that, once, but not as a habitual (no pun) mode of talking about them -- and then goes on to mention that he does think well of Dr. King... "even though he always talked about his invisible friend".

Well, I'm sorry, Bob, but I've never had an inclination to religion in my life, not even as a credulous small child in Sunday School, but I can tell when someone is speaking the truth... with whatever terms he uses to express it. That you are too thick-witted to discern Martin would have known far better than you how to say what needed to be said doesn't let you off the hook for your filthy mouth. He was talking about actual reality to a world inured to putative realities, and he had to use the language that brought his audience to the level on which they could hear it... hear real truth. He was speaking to our truest selves, that which people call "spirit" or "soul", and in his time, in his school, with his people, that was how you addressed the unsayable in words. It still is for many, no matter if there are literally millions misusing the terms.

But that's not even it, is it? You're so busy portraying yourself as an iconoclastic bugger you take no heed of the transcendental insults you sling as you go about your merry self-portraiture to the few marveling at the vocabulary of a hillbilly talking into a mic. Problem is: We should call you "Moe".

My heroes were murdered one by one. The men that I most admired, slaughtered for wanting my health and well-being over the profits of plutocrats. I was asking my teachers why all the great men in history had been murdered or killed themselves. Why do the beautiful almost always die before their times? Why is the penalty for genius death? How could such great love be met with such coldness, such vicious fear, such seething hate? And they were picking off the living heroes as though they were yanking off my limbs right in the here and now, not just in my history books.

Even so, I would have as many heroes as beings and die instead. What's wrong with all these so-called talkers? These so-called bloggers? These so-called media people? Is their vision so blurred, their intelligence so muddled they cannot come up on the truth or even the subject of heroes who knew and told and lived the truth without exposing only their stunted wits and vital ineptitude? This seems like sacrilege to me.

We need those heroes back! Not their lineage bestowed in the hope of encouraging some charming dope to greatness. It would be enough to just have our dead heroes be left whole until at least we've grown real ones again to take up their cause, but everyone who tries to get on the subject just keeps blowing it so badly! Not even real enough to come up to Martin's knees, for crying out loud. How are we going to grow heroes if that is the best we can do?