De-Fanging Our Heroes
In an era when open expressions of bigotry, hate and contempt for the less fortunate are on the rise, I find myself wondering how we got here. Lots of factors contribute, but we might want to pay more attention to our national tendency to take our heroes and de-fang and de-claw them — turning them into warm and fuzzy but largely empty shells, cutting the heart out of what they tried to teach us.
Last month’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday prompted many to remind us of what’s been called the “Santa Clausification” of Dr. King. Annual MLK commemorations contain lots of “I have a dream” but shockingly little about King’s fierce and controversial advocacy for economic justice or his opposition to not just the Vietnam War, but the whole U.S. war-making machine. In an era when eight rich individuals now have as much wealth as half of humanity, we would do well to remind ourselves of King’s words: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
Given that we live in an era when even the reading of a 30-year-old letter from King’s widow was silenced on the Senate floor, I’m not optimistic.
But we’ve selectively forgotten a lot more than just King’s messages on war and the economy. Yes, our historical amnesia even affects white guys. Think of poor old Abe Lincoln. We cheerfully remember the president who held the union together and, by so doing, brought an end to slavery. But, as our government increasingly seems to do the bidding of plutocrats and the corporations that make them wealthy, we might also want to remember what Lincoln said about corporate power:
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. … corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
(Some have questioned the authenticity of the above quotation, but Rick Crawford at UC Davis dug through historical source material and emerged convinced it’s authentic).
We seem to have forgotten that side of Lincoln, but today we need him more than ever.
We’ve also de-fanged and de-clawed Mark Twain, now mostly remembered as a genial teller of tall tales who occasionally deployed a pointed wit. Friends who’ve been to Twain’s birthplace, now a state park, tell me that’s pretty much the only Twain you’ll encounter there.
But at a time when the U.S. increasingly used its military might to dominate other nations and peoples, Twain said, “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land,” and wrote the scorchingly antiwar “The War Prayer.” In “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” he exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo Free State and satirized the Belgian king’s smug indifference. And in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” he summed up the whole imperialist enterprise with scathing sarcasm, aiming some of his strongest fire at U.S. war crimes in the Philippines.
What do we lose when we turn great Americans into warm, cuddly Santa figures? Perspective. This historical forgetting lets us safely see present-day critics of economic inequality or militarism as cranks and outliers, rather than what they really are: Spiritual descendants of American heroes who bravely pointed to America’s wrongs — and yes, even its atrocities — and demanded that we end them.
Today we regularly hear voices on the political right call truth-tellers like Black Lives Matter activists “anti-American.” If we remembered our history, we would know they are every bit as American as Abe Lincoln, Mark Twain and Martin Luther King.
Bruce Mirken is Media Relations Director at The Greenlining Institute. Follow Bruce on Twitter.
