"If this be treason, make the most of it."
What a different line that would be without "if." It would become an admission of the crowd's charge of treason rather than Patrick Henry's defiant stand for the law it was.
"Thou hast said it."
Is that an affirmation or a denial; or a refusal to answer the question?
"If I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness. . ."
How would that statement differ if the 'if' disappeared? That's a question being asked today about one of the inscriptions on the new Martin Luther King memorial being dedicated in Washington, where the 'if' does not appear as it did when it was spoken at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1968:
"Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all the other shallow things will not matter."
The 'if' matters. It matters a great deal because without it King is assuming a mantle and with it he is not; that it is not about him but about Justice, peace and righteousness. Is this a shallow thing or insignificant? I don't think so. I think it speaks of the way our heroes are elevated, to become, in death, a 30 foot tall man expressing stern, stony determination rather than just a man struggling with a mission, struggling with himself, struggling with a stupid, angry and vengeful world that will continue to be just that long after he is gone. The quote on the monument is not phrased as part of a question and that raises many questions.
Are we making him what he was not and apparently did not wish to be? If we make his life about him, then we can opposes him more readily than we can argue against justice and we can make the movement he participated in, a mere matter of quotes and formulae if we like him and personal failings if we do not. Perhaps some can ask his stone idol for guidance and support for their own objectives and pretend he is not gone and will magically return some day. As always happens when our heroes die, we are making his life something less than it was and something more about our lust for leaders, prophets and even gods and we do it to preachers and prophets; polemicists and presidents when we put our desires into their acts and words and thereby worship ourselves.
"Are we making him what he was not and apparently did not wish to be?"
ReplyDeleteWho's "we"? There was no referendum on this. Someone (presumably the sculptor) made a very faulty decision to paraphrase what should've been quoted. King was nothing if not a master of eloquence and precise use of language. Anyone of King's exceptional skill deserves to be quoted verbatim on any statue memorializing him.
The edited quote is not the story, the monument is the story and I think it's beyond dispute that we manufacture heroes according to our specifications and not according to reality.
ReplyDeleteKing was not a grandiose man, not 30 feet tall not possessed of that stony countenance or cut from flawless stone. He was just an eloquent man struggling with injustice and struggling with himself and so to me, more to be appreciated than some marble image incapable of introspection, fear or doubt.
I doubt it was the sculptor. Lei Yixin doesn't speak English and his ouvre is composed of massive sculptures that make subjects like Mao Zedong look like granite heroes, not like what they were. That is one of the reasons the King family is disappointed in the choice.
But the "we" you're asking about is the human race. This is what we do and have always done since we learned to make statues.
Tributes to men of significance are seldom scaled to reality. That Dr. King's statue is 30 feet tall signifies the major role that he played in shaping a more positive vision for this country, and I think the stern expression is befitting the seriousness of the work that he did and the challenges that he faced. I don't know exactly the scale of Lincoln's memorial but his statue is certainly larger than life size. I know that there have been mixed reactions to the memorial but I the only problem that I have is that I think that his words should have been quoted precisely.
ReplyDeleteAs the first and only memorial on the mall recognizing an African-American leader, I would have far more problems if his was the only statue that reflected introspection, fear, or doubt. I see his mien as portrayed by the sculptor as dignified and serious.
Capt. Fogg, I think your take on the statue not being appropriate to the man is right on target.
ReplyDeleteYour post begins with, and the linked article focuses on, what a difference omission of the word "if" makes, and how it makes the quote less appropriate for conveying what King was really like. I agree. Hence, my comment.
Sheria,
ReplyDeleteNo, that's true. Pharaoh's statues were always ten times the size of others and those he conquered were always tiny, but I see the man in question differently than I see Rameses or
Lenin or Chairman Mao or General Grant on his marble horse. When you set someone up to be a stone idol, a massive monolith of fierce determination, you diminish the reality of him, you misrepresent him, you create him in your own image to fill your own needs. I think it's obvious that humans have a need to make things to worship and venerate and pray to while ignoring whatever reality was behind that creation. I think the misquote is an example of how we manufacture our heroes and I think the image is as much or more of a misquote and that's inevitable. I think that's sad when the hero was humble.
The commandment to make for ourselves no graven images is all about not reducing things to our own level, I think; not introducing our own ideas. It's about not adorning what we adore, and there is supposed to be more in God than you can make out of wood and there was more in this man than can be expressed in Stone. His words are what mattered, and his courage; they rose above him - and us.
The Vietnam War memorial is to me an example of a monument that is a memorial and not an attempt to rephrase history, to create heroes out of ordinary men doing what they had to do and often against their will. That's why it has such power and far more than any pictures of glory or even suffering.
This sculptor made a career out of making a very, VERY flawed, ruthless, dirty little man - a possible megalomaniac - look like a hero and I think some of that technique rubbed off on a man I admire most for his having been very human and flawed like all of us but yet he went on and on, knowing that it wouldn't end well for him - but going on and on even so. It bothers me to see him or anyone else, as a very complex human being, reduced to a symbol, a cliche.
Heroes of the unblemished alabaster kind don't exist in reality. We only manufacture them for our own purposes. Again, I know I ask a lot and the public demands fearless men and women of steel or granite, but real heroes are as afraid as any of us - they just act anyway because there's something more important than their safety and their longevity.
I was an adult, married with a family in 1968. I remember many of his speeches and the atmosphere he was immersed in when he made them. Few of my friends admired him, Accusations were made about his being responsible for rioting. He was accused of hypocrisy. Jackie Kennedy thought he was a phony and she certainly wasn't alone.
The FBI illegally invaded his privacy seeking probably to blackmail him. Snide mockery was de regueur among people you'd expect to be more sophisticated than that. He was damned from many a pulpit and in many a classroom and by many a "liberal" newspaper. He tasted the scorn, the hate, he grew up with the bigoted disdain -- he must have known what his chances for survival were, but still. . .
Yes, I know, I talk too much.
Probably the place to delineate the content of MLK Jr’s character is in anthologies, not in statues or their inscriptions -- some of the more realistic ancient Roman busts and statues are wonderfully suggestive, but in general stone isn’t the place to go for getting your historical truth. “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair,” as the statue of Pharaoh says in the Shelley poem “Ozymandias.” Phil Sidney said literary works don't lie because they "nothing affirm." The problem with a big stone statue is that it can't help but affirm, or seem to in a massively earnest way.
ReplyDeleteJust teaching kids both dimensions of the man – the uplifting AND the sharply critical that includes works such as “Declaration Against the War in Vietnam,” would go a long way towards keeping MLK from becoming a marble cipher for whatever we want him to be.
Perhaps the difference is that all of my friends admired MLK and he was our hero. We didn't concern ourselves with his imperfections; they were insignificant. He was the force that changed our world literally and as such, he was both hero and leader. That's all that I see in his memorial. I don't see it's stylized effect as denying his all too human flaws. He was a man, not a god, and I think that most of us are well aware of that, but he was still indisputably a hero to many of us. Without his willingness to fight for equality and justice, my generation would have led entirely different lives with limited opportunities.
ReplyDeleteBesides, a life size statue with a smiling face would seem rather pedestrian and not in keeping with the impact of the man. Heroes don't have to be perfect, which is a good thing because none are.
Below is a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that I think captures the essence of MLK.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Gwendolyn Brooks
A man went forth with gifts.
He was a prose poem.
He was a tragic grace.
He was warm music.
He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes.
His ashes are
reading the world.
His Dream still wishes to anoint
the barricades of faith and of control.
His word still still burns the center of the sun,
above the thousands and the
hundred thousands
The word was Justice. It was spoken.
So it shall be spoken.
So it shall be done.
I wasn't suggesting a happy-face Martin, but with the misquote and the facial expression, the humility seems lost. It's something we do to our heroes regularly - that's all I'm saying.
ReplyDeleteI would have preferred a more contemplative, more human face; Martin struggling to be what he was, but even so, It was the misquote that inspired me to write. Perhaps it was inadvertent, but I doubt it. I think it was, as I said, part of a process that converts beating hearts into stone, robbing him of his human nature.
Even a materialist like me can be touched - staggered sometimes by another person's heart. Nothing about the monument does that for me. It looks like another stone hero.
Don't get me wrong, I am prouder of my country that it's put up a monument to someone who was seen as an enemy by so much of America. I just wish the stone could challenge us as much as the real man did.
It's easy for stone to be stone. I don't think what he did was easy for him to do. I don't think it came naturally to be what he was and that is not easy to express - but I think it could have been done better.
Oh - well I just now noticed that that pesky lizard just said it all better than I did - he does that too often.
ReplyDeleteCaptain, you made your point just fine, as did dino.
ReplyDeleteWhy thanks, Capt. Fogg and Sheria.
ReplyDelete