The Word of the Week is Eloquence

On the evening of  April 4, 1968,  as the tragedy of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King began to filter out over a pre-internet nation, an extraordinary moment in U.S. political history occurred as Robert F. Kennedy, broke the news of King’s death to a large gathering of African Americans in Indianapolis, Indiana.

historyplace.com puts it, “The gathering was actually a planned campaign rally for Robert Kennedy in his bid to get the 1968 Democratic nomination for President. Just after he arrived by plane at Indianapolis, Kennedy was told of King’s death. He was advised by police against making the campaign stop which was in a part of the city considered to be a dangerous ghetto. But Kennedy insisted on going.”

Robert Kennedy arrived that night to find the people in an upbeat mood, anticipating the excitement of a Kennedy appearance. As he climbed onto the platform, he realized that they did not know, and that he would be breaking the news.

I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.

In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black–considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible–you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization–black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

Only a fool could attempt to argue that Bobby Kennedy failed to demonstrate the incredible, I’d say heroic, eloquence that was demand by awful circumstance.

And only a fool could argue that value of well spoken words has been tarnished since then. Somehow we’ve become not only inhibited from speaking about love, compassion and justice, but we’ve devalued the ability to speak eloquently at all.

The expression of complex thoughts is for the effete; something for latte drinking elites, not regular Americans. To quote a poetry (other than maybe a psalm) these days would be political suicide. Barack Obama can make a good case for why he holds his views or favors one course of action instead of another and that is pretty jarring to some, and downright scary to others.

As a country we have become more comfortable with the simple, the inarticulate, and the dumb. Instead of “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself,” this week we got George Bush’s “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.” By “this sucker” Bush, I guess, meant the economy.

Where we once assumed that someone seeking high office would be able to speak in complete even elegant sentences, we now have bubbling nincompoops like Sarah Palin and John McCain being treated as legitimate.

Abetted by the national media, Republicans have turned inarticulate stupidity into a virtue. They have packaged together the concepts of eloquence and thoughtfulness with weakness in order to force the country into a false choice. Do you want the stupid Republican or the weak Democrat? The proof of weakness is any acknowledgment that some questions are not black and white. Why can’t a candidate simply state that he or she is against abortion? They must be hiding something. They must be weak.

The irony is that there is clearly no weakness in Robert Kennedy’s call that April night for us to recognize each others humanity. There was only strength and steel in Dr. King’s I have a dream speech. On the other hand, there is nothing but weakness in the shallow and simplistic talking points like “No Pre-Conditions,” that McCain trotted out last night.

The good news is that today’s public opinion polls tell us that we may be emerging from the simple minded rhetorical darkness that the Republicans claim is broad daylight. A majority of Americans felt that Barack Obama, who did not rely on quips and reductive talking points, won the debate. There, of course, are those 38% of dead enders though, who prefer the vapid and shallow, but even that does not bother me so much today. How does the saying go? “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, I must be a Republican.”