The 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s
assassination last week was met with the expected crocodile tears by the
presidential candidates, providing a painful display of insincerity, or just plain
bad acting.

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s speech was particularly transparent:
“I remember hearing about it and just feeling such despair. … I walked
into my dorm room, picked up my book bag and just hurled it across the
room.” She really needs to stop with this lying thing.

It hardly needs to be said that Mr. King’s message has been
expropriated and morphed by today’s elite. As with most rabble-rousers and
rebels whose popularity is too great to ignore, his icon has been hijacked by
those who have done their best to toss his legacy into the dustbin of history.
Thus, we have one presidential candidate who wants to militarily occupy Iraq
for a century or more, and another who wants to expand the state-terror
campaign into Pakistan, both praising an unrepentant opponent of war and
imperialism.

Like I said, the disingenuousness has been painful to watch.

By almost any definition of the term, Mr. King was a
radical. Countering the boring frivolity of the self-cultivating liberals of
his time (their kind never changes), he knew fundamental social change was
never made through the corridors of power. His tactics were extralegal and
confrontational; he didn’t lobby politicians but aimed to mold their policies
with the welding tools of a social movement.

An avid reader of Thoreau and follower of Gandhi, civil
disobedience — including sit-ins, marches and countless run-ins with law
enforcement — became the defining feature of the struggle for civil rights
under his leadership.

In his time — as in ours — the law often ran contrary to
humane interests, rendering it more a measure of elite power than a tool for
enforcing equality. When the legal code and social justice were at odds, Mr.
King never hesitated in making his mark in the latter camp. He did not put
principle before human beings; his principles were human beings. In this vein,
he placed himself in the proud American progressive tradition, the likes of
which include Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglas, Eugene V. Debs and Malcolm X.

No, Mr. King was not a fetishist of the law. But it was more
than his strategy that banishes him from the mainstream; his political vision
was of a similarly radical bent. He was a proponent of people’s power, a
believer in the ideal of truly democratic society. This meant organizing, agitating
and more organizing and agitating, all with the goal of a tolerant, equitable
and peaceful society in mind.

Concretely, this meant aggressive opposition to the war in
Vietnam. He supported draft resisters and tax evaders, and came to the
conclusion that the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world today.” He denounced all imperialisms, condemning “those
individual capitalists of the West” who usurp the wealth of the Third
World, all in the name of profit. Comments like this wouldn’t earn one a spot
on the cable news shows of 2008.

Even more “dangerous” (his term) to the
establishment was his view that the root of the present violence and injustice
is a system that produces ostentatious wealth amid abject destitution.
“True compassion,” he said, “is more than flinging a coin to a
beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring.” Out of this belief came the Poor People’s Campaign near
the end of his life, the aim of which was to form “a multiracial army of
the poor” to challenge the more obscene features of a profit-driven,
class-based society.

Given what we know about his life and ideas, it is not
presumptuous to point out that today Mr. King — though ever-praised by the
likes of John McCain and Hillary Clinton — would be on the side of AWOL
soldiers, impoverished prisoners and undocumented immigrants who (gasp!)
overstay their visas.

Though he was radical, Mr. King undoubtedly would have
wanted his vision embraced in nonpolitical terms. For there is nothing
“communistic” or “extreme” about the fight for universal
health care, criticizing wars for profit or defending the interests of people
who don’t have the right paperwork. These are struggles based on the most
elementary of human impulses — empathy, altruism, respect — and,
consequently, emphasize the universality of our species. They entail that every
human being should be able to live in comfort and dignity without having to
grovel or ask politely for it.

The contemporary mainstream has, nonetheless, ostracized
this vision as subversive and unseemly. Of course, it could be no other way;
the airwaves are controlled by those with money and influence, or those who
stand to lose out from Mr. King’s real message. It is therefore incumbent upon us
to clean the obfuscating dirt off his unsubtle, aggressive vision, and thereby
work to make it a reality.

?

Kyle Szarzynski ([email protected]) is
a junior majoring in Spanish and history.