The Last Speech

Below is a link to my first foray in documentary film-making. It's a synopsis of King's escalating radicalism in the last year of his life. The bulk of the film is King's final speech in Memphis the night before his death.

If the speech grows too long, I urge you to forward to about 44:00 in to see the transition back to the video and the closing scene. Thanks to the Open Table of Christ for hosting the viewing and posting the link.

http://otc-movementofradicallove.blogspot.com/

In Defense of Hypocrisy

"Hypocrisy" is one of those words like "freedom", or "propaganda", or "justice"; they evoke an instant moral judgment from mainstream American society. Each of these things are considered by most of us to be inherently either good or bad, without any real exploration about how each of these things can be either good or bad or both, just like technology or religion or anything else.

All of man's tools and ideas are value-neutral. Is iron good or evil? Well, it's good if it's building ships to send grain to a famine, but it's evil if it's building trains to ship Jews to death camps.

Is democracy good or evil? Well it's good if it's used to avoid political violence by sharing power, but it's evil if it's used to abuse and segregate racial or religious minorities.

How can hypocrisy be good? Well, let's consider what a world without hypocrisy would look like. There are two ways such a world could come about.

The first way would be that all people behaved in a morally perfect manner towards themselves and everyone else for all time. Not gonna happen. The second way would be that society would abolish the very notion of sin or wrong or bad. Well, there would be one sin: being judgmental.

In this second scenario, there would be no such thing as wrong, so there would be no such thing as hypocrisy. If there are no rules to break, there are no hypocrites. But would any of us want to live in a culture in which nothing was considered absolutely wrong?

Hypocrisy exists because people aspire to be better than they are. If hypocrisy disappears, it won't be because we achieve perfection; it will be because we stopped aiming for perfection.

To take the example of Bill Clinton, he is considered by many to be a hypocrite. Since he never criticized anyone else for adultery, he wasn't as hypocritical as many of his colleagues, but surely he was hypocritical regarding his vows to his wife.

The relevant thing here is that he was wrong. He knew he was wrong. He said he was wrong. Everyone else knew he was wrong (well, almost everyone else). It was understood to be selfish and reckless and shameless behavior, a failure of moral discipline. A very bad thing, all told.

But since people are never going to be perfect, wouldn't we rather live in a culture that would condemn Bill Clinton rather than one which would call his adultery totally irrelevant and morally neutral? Because that's the only alternative.

Unfortunately, men will never stop cheating on their wives. So our options are: do we live in a society that condemns such behavior as a failure of character, or do we live in a society which accepts adultery or any other sin as a matter of personal "freedom" or "conscience" or "inner truth"?

There are certain bad things that some people will always do. Lie. Cheat. Steal. Kill. The question that confronts society is whether we condemn such behavior even if we're not perfect ourselves. If we are not willing to be somewhat hypocritical, our society will lose all sense of shared morality. And that is no society at all.

Even men who cheated on their wives should have condemned Clinton. Why? Isn't that hypocritical? Yes, but the more important thing is that people must been seen condemning such behavior if we share the assumption that such behavior undermines society.

If we only let perfect men pass moral judgement, we would have no moral standards, because the judges of such a high court simply don't exist. No person is perfect. Therefore, morally imperfect people must set moral ideals. The prospect of moral shame is a deterrent to some behavior.

If society does not set such standards for its children, the children can be forgiven for growing up into decadent heathens. If we wait for the perfect to lead us, we die. If silence the hypocrites, we silence everyone.

Does Character Count?

What does our obsession with John F. Kennedy tell us about ourselves? What was it, what is it, about this man that has led tens of millions of people all over the world, even those born after his death, to attach some sort of mythical quality to him?

Kennedy was a very complicated man, but all decent people can agree that what has been learned since his death casts him in a far more negative light than he basked in before and immediately after his death. If Americans knew about him while he was alive what they have learned since his death, they would have been repulsed by him.

But there's a disconnect. It's as if his martyrdom absolved him of his sins, even though the two were entirely unrelated. Kennedy wasn't killed for any political position he ever took. He was killed by a loser looking for fame, the same type of fame Kennedy had so skillfully manipulated.

Since Kennedy's murder was unrelated to his conduct, his murder should not logically change our opinion of his conduct. But we don't run on logic, do we? I'll be the first to acknowledge a sort of irrational reverence for this man in some sense.

Partly this is because I can appreciate what he meant to people. I can appreciate what people thought he was. My adolescent Irish-Catholic mother had a picture of the man above her bed, as did most people she knew. But I can also appreciate how far the perception was from the truth.

The extent of the recklessness and depravity of Kennedy's adulteries, for example, is simply impossible to comprehend. When Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998, it was for things that John Kennedy did daily between breakfast and lunch.

I was opposed to Clinton's impeachment, and I'm not necessarily saying that Kennedy should have been publicly exposed and humiliated for his sins, but consider what they say about the man's character.

Kennedy slept with dozens and dozens of women while president, in the White House as often as anywhere else. Interns, yes, but more. Kennedy was sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, who was perhaps the most famous woman in the country and, how shall we say, one Excedrin tablet short of a full medicine cabinet. The kind of woman who might say anything.

It would be as if Clinton were sleeping with Angelina Jolie. And then Angelina committed suicide. When Monroe committed suicide (it was rather a Michael Jackson "suicide", thought by many to be homicide), one of her last visitors was......Bobby Kennedy. Who was also sleeping with her.

Kennedy was also sleeping with Judith Campbell, who in turn was sleeping with Mafia Godfather Sam Giancana. In addition to attending to their carnal needs, Campbell also arranged communications between President Kennedy and the Godfather. And what were they talking about? Murdering Fidel Castro.

So this would be like Bill Clinton, when he's not sleeping with Angelina Jolie, sleeping with the girlfriend of the Mexican drug cartel leader and asking her to ask her boyfriend to murder the president of Venezuela.

So in addition to sleeping with dozens of women while his wife bore him children and lost one after birth, Kennedy was sleeping with famous and/or dangerous women who could obviously and directly blackmail him and, therefore, the nation itself. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but Monica Lewinsky was no threat to national security. And there weren't dozens of her.

Back to Giancana. What do Kennedy's contacts with the Godfather tell us about his character? It tells us something that relates directly to how his character affected his official duties as president in a way that all the adultery did not. It shows that this man was not bothered with law or morals.

Kennedy had no compunction about hiring Mafioso to murder the head of state of a sovereign nation. "Illegal" or "immoral" were not words that had any impact on him. Perhaps every president acts this way, but Kennedy's actions had near-apocalyptic consequences.

Kennedy's finest hour is regarded as the Cuban Missile Crisis. I share that assessment. The man literally saved the world, from a certain point of view. That's the truth, but it ain't the whole truth. And it's a great example of what people knew about Kennedy when he lived versus what we've learned since.

What caused the Cuban Missile Crisis? Why did the Soviet Union feel compelled to send nuclear warheads to Cuba? Why did Cuba want them? Well, the Soviets and the Cubans knew something at the time that we only learned years after Kennedy's death.

John Kennedy had hired the Mafia to murder Fidel Castro. He had trained thousands of Cuban exiles and armed them to invade Cuba. He had invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He had authorized terrorist attacks and sabotage in Cuba, burning sugarcane, blowing up ships, killing civilians.

All of these things are true. Does it mean Kennedy didn't perform well during the Crisis? No, but it means that he essentially caused the Crisis. Kennedy's finest hour was based entirely upon a lie and upon direct consequences of his own lack of character.

So was his image as a good husband. And so was his image as a young and healthy man. We now know that Kennedy was perpetually on drugs that were illegal even at the time, namely steroids and amphetamines. He was a sick man, and obviously a tough one for soldiering through as he did.

There is something about his murder, of course, that makes me feel vaguely treasonous for even pointing these things out. Even though he died 16 years before I was born, I do feel a strange sort of bond with him.

But ultimately I'm drawn back to that devastating question: what does it say about us that good looks and television talent seduced us into totally ignoring drastic failures of character? What if Senator McCarthy had been as handsome and as smooth as JFK? We might live in a considerably uglier country today.

The Burden of Freedom

"Freedom" is one of those words like "justice" or "truth"; it's something that nearly every single being claims to honor, but which nearly every single human being also claims to hold their own uniquely precise definition. Nobody is against freedom, but nobody agrees on what it means, either.

The first act of human freedom as told in the Western and Middle Eastern creation story is the Adam and Eve story, in which man (or woman) chooses to disobey God. So the first story defines freedom as disobedience. And this is the truth. But it is not the whole truth.

Freedom is disobedience. My 3 year old niece could exercise her freedom by disobeying her mother's order not to touch the stove. But is that "freedom" a good thing? Not really. So, in order to be as good as we say it is, freedom must be more than just disobedience.

The key is understanding authority. Authority had a negative connotation, but it is just as good, or evil, as freedom is. In the example above with the infant and the stove, the mother's authority keeps the infant safer than the infant's freedom would.

When a doctor suggests a certain treatment for your illness, you are probably better off ceding to his or her authority than you would be exercising your freedom to invent your own medicine; authority is not just about oppression. It is at least equally about protection and guidance, and the more specialized authorities there are, such as doctors, teachers, roofers, and auto mechanics, the more free everyone else is to live their own lives.

The example of the infant and the stove speaks to the issue of negative freedom versus positive freedom. The freedom to do something versus the freedom from something. The freedom to drink after work versus the freedom from drunk drivers on your drive home from work.

In America, we have made a fetish and a cult out of the word "freedom". The beauty of our Constitution is manifest; it is the first document written by the powerful which spells out what the government they are conceiving is NOT free to do to the people.

The Constitution is an exercise in negative freedom. Positive freedom would say "Americans shall be free to say whatever they want". Negative freedom says "Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech".

The revolutionary import of this wording is profound. The Constitution doesn't need to tell people they can say what they want because God already gave every person that right. Instead, the Constitution informs would-be tyrants that they are denied the authority to abridge the freedom that God gave to humans.

But lately our culture is much more fixated on positive freedom, on what we can get away with rather than what we should guard against.

This is why the majority of the planet is suspicious of Western concepts of freedom. They understand, as we should remind ourselves, that total "freedom" is more precisely called "anarchy" or "barbarism".

The only perfect freedom for a person exists on a desert island with no other people. Since the primary need of humans is contact and belonging, billions of desert islands is not an option. People need other people for even the most remedial physical and emotional security and sustenance.

Since we MUST live in groups, what is the price of admission? It is sacrificing freedom to authority. These are not polar opposites, as explored above.

The balance between freedom and authority is the fulcrum of all politics for at least the last 500 years. This battle has produced oceans of blood, but these oceans were shed by and between people who recognized a need for laws; they just violently disagreed on the details.

There are no anarchist armies, because there never could be. The only competitors in the 3-way race between freedom, authority, and anarchy are the first two.

But freedom is not a ladder to be climbed; it is a see-saw, and its counterweight is authority. It must forever be balanced carefully, even as new elements of culture and society and technology are unceremoniously and inevitably dumped onto one end or the other, forcing a revision of all previous calculus.

In the 70's people could carry guns on planes and smoke and drink to their hearts' and lungs' content on those planes. Now they cant. And I'm okay with that.

Freedom is a good thing, but it means nothing without authority. We must learn to be wary of both. Every sailor loves coming home, but it is the ocean that keeps earth alive.