“Charlie Kirk said Martin Luther King was a bad man and that desegregation laws were a mistake. Do we agree with him?” commented one of my Ph.D. classmates on my tribute to Kirk.
The unhinged reactions from self-anointed intelligentsia to the assassination of an American hero and a Christian martyr range from disingenuous platitudes to smirky spins to outright celebration. Debating these positions, all of which pivot the focus away from a much-deserved condemnation of political violence, on their merits, will be a worthy pursuit in itself. But for the time being, let’s entertain my former classmate’s question at face value and examine the surge of “whataboutism” implied in similar statements of “Kirk said so and so, and somehow that made his slaying less bad or even justifiable.”
Was Martin Luther King Jr. a bad man? Certainly, for the left, whose cosmic visions turn thorny questions and complex issues into moral absolutes, any answer other than a resounding “no” is unacceptable. In their make-believe universe of zero-sum power vis-à-vis oppression and endless injustices, any words and thoughts that deviate from bestowing King a God-like status shall be treated as heresy. By logical extension, ill-fate falling on their political, ideological, and spiritual opponents should be cheered or at least excused, especially when there is evidence of these opponents speaking about the fallible nature of flesh-and-blood human beings, including King.
For the record, this is a quick summary of Kirk’s stance on King:
While he was alive most people disliked him, yet today he is the most honored, worshipped, even deified person of the 20th century.
He was just a man. And a very flawed one at that.
The sharp comments, emblematic of Kirk’s straight-shooter style, were certainly not reason enough to discount and legitimize his killing. In fact, King’s own wife, Coretta Scott King, admitted that her husband was “no saint” and contended with questions on King’s infidelity in her memoir. Out of all mainstream media platforms, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on this memoir:
‘Martin didn’t want me to buy these window curtains,’ Coretta told me during a 1983 conversation in the living room of that home, where she continued to live. King’s belief that he was unworthy of many of the tributes that came his way fueled an ascetic desire to which his only exceptions were rich food, good suits, menthol cigarettes, hard liquor (eventually), and extramarital sex … No one can master the full documentary record of King’s life without acknowledging that he had various special women friends in cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Louisville.
While King’s contributions to the Civil Rights Movement cannot be overstated, acknowledging the inconvenient facts of his personal life is essential to understanding the full complexity of the individual.
As a matter of fact, glaring gaps between public virtues and private vices have marked not just King. Karl Marx was a heavy drinker and smoker, whose inability to manage personal finances squandered family wealth and reduced his family’s living to squalid conditions. Marx also cheated on his wife and called his opponent, German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, a “Jewish n[****]r.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a central figure in the Enlightenment and author of a seminal text on child-rearing, abandoned all five of his own children soon after their births. When Rousseau managed to track them down in his later life, they had all passed away. In the immediate years following the Glorious Revolution, English politician Edward Stephens observed the persistence of public corruption and private vices, such as debauchery and impiety, in English high society, despite the revolutionary victory of ridding the nation of popery. Stephens criticized King Charles II for indulging in vice and infecting the country by evil example.
[RELATED: Character, Grace, and Martin Luther King, Jr.]
These may be extreme examples of reputed individuals’ personal failings at walking the talk. Sadly, a walk-talk gap plagues far too many public figures whose lofty ideals misalign with questionable actions and choices in their private dealings. In the marketplace of ideas, rational and reasonable beings should have the discipline and restraint to acknowledge one’s private life and still see a person’s public virtues.
On the contrary, open discussion and civic discourse are relegated to symbolic status when supposedly well-educated folks take quick offense at fact-based criticism of historical figures whom they idolize. Any speech distasteful to the self-anointed, no matter how truthful or meritorious, is treated as hate speech. Living in this cosmic space of moral absolutes, self-anointed warriors gradually lose the ability to differentiate between character indictment and objective analysis.
It is with the same amount of fervor that they have engaged in posthumous character assassinations of a God-fearing man, who actually walked his talk.
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Image: “Charlie Kirk” by Gage Skidmore on Flickr
