What a huge, huge loss he was, not just for that decade and not just for America. Imagine the alternative worldline if King had been allowed to live on for just another few years. That speech is so extraordinarily right that it's very hard to listen to it today. (I had to press pause a couple of times.) It's just unimaginable today, all of it. For one thing, and this is by no means the most extraordinary thing about that speech: imagine any American public figure in 2008 taking a "mass" audience seriously enough to mention Dante, Langston Hughes and Nietzsche to them, and citing poetry in his speech, and citing it well, and citing it in passing! And saying this:
"These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before."
The plain truth. And a year to the day after he said that, he was dead. And very shortly after that, the times were no longer revolutionary.
What a huge, huge loss he was, not just for that decade and not just for America. Imagine the alternative worldline if King had been allowed to live on for just another few years. That speech is so extraordinarily right that it's very hard to listen to it today. (I had to press pause a couple of times.) It's just unimaginable today, all of it. For one thing, and this is by no means the most extraordinary thing about that speech: imagine any American public figure in 2008 taking a "mass" audience seriously enough to mention Dante, Langston Hughes and Nietzsche to them, and citing poetry in his speech, and citing it well, and citing it in passing! And saying this:
ReplyDelete"These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before."
The plain truth. And a year to the day after he said that, he was dead. And very shortly after that, the times were no longer revolutionary.
Goddamit.
-w.
yes, amen to that.
ReplyDelete