By Matt Stoller and Charles
Davis
“The nation is sick. Trouble
is in the land; confusion all around.”
In the first episode of BrandX,
Russell Brand talked about meeting the Dalai Lama. Why did we choose
him as the subject for our first show? Because the Dalai Lama’s
preaching of peace, anti-consumerism, spirituality and nonviolence is
radical, a stark contrast to the message of war and consumption one
usually hears on television.
In the writer’s room, as we
were talking about who the Dalai Lama is, we hit upon a question that
none of us could answer: who is the American Dalai Lama? And we
realized, there isn’t one. The last great spiritual figure in
American history was Martin Luther King Jr.
Today, though, King has been
turned into a Santa Clause figure. There’s a holiday commemorating
his life and works and his likeness appears in ads for Apple
Computer, Alcatel, and McDonald’s. King’s legacy, if commercial
interests had their way, would be the nonthreatening “Think
Different”
campaign, an encouragement to purchase luxury electronic goods made
by exploited foreign workers.
Yet, for all of King’s talk of
getting along – the stuff he’s known for now -- he was not at all
about just going along with a system he saw as evil; he wasn’t
about politely working within a system designed by and for those who
profit from human suffering. And for that reason he was hated by the
elites, labeled a communist by the likes of FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover and a potential security threat by good liberals like
Robert
Kennedy.
Rather than shy away from
controversy, however, King embraced his status as a pariah for
progressive change, coming out as an enemy of the American warfare
state.
Speaking at a church in New York
City in April 1967, King criticized American military intervention in
Vietnam, proclaiming
that
he could no longer stand idly be as his government – headed by a
pro-war Democrat – reigned hell upon the poor overseas. Though he
had for years focused on preaching a message of peace as an answer to
America’s domestic problems, “I knew that I could never again
raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos
without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today
– my own government.” King decided he couldn’t keep quiet as
millions of human beings being murdered in Vietnam, even if it meant
speaking out against a president who had signed the Civil Rights Act.
For the sake of those at home watching their government employ
violence to solve its perceived problems, and thinking that perhaps
violence could be the solution to problems of their own, and “for
the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I
cannot be silent.”
Almost a year to the day later,
King was silenced for good by an assassin’s bullet.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an
American radical, a man who stood up to the ruling class on behalf of
the impoverished, both at home and abroad. Unable to confront the
moral force of his message, the powerful have instead chosen to
ignore it, appropriating his image and stripping him of his
radicalness. In Washington the whitewashing of King’s legacy is
plain for all to see, the made-in-China
monument constructed in his honor as white as most members of
Congress.
But like other radicals, King’s
image has been appropriated by the powerful, his inconvenient
radicalism ignored, his message dumbed down to a few lines that would
feel at home on a Hallmark card. According to the official history,
King is something of a jolly American Santa Claus who, like, just
wanted everyone to get along, man. George W. Bush and Barack Obama
alike have claimed him as an inspiration, reducing him to the status
of an honorary Founding Father, a guy who believed “all men are
created equal,” in the words
of
The
Decider,
one who had faith in the “beliefs
articulated in our founding documents.”
What our powerful elites leave
out: That today, America doesn’t have an equivalent popular voice
against state-sanctioned terror. Our preachers condemn sex and drugs,
but can’t be bothered to say nary a bad word about incinerating
women and children with Hellfire missiles. Our 21st
century spiritual leaders hawk phones but couldn’t care less about
peace, consumerism filling the void left by our society’s atrophied
moral conscience.
That void cannot remain. A nation
without a conscience, a nation that abides state-sanctioned murder
from Yemen to Pakistan to Honduras so long as a new iPad is released
every 9 months or so, is a nation without a soul. Instead of waiting
around for a savior, though, we as a people need to acknowledge our
collective power to shape the future for the better, our ability to
create a world where militarism and corporate greed are supplanted by
mutual aid and a commitment to community. The elites may have all the
guns and money, but we have the numbers.
"For a time I was
depressed,” Helen Keller, another American whose radicalism has
been forgotten (she was a socialist, an antiwar marcher and a founder
of the ACLU), remarked
when speaking of her own awakening to the institutionalized injustice
around her. “But little by little my confidence came back and I
realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that
society has advanced so far in spite of them. And now I am in the
fight to change things.”
Are you?
BrandX airs every Thursday
at 11pm Eastern/Pacific on FX.
I don't have cable, so I can't watch it, but given what I've seen from the blog and youtube clips so far this seems a far more radical show than anything else on air today. What are your thoughts about it?
ReplyDeleteWell, the producers actually agreed to give me money to work on the show, so I think you're on to something with that radical thing. I think it'll only become more so with time.
ReplyDeleteThat's actually bad news. I may have to shell out for cable now. Unless they're going to post episodes online after they air.
ReplyDeleteThat is airing on a news corp channel, but I guess they see no threat. I guess I'll give it a watch.
ReplyDeleteFelicidades on the new job, delighted you're reaching such a big audience! (And as usual, great post.)
ReplyDeleteCongratulations. And yes more, rather than less, radical, please. We're long past polite disagreements here.
ReplyDeleteJack,
ReplyDeleteThe Dalai Lama is of course extremely flawed: he received funding from the CIA and couldn't ever seem to bring himself to forcefully condemn the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The point we were trying to make was not that he's super awesome, but that corporate media and politicians only approve of a radical message of non-violence if it comes from a safe, non-threatening foreigner who doesn't threaten their power, a role the Dalai Lama fills as a direct result of his aforementioned flaws. If the message of peace comes from a domestic radical in relation to his or her own country, however -- as with King and Keller -- that aspect of their message is either ignored or reduced to a feel-good line on a greeting card.
Charles,
ReplyDeleteI got that from the full essay, I just think there's a reason to be wary of looking for analogs to the DL or Gandhi, given the caste systems upon which they always depended for their power.
All that said, I can think of person like Ammon Hennacy as an excellent homegrown answer to your original question. Plus, he has the added benefit of being somewhat more resistant to sanitization, in comparison to the woefully recast MLK, Jr.
And Dali Lama also naively supports Israel this of course, does not mean China is in the right either.
ReplyDelete