Dreams are not for the taking, especially when they are someone else’s dreams. In Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific the character Bloody Mary sings “you’ve got to have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?” Martin Luther King’s original message stands alone as an iconic historical moment. His dream not entirely realized even today requires some recognition of what it would take to make it a reality. Suggesting his message needs to be revitalized in some revelatory new fashion is an absurdity of monumental proportions; that it should be co-opted or rewritten ignores the profundity of its original content.
Glenn Beck’s weekend rally was another inglorious attempt to make all that is detestable about his positions seem palatable and patriotic by asserting a goal of “restoring honor.” With Sarah Palin as a featured speaker and a mantra that created a mythological universe they used words like freedom and liberty as if only they possess the magical components to create a more perfect society. The proposition that the rally was about “reclaiming the civil rights movement” could only have attracted people who either slept through or otherwise missed the entire civil rights era. It was an insult to the memory of that movement’s early standard bearers, the violence they endured, the sacrifices they made.
Some observers have remarked about the peaceful, prayerful tenor of the rally. It was in fact a departure from the hyperbolic, hateful speech that animates Beck’s usual demeanor on Fox News. But the revival-tent atmosphere of this and some of the other Tea Party moments is not an accurate iteration of the nation’s founding principles. Contrary to the day’s religious zealots the founders were not inclined to form a government based on a particular religious preference. And when people gather on the mall or anywhere else and speak about faith and complain that government has acted to exclude religion from its deliberations it is a departure from not a return to original intent.
There is no disputing the fact that people are free to express their religious views. It is only when they attempt to impose their beliefs on all of society that they present a danger by engaging in dubious rhetoric that purports to be divinely inspired - - God wants me to run for office, God wants me to be president, God wants religion to be incorporated into government structures regardless of what the Constitution says. At Beck’s rally a humanitarian award was accepted for the winner by a woman who brought “greetings in the name of Jesus Christ our lord.”
Beck could later wax eloquent about how we should all come together, Jews, Muslims, and Christians, but that’s hardly the overriding message delivered by prominent members of evangelical ministries. In fact one amusing facet about their travels to the Middle East to make nice with the Israelis in a land both consider holy, is that when the rapture, or the end days arrive, there’ll be a great big stop sign at the entrance to heaven for anyone on line who hasn’t accepted Jesus as their savior, in other words converted. As for Muslims they probably shouldn’t bother getting on line at all.
When was the precise moment that Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and other fast-talking self-professed patriots began to assume such prominence? How do ordinary Americans find a political home in a Tea Party movement whose grass roots flourish with the help of the very forces of privilege and elitism that wield enormous power over them? Tea Partiers seem to have no clue who they’re dealing with or that various benefactors’ goals are often personal and ideologically self-serving, not idealistic. Sharron Angle and Michele Bachmann before her have claimed that some people in Congress are “domestic enemies” because basically, one must conclude, they aren’t overtly religious enough or supportive enough of capitalism or American exceptionalism.
So just when you thought nothing could be more bizarre than the usual political excesses of an election year, a mixture of religious fanaticism and political duplicity have managed to so damage the democratic process that the way back may be too tortured for ordinary people to navigate. The Beck organizers say their rally wasn’t about politics but when you build a platform around how the country is on the wrong track obviously you are being political. In closing, Beck called for a “new dream.” Never mind, Mr. Beck, we’re still working on the old one.
