Last night I caught a couple of snippets of a Martin Luther King speech, trotted out on the 40th anniversary of his murder. Today the Wichita Eagle had an op-ed on King, written by right-wing nut case Cal Thomas, which was respectful and almost coherent. Checked TPM -- the Clinton-Obama primary squabble is making me crazy (more on that later) -- and there are various reports on McCain speaking (and getting heckled) in Memphis honoring King. McCain even admitted his error in voting against the MLK holiday. Looks like King, like Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson, is gaining posthumous entry to the halls of conservative saints.

Coincidentally, I'm reading Geoffrey Nunberg's Talking Right, and I picked up today in a chapter called "New Bottles, Old Whines" where I read this (pp. 156-157):

Conservatives like to invoke Martin Luther King's famous call for a color-blind America: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." But the quotation, like conservatives' memory, is selective [ . . . ] As many conservatives tell the story, that's no longer a big problem; if the government would only stop taking race into account, nobody would notice it anymore.

Nunberg introduces this by explaining (p. 156):

The right's embrace of the language of color-blindness, "reverse discrimination," and the like provides ideological cover for white resentments about racial preferences that might otherwise leave people vulnerable to charges of racism and sexism.

Nunberg goes on (pp. 157-158):

Conservatives' appropriation of the language of the early civil rights movement allows them to rpesent themsleves as the true inheritors of tradition represented by John and Bobby Kennedy and especially Martin Luther King, whom the right has recast as a conservative icon. As William Bennett puts it, "If you said in 1968 that you should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, that you should be color-blind, you were a liberal. If you say it now, you are a conservative." But conservatives also credit King with othe rur-conservative virtues. According [to] the Heritage Foundation's Carolyn Garris, King's "core beliefs, such as the power and necessity of faith-based association and self-government based on absolute truth and moral law, are profoundly conservative," adding that "King's primary aim was not to change laws, but to change people." On King's birthday in 2006, the Wall Street Journal celebrated King's "commitment to non-violent social change," in the course of deploring the liberals who "do violence to the English language and King legacy by engaging in inflammatory rhetoric." Whatever the historical realities, many on the right have turned King into a mythic embodiment of the "good" liberalism of the early civil rights movement, before it "degenerated into a collection of political extremists, homosexual militants, Muslim activists, and anti-American Marxists," as the right-wing media watchdog group Accuracy in Media puts it.

Thomas Frank, in What's the Matter With Kansas?, has many more examples of the right adopting the rhetoric of the civil rights movement for its own ends. This might be something of a paradox, given that the right opposed the civil rights movement at each and every stage, yet now they argue that it was a good and necessary thing, a triumph of good old fashioned Americanism. Cal Thomas writes:

It is easy to bask in his glow four decades after his death. It took incredible bravery at the time to walk with him in support of his cause. And it wasn't only his cause. It was an American cause. He challenged this country to live up to its ideals and what he knew was its better nature, if it could escape from behind the barricade of prejudice and ignorance.

Thomas goes on to say: "King deserves more than a national holiday. In what he said about race and brotherhood, he deserves to be followed." On the other hand, the way Thomas follows King is to attack Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a bigot. The big difference between Wright and King is that King died 40 years ago, so his speeches refer to an America that is now safely interred in the past, where self-serving conservatives can clean it up and present it as a triumph of Americanism, as opposed to a still unfinished struggle against America's deep habits and most disreputable impulses.

Michael Eric Dyson: The Prophetic Anger of MLK. Read this for a view of King 40 years ago that still has some immediate relevance today -- the word "prophetic" is not too strong:

After the grand victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King turned his attention to poverty, economic injustice and class inequality. King argued that those "legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve" Northern ghettos or to "penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation." In a frank assessment of the civil rights movement, King said the changes that came about from 1955 to 1965 "were at best surface changes" that were "limited mainly to the Negro middle class." In seeking to end black poverty, King told his staff in 1966 that blacks "care now making demands that will cost the nation something. . . . You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then."

King's conclusion? "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." He didn't say this in the mainstream but to his black colleagues.

Similarly, although King spoke famously against the Vietnam War before a largely white audience at Riverside Church in New York in 1967, exactly a year before he died, he reserved some of his strongest antiwar language for his sermons before black congregations. In his own pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, two months before his death, King raged against America's "bitter, colossal contest for supremacy." He argued that God "didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world today," preaching that "we are criminals in that war" and that we "have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world."

Amen.