The death of a major political figure these days is an occasion
not so much for reflection as for exploitation of the political
opportunity or obligations such a death offers. The death of
Coretta Scott King is of course exhibit number one. Even before
this week’s scandalous memorial service we saw President Bush open
his State of the Union speech by paying tribute to her, which
worked politically because Gov. Tim Kaine, in the Democratic
response that followed, seemed to be playing catchup when he began
his remarks with a tribute to Mrs. King.
At the Atlanta ceremonies, meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton, once she
stopped nodding, noted, “We can carry on the struggle against
racism and discrimination.” It never ends, you see. Ninety-nine
percent of America has probably rejected racism, yet the official
line is that racism remains endemic. “We shall overcome” were
evidently empty words.
A key word no one uttered in Atlanta was “integration” —
perhaps the single most important concept associated with Martin
Luther King before black power and identity politics pushed his
goals off the political table. “Equality” was mentioned, but it’s a
term no one pairs with color-blindness. A half-century of civil
rights movement has left us a more color-conscious society than
ever. The goal of color-blind integration is all but forgotten.
Just how much so was recently driven home by reactions to the
new film, Glory Road, which purportedly chronicles Texas
Western’s famous all-black starting team that in 1966 defeated an
all-white Kentucky team for the NCAA basketball championship.
Sports Illustrated last month actually took the press of
40 years ago to task for underplaying the racial dimension.
“Newspaper and magazine accounts [of the championship game], read
today, make it seem as if an epidemic of color-blindness had struck
press row,” SI’s Gene Menez writes contemptuously about
one of the Civil Rights Movement’s founding ideals. Naturally, in
best Oprah fashion he also defends the movie’s factual distortions
in the name of a “larger truth” — as if American blacks hadn’t
already become a fixture in college and professional basketball
well before the 1966 showdown.
Incidentally, I use that last word on purpose. In the current
progressive mind, there can be no racial progress unless it’s a
black on white confrontation in which whitey gets his comeuppance.
What if Texas Western had lost?
Such ideologically driven myopia led a number of reviewers of
Glory Road, including Roger Ebert, to compare the Texas
Western’s victory in 1966 to Jackie Robinson’s breaking the Major
League’s color barrier nineteen years earlier. Take your pick:
we’re either a sick society or a stupid one.
Or both, as the dishonest reactions to the death of Betty
Friedan remind us. Read the obituaries in the New York
Times or Washington Post and you’d never know that
Friedan’s women’s liberation impulse derived not from any real
suburban frustration but from her serious Marxist commitments in
college and subsequently. The Post even quotes Friedan biographer Daniel Horowitz
without informing readers that he is the one who brought Friedan’s
Marxist foundations to light. An even greater irony is that a
chronic leftist like Friedan essentially came to serve the
interests of the privileged intellectual and professional classes.
That she might have been playing them for dupes guarantees that the
real Betty Friedan will have to remain under wraps. As Judith
Shulevitz once put it in response to Horowitz, what would he not
being a woman know about Friedan?
There was a recent political death, of former German president
Johannes Rau, that barely attracted notice here. Though Rau had
been a leading figure the Social Democratic Party (SPD) for more
than a quarter century, the N.Y. Times had to rely on the
AP for its obituary. Which only figures, given that Rau was a
genuine force for reconciliation, whether with Poland or
Israel.
I had the good fortune to meet Rau, in 1982, during a six-day
junket to West Germany in the midst of a sizzling heat wave. My
group of some 20 journalists met with a number of SPD luminaries,
including in Bonn with then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former
chancellor Willy Brandt. Those meetings took place in
air-conditioned comfort. The real test came in Dusseldorf, seat of
North Rhine-Westphalia where Rau was then premier. The meeting room
in which we gathered wasn’t air-conditioned, as we noticed with
alarm on walking into stifling, awful conditions straight out of
Death Valley, California. Yet there to greet us was Rau, in
long-sleeved white shirt and tie, not a drop of sweat falling from
his forehead. Smiling, friendly, relaxed, he knew each of our names
as he walked over to shake hands. He proceeded to brief us at
length, acting all the while as if for all he knew the room was at
a perfect 70 degrees. I don’t remember offhand what he said, though
I do recall he was being trumpeted as a rising star and likely
successor to Schmidt. Right then I knew he had the right stuff. (As
it was, he lost against Helmut Kohl in 1987.)
Later I learned one of the secrets to Rau’s self-control and
pleasant calm. He was the son of a Lutheran minister, and, as the
New York Times reported in 1987, “Mr. Rau was long known
among fellow Social Democrats as ‘Brother Johannes’ because of his
active involvement in church affairs and his habit of starting off
the day with a reading from the Bible.”
In other words, he wasn’t the sort of person today’s New
York Times and post-modern culture will bother to commemorate
with any delusional fondness.
