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Last year was hard on heroes.
The Rev. Ralph Abernathy published a biography of his long-time friend and associate, Dr. Martin Luther King, whose birthday accounts for yesterday's federal holiday.
Abernathy tried to present a full account of King's life, which included not only courage and eloquence, but also some shabby episodes of marital infidelity. The general response was not to thank Abernathy for giving history an eyewitness report of some important events and a rounded view of a major participant in those events, but to criticize him for being honest -- that is, King did not appear at all times as a perfect saint.
Another American immortal whose image suffered
grievously last year was H.L. Mencken. We Mencken fans had
no disloyal
Abernathy to blame, for it was Mencken's
own diary which revealed him as something of a bigot:
anti-Semitic and anti-black attitudes, blind to many of the
horrors of Nazi Germany.
The furors over Mencken's diary and Abernathy's biography of King raise a question which won't ever be satisfactorily answered -- where do we draw the line between a person's public life and his private concerns? If he speaks nobly in public while fighting the good fight, but has sordid episodes or disgusting prejudices in his private life, does that make him a scheming hypocrite, or, like the rest of us, a mere imperfect human?
None of us is as good or wise as we would like to be, which may explain why churches stay in business.
King's eloquence shamed a complacent nation 25 years ago. He brilliantly displayed the difference between what America professed to be, a nation of liberty and justice for all, and the America that used police dogs and fire hoses to keep some citizens from voting or attending school.
As for Mencken's prejudices, the man never claimed to be fair, even as he, the supposed anti-Semite in business partnership with two Jews (George Nathan and Alfred Knopf), sought out black writers and argued against discrimination in public places.
And what was the effect of Mencken's writing? Did his
work further oppression in America? Look at black author
Richard Wright's autobiography: I opened A Book of
Prefaces and began to read....And how did one write like
that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with
his pen...laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking
God, authority.... Yes, this man was fighting, fighting
with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as
one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes,
for here they were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them
as a weapon?
Thus inspired, Wright started reading everything he could get his hands on. I know I felt much the same way -- Wright explained it better than I can -- the first time I encountered Mencken's potent prose.
It doesn't change my opinion of Mencken's work that his diary contains offensive attitudes, nor does it diminish King's dream to know that he was sometimes a philandering male chauvinist.
Why is there this demand that people be perfect in all respects?
Doesn't it mean something that a Baltimore tobacco dealer's son who never attended college could become America's leading man of letters? That the pastor of an obscure Baptist church could change the course of a mighty nation? That they could wield great and generally beneficial influence despite their flaws?
Perhaps not. These days, the argumentum ad
hominem is the only argument that matters, and when you
read an essay or listen to a speech, it is not the argument
that is important, but the personal life of the author.
Consider the source
is all anybody needs to say, and
since no source is without blemish, our smug lives need
never again be discomfited by the likes of an H.L. Mencken
or Martin Luther King.
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