King Funeral Brouhaha

Critics have attacked Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Jimmy Carter former president of the United States, for speaking out against war, poverty, and deception at the funeral of Coretta Scott King. Doing so amounted to attacks on the Bush administration, they say, and was impolite because President George W. Bush was present at the funeral.

These criticisms skirt a basic point: This was Mrs. King’s funeral, not President Bush’s. Honoring Mrs. King’s life was paramount, and her life was about issues inclusive of what Lowery and Carter discussed. If the Bush administration’s policies are 180 degrees opposite of what the Kings were about, so be it.

If we accept a value system wherein speakers cannot criticize presidential policy if the President is present, then the President can quash any criticism simply by showing up. That is not free speech America.

Attempts were made to ban funerals during the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa during the 1970’s because funerals included the protest that the decedents’ lives had been about. Are we headed toward banning activists’ funerals in the United States? Perhaps.

On a reporters’ roundtable discussion program, commentators Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson ranted that the speakers who criticized presidential policy at Mrs. King’s funeral lacked manners and taste. “Manners” and “taste,” in this case, are simply manifestations of the culture or value system of the oppressor.

“You can also eat with your hands, but you don‘t,” Carlson said, as if that would demonstrate the ultimate tastelessness.

But we do eat with our hands in Africa because it is consistent with our culture there. Does Africa therefore lack taste? No, our taste is different from the Bushes’ taste. Our taste is far less elitist.

Their “taste”— integral to the insensitive culture of the ruling class — permits the President’s upper class mom to imply that the crowded squalor in the Houston Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina was okay because the victims were “underprivileged.”

That same upper class taste discourages discussion of injustice in the presence of the oppressor, less that oppressor be offended.

Christ and the prophets did not keep silent. Christ spoke truth to the Pharisees and Sadducees, with deadly consequences. Elijah spoke truth to King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, and was therefore hunted. Were those guys killed and hunted because of their bad manners and lack of taste?

Cheney Shooting Brouhaha

Vice President Richard Cheney’s accidental shooting of Harry Whittington while hunting quail on the Armstrong Ranch in South Texas demonstrates his insensitivity to the consequences of his actions. So focused was he on what he wanted to do – shoot quail – that he paid insufficient attention to the safety of his 78-year old hunting buddy, who had apparently wandered into the line of fire – as a typical 78-year old might do.
Apparently, Cheney was not even thinking about Whittington. Such carelessness smacks of reckless indifference to human life. Thank God Whittington lived.

That vice presidential mindset also appears to have manifested itself in the invasion of Iraq. We now know that the Bush administration, in which Cheney plays a prominent role, planned to invade Iraq from day one, and that 9/11 simply provides a lame excuse. That fixation, that determination to do what they wanted to do, regardless of consequences, resulted in tremendous loss of life, limb, and happiness for at least tens of thousands of people from three continents.

The Bush leaders, including Cheney, paid too little attention to the welfare of the human beings who wound up in their line of fire.

Reconciliation – Out of the Box

Wait a minute. Are these statements tasteless, poor manners? The vice president felt terrible about the Armstrong Ranch accident. Why kick him when he’s down?

I am not kicking. I am simply observing an awful consistency that leaps out, unless one tries to suppress it.

Putting truths into separate, neat boxes is comfortable, but dangerously close to falsification. Truth suppressed will rise, full and intermingled.

To lock the Armstrong Ranch shooting and the ever-mounting casualty toll in Iraq into separate boxes — to refuse to mention them in the same — is to ignore the harmful consequential pattern of an overly focused, self-absorbed leader with access to guns.

To put Coretta Scott King’s life and death into separate boxes  to ignore at her funeral the causes to which she dedicated her life — would be to falsify her life.