The Anchoress

My dear Blogfather Ed Morrissey, writing at Hot Air, takes a look at this rather drama-queeny column by E.J. Dionne and then lays Dionne out nicely:

E.J. Dionne commemorates the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King by proclaiming it the day that liberalism died. He argues that King’s death led to the election of Richard Nixon, thanks to his “coded racism” of law and order, and that liberalism died on the balcony at the Lorraine in Memphis. The only problem with this analysis is that it ignores the entire decade of the 1970s and misses the mark by eleven years:
[...]
The entire decade of the 1970s constituted a liberal experiment in American governance, and not just in top-down management of the economy. Affirmative action started and expanded not before 1968 but afterwards. We withdrew from Vietnam and allowed the Saigon government to fall, thanks to defeatism at home. We became weaker abroad and allowed our military to sag during the transition to an all-volunteer force. Unemployment and inflation rose while we allowed OPEC to batter our economy rather than ramp up our own domestic oil production capabilities.

And finally, in November 1979, we reached the nadir of American power when we allowed the Iranians to sack our embassy in Tehran without offering any appropriate response. The collapse of American prestige continued for 444 days while the liberal administration of Jimmy Carter floundered for a solution short of military action. Religious fanatics held our diplomatic personnel — and our credibility — hostage for well over a year, during which the Soviet Union felt emboldened enough to invade Afghanistan and set off a series of events that plague us to this day.

That was the end of liberalism as a credible political force.

Quite right - you’ll want to read the whole thing. But - I will say that Dionne was on to something; the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King was the day something died in American politics, while something else was born.

What died was public taste for authentic intellectual substance and what came screaming to life was an insatiable hunger for unthinking sentiment and sensation. And here - with King’s terrible assassination - we may possibly be able to identify the very moment when image and fakery began to overpower and supplant authenticity in America.

Robert F. Kennedy learned of MLK’s murder as he was campaigning before a gathering of African-Americans, and he spontaneously delivered a remarkable speech to that hurting and angry crowd – a speech that had poetry, personal grief, compassion, understanding – RFK drew on his authentic self and his own resources, and it elevated everyone who was within hearing.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with — be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

Contrast that with Jesse Jackson’s opportunistic non-stop round of bloody-shirted (and later disputed) television interviews declaring he had cradled the dying Martrin Luther King. 16 years later, running for president, Jackson would downplay that claim, but back then, in 1968, the “whole world was watching,” and opportunistic Jesse Jackson wore a bloody shirt for two days and made sure everyone saw it.

Robert Kennedy’s breathtaking extemporaneous words are barely recalled, but everyone remembers Jackson’s shirt. It was a triumph of marketing, of image over substance, and America has been roiling in the funhouse mirror of spin and imaging ever since.

No wonder we’re so dizzy.