Today marks the 32nd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, a limited and limiting bit of jurisprudence, yes, but also the Supreme Court’s landmark recognition–even if in a partial and problematic way–that women have a human right to control their own internal organs, including the reproductive ones. It’s sometimes frustrating that Roe is the ruling that we’re stuck having to defend, but January 22 is the jubilee day in which most abortion was decriminalized in every state in the U.S., and it is a good day to celebrate the remarkable story of the radical feminist movement. (You do know that it was radical feminists who organized the first abortion speak-outs and who drove the movement for abortion law repeal rather than weak health-of-the-mother reform, don’t you?) Roe was the capstone victory in a remarkable struggle that exploded, seemingly out of nowhere, with the first abortion speak-out in 1969, and transformed the lives of millions of women for the better over the course of 4 years. And if that’s not worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.

In honor of the occasion:

• Most of what I want to say today are things that I’ve already said, in Happy Roe v. Wade Day!, April March, Why We Marched, and Pro-Choice on Everything, Part I.

• Digging even deeper into the archives, I can’t encourage you enough to give a read to Lucinda Cisler’s Abortion law repeal (sort of). It’s a remarkable, sometimes depressingly prescient, essay written four years before Roe, on the opportunities and dangers that lay ahead, and on the need to be consistent and completely unapologetic about abortion rights. It’s a woman’s right to control her body that’s at stake here, and there’s no excuse for letting anti-choicers Mau-Mau us into acting as if they had some kind of monopoly on moral discourse.

  The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

  …

  There are many reasons why a woman might seek a late abortion, and she should be able to find one legally if she wants it. She may suddenly discover that she had German measles in early pregnancy and that her fetus is deformed; she may have had a sudden mental breakdown; or some calamity may have changed the circumstances of her life: whatever her reasons, she belongs to herself and not to the state.

• Lauryn at Feministing exhorts:

  Hopefully you have some kickass events planned for the day, however, if Thursday’s festivities left you feeling like you have little left to celebrate, then take a moment to reflect on what you’re willing to do to for the reproductive rights movement.

  Whether it’s a commitment to start escorting at your local abortion clinic, writing a quick email to Congress, taking a pro-choice picture, making a donation, or posting on BushvChoice–just get busy.

  Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, encourages that: “We need to talk to neighbors around the kitchen table about the values of freedom and privacy; we don’t run away from the arguments. Our movement is on stronger ground when we take seriously the moral dimensions of the issue.”

• Of course Keenan is absolutely right that there is a moral principle here, and it’s one worth being unapologetic over. The Well-Timed Period makes that especially clear by offering us a harrowing history lesson. Criminalizing abortion is State violence against women. We must never go back.

• BlackFeminism.org marks the occasion by reminding that for all too many communities, Roe is only a slip of paper, since abortion providers have been run out by the bullies, the thugs, and the constant daily assault from reactionary state governments. Today is a day to celebrate what we’ve won; but it’s also a day to commit ourselves to a struggle that is far from over.

• And finally, L. reminds us of just how far we have come, and how important that struggle has been:

  So just do me a favor and thank dumb luck or the deity of your choice that you were born in an age of reasonably effective birth control and open, legal abortion Better yet, thank your mothers and your grandmothers, for what they forced into being and what they lived through, and admire their strength without being nostalgic for its necessity. You don’t have to wallow in any grim hypothetical details, though there are plenty to be had. Just pause for a few seconds and consider that, yeah, ok, it really is better this way.

In the course of repeating a game the other day, I mentioned that I don’t like meme-talk, and pointed to an older post that, among other things, gives a short version of my reasons for saying that there are no such things as memes. Thing is, in that post I said I was giving the argument short shrift, and said I’d probably come back to it later–and then I never did. Since (1) I had cause to mention it lately, (2) a commentator recently prodded me on my abbreviated version of the argument, and (3) in memoriam of Rox’s last Random Ten–a fun weblog game unfortunately mislabeled a meme–I’d like to make good on that at last. Consider this the Friday Anti-Meme, if you will. Rox may not be continuing to spread a fun idea for talking about music anymore, but by God you will get a cranky philosophical disquisition that spends too much time talking about how we talk about silly web games. (It’s not that I have anything against people who use the word meme to describe the ideas for posts that they spread. At worst it’s a bit of an offense against my prose aesthetic. But I do have reasons for hoping that the word will meet a swift and ignominious demise; and if this contributes to it, well, so much the better.)

So what’s all the fuss about, anyway? Well, we’re not just talking about weblog posting games where you encourage others to join, of course. What is all is the notion of a meme supposed to encompass? Here’s how Susan Blackmore, quoting and explicating from Richard Dawkins’ original discussion in The Selfish Gene (1976), puts it:

At the very end of the book he asked an obvious, if provocative, question. Are there any other replicators [besides DNA-based genes] on our planet? The answer, he claimed, is Yes. Staring us in the face, though still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator — a unit of imitation.

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

(I, for one, won’t forgive such a clunker of an attempt at cutesy neologism. But let’s move on.)

As examples he suggested tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. He mentioned scientific ideas that catch on and propagate themselves around the world by jumping from brain to brain. He wrote about religions as groups of memes with a high survival value, infecting whole societies with belief in a God or an afterlife. He talked about fashions in dress or diet, and about ceremonies, customs and technologies — all of which are spread by one person copying another. Memes are stored in human brains (or books or inventions) and passed on by imitation.

In a few pages he laid the foundations for understanding the evolution of memes. He discussed their propagation by jumping from brain to brain, likened them to parasites infecting a host, treated them as physically realised living structures, and showed how mutually assisting memes will gang together in groups just as genes do. Most important, he treated the meme as a replicator in its own right. He complained that many of his colleagues seemed unable to accept the idea that memes would spread for their own benefit, independently of any benefit to the genes. In the last analysis they wish always to go back to biological advantage to answer questions about human behaviour. Yes, he agreed, we got our brains for biological (genetic) reasons but now we have them a new replicator has been unleashed. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old (Dawkins, 1976, 193-4). In other words, memetic evolution can now take off without regard to its effects on the genes.

Well, Dawkins and Blackmore are certainly right to knock their colleagues’ heads together if they insist on trying to find some way to tie every widespread cultural phenomenon to some sort of adaptation for genetic fitness (except in the very broad sense that human intelligence, as such, allows for such phenomena through its extreme versatility, and human intelligence is itself adaptive). Good for them. Unfortunately, the alternative they offer is on no better grounds. What they are claiming to do is to introduce a new technical term and a new theoretical framework that will give us interesting, useful, and accurate accounts of a huge array of cultural phenomena. Let’s keep in mind just how various the facts they’re claiming to explain are; they explicitly include:

1. the popularity of tunes and catch-phrases
2. fashions in dress
3. cuisine
4. the inculcation (and adaptation) of customs and etiquette
5. styles of art and architecture
6. the spread of ideas and beliefs
7. religious belief, evangelism and conversion
8. the rise and fall of scientific theories
9. the adoption of technologies and useful inventions
10. the preservation of key elements of (1)-(9) in the form of literature, story-telling, articles, blueprints, recipes, etc.
11. the adaptation, modification, and sometimes disappearance of (1)-(10) over time

If you really could come up with a unified science to take all of these phenomena into account, then it truly would be a discovery of Newtonian (or Darwinian) proportions. Dawkins and Blackmore think they have got it: the concept of self-replicating information patterns, and a research programme based on investigating the selective pressures at work on the replicators. Just as research into the selective pressures on genes can do the heavy lifting to explain the vast biodiversity of our world, the idea goes, research into the selective pressures on bits of culture can offer the basis for a Grand Unified Theory of cultural development and human diversity.

If the parallel between selfish genes and bits of culture can be drawn, that is. But that’s easier said than done. For that parallel to hold, and for memetic accounts to do any explanatory work from it, we’ll need to say something about what it means for tunes, catch-phrases, superstitions, religious beliefs, scientific theories, poems, weblog games, customs, and more to be fit, and what the selective pressures on them in a given environment are. In order to draw a good parallel, we need to cash out fitness like we do in evolutionary biology–in terms of reproductive success, i.e., the replicator’s shot at making copies of itself. The whole research programme, then, depends on an account of what it means for tunes, catch-phrases, superstitions, religious beliefs, scientific theories, poems, weblog games, customs, and more to replicate themselves. So what is the account? Well, Dawkins says, it’s jumping from brain to brain; memes replicate when they spread to another person. Or, to be more precise, when one person spreads them to another.

And that’s the problem. To talk about how bits of culture replicate, you need to talk about the reasons people have for spreading, or for taking up, an idea, belief, device, etc.

Yet memetics can’t get us one step closer to understanding these reasons. The whole point of memetics, as a science of culture, is supposed to be that it can give us accurate and interesting explanations of cultural phenomena from the standpoint of selection of the fittest. But there’s an important disanalogy here between evolutionary biology and the study of culture: organisms can, and the astronomically large majority of organisms do, replicate their genes blindly. That is to say, they can replicate their genes without intending or desiring to do so; since of all the species in the known Universe only one understands how babies are made (let alone population genetics), most genes are replicated this way. There is usually a causal link between an organism’s interests or desires or choices and the replication of the genes that may determine or influence them, but there’s no conceptual link; you can spell out what makes for the replication of a gene, and what makes a gene fit, without any essential reference to the interests or desires or choices of its vehicle. Not so for memes; the link between the fitness of a idea, belief, device, game, etc. and the reasons a person does or doesn’t have for passing it on or taking it up is not just causal, but logical. Those reasons may be very simple: you hum a song you heard on the radio because the melody is nice; you tell your child not to bite you because it hurts. Or they may be very complex: scientists begin to adopt the Alvarez theory of the K-T extinction because several complex geological findings tend to support it over other plausible candidates; Dada Anti-Art flourishes in the world of visual art and art criticism because of an intricate knot of political, aesthetic, and philosophical influences including the devastation of the Great War, a perception that the possibilities for modern painting had been exhausted, and the modernist ethic of rebellion against stale convention. But whatever the reasons are, it is essential that there are some reasons; otherwise what we are discussing is not a part of culture, but rather some kind of acquired tic or reflex.

That leaves memetics in a nasty bind. Since there is no way to give an account of the replication or fitness of spreading bits of culture independent of facts about their hosts’ reasons for spreading them, memetic explanations of cultural diversity don’t have the explanatory ground to stand on that genetic explanations of biodiversity do, and must fall into one of two degenerate patterns:

1. They could fall back on some understanding of people and their reasons for accepting and spreading ideas–making the account accurate but completely vacuous. The explanation here depends on the selection of fit over unfit ideas, but the criteria for determining whether an idea is fit or not depends on entirely on understanding acts such as giving evidence, drawing conclusions or committing fallacies, weighing alternatives, informing or deceiving, manipulating, explicating, misdirecting, ignoring, revealing, confusing, and all the other things that people do when they talk with one another. But that just means that the memetic explanation is entirely parasitic on explanations drawn from other disciplines–logic, for example, or rhetoric, or psychology. If those other explanations are good ones, then you may really get an explanation of why an idea has spread so well; but in that explanation memetics will be contributing nothing more than argot. The notions of memes and selective fitness and the rest will just be along for the ride, as terminological placeholders for the non-memetic analytical categories that are doing the real explanatory work.

2. If, on the other hand, they try to offer an explanation that doesn’t refer, either overtly or covertly, to people’s reasons for accepting and spreading ideas, then the meme-terminology will indeed do some special explanatory work of its own; the problem is that it must issue in conclusions that are obviously false. In order to do real explanatory work a memetic account would have to spell out some factor that makes an idea, belief, etc. fit in terms that are independent of facts about hosts (that is, us) and the reasons that we have for adopting or rejecting it. But you can’t do it, and if you tried to, the degree to which your explanation invoked terms that have nothing to do with the person’s reasons would be the degree to which you were treating the object of your study as something other than a cultural product. (If your explanation for a person falling to her knees five times a day has nothing to do with her reasons for accepting and acting on the idea that she ought to, then you’re not explaining a ritual; you’re explaining a repeated fit.) Any non-vacuous memetic account has to be false, because it attempts to explain by irrelevancies.

A would-be memeticist might try to avoid the dilemma by claiming that my second horn depends on an overly rosy view of the average human being’s rationality. Is it really wrong to say that a lot of customs, slogans, etc. aren’t the products of reason? But that would just be a cheat: there’s a difference between explaining a cultural product by reference to bad reasons people have for adopting it, and explaining it without reference to any reasons people have for adopting it. Among the things I said you have to understand in order to understand how some beliefs and ideas spread are things like deceiving and confusing and misdirecting. It’s certainly true that there are some beliefs–superstitions, for example–that persist because people adopt them for bad reasons. But a memetic account that refers only to the bad reasons that a person might have for adopting a belief is no less vacuous than a memetic account that refers to all the reasons they might have had; it’s still entirely parasitic on our understanding of people’s reasons for spreading certain beliefs. The only difference is that it is also less charitable, and so more likely to be false. In fact, this precise confusion seems to be at the root of many if not most memetic accounts: since you can’t intelligibly give an account of cultural practices under option (2), but the memeticist wants to avoid explanations that are obviously entirely parasitic on an understanding of logic and psychology, they try to cheat their way into (2) by restricting the range of reasons that they’ll consider to the bad ones. I think this goes a long way toward explaining, for example, the common memetic explanation for widespread norms for altruism by appeal to the likelihood that people who get the meal will listen to the sermon, or that mutual back-scratching will benefit the scratchers. It’s certainly true that these may be part of the reason why people exhort others to be nice, and listen to others who so exhort them. But why not also explain the widespread norms by reference to, say, the notion that humans can see it’s true that they have a duty to be generous and not cruel? The past century of psychoanalysis and secularism notwithstanding, the fact that an explanation of human behavior is ennobling isn’t always a good reason to regard it as false.

This may also help to explain why memetics talk rarely progresses beyond some appeals to elementary folk psychology concealed under cutesy pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. Smuggling in the folk psychology keeps the account from being false or simply unintelligible–as in (2)–and imposing the flashy argot in between the real (logical, rhetorical, psychological) explanations and the audience directs their attention away from the degree to which–as in (1)–the account is, where it gets something right, entirely parasitic on some non-memetic explanation of human behavior.

Omar K. Ravenhurst argued, in reply to my previous post, that the dependence of memetic accounts on other disciplines might not pose any problem for memetics as a science. Thus:

I don’t know if I follow you here. Physics can theoretically explain the whole of biology. Even if we could do this in practice, it wouldn’t destroy the usefulness of biology as shorthand.

Actually, I’m not at all sure that it’s true that biology is reducible to a complete physics. But if it is, that certainly doesn’t mean that biology is useless. Fair enough, but that doesn’t help memetics. If memetics is entirely reducible to the other human sciences, then it is failed at what it set out to do. It’s not at all clear to me that memetics could do what it is supposed to for the other human sciences (that is, provide an over-arching theoretical framework that will do what evolutionary biology has done for the study of paleontology and ecology) if it is merely a shorthand for them, but even if it could, why bother? If biology is merely shorthand for a complete chemistry and physics, it is still useful because the chemical and physical processes involved in a single organism are orders of magnitude more complex than anything a human being could comprehend in one survey. But are facts such as People often pick up catchy tunes they hear on the street or Scientists tend to pick up on scientific theories that elegantly explain recent findings and solve outstanding problems in the field or Sometimes human beings believe things without enough evidence if it makes them feel better about the future complex facts that need a shorthand? If not, then why bother making up a distracting shorthand–much less a shorthand based on a systematic attempt to turn attention away from the very facts about people and their reasons for doing what they do that you ultimately need to refer to to make sense of the account?

It seems, in all cases, that memetics is nothing more than pseudoscientific mummery; the notions of memes and memetic fitness, and any research based on these notions, depend on a conceptual misdirection. We are told that we’re going to find out something about how ideas or beliefs spread, but the memetic terminology is supposed to turn your intellectual attention away from the very facts about meme hosts (viz., us) that actually explain why we do or do not accept ideas, and why we do or do not pass them to other people. But that’s nothing more than a conjuring trick, and a pernicious one at that. The reasons that we have for picking up or putting down ideas, beliefs, theories, bits of culture, etc. are what make us who we are: rational animals who relate to one another in an intelligent community. Memetic explanations are so often uncharitable because they insist on trying to explain facts about human actions, human ideas, and human communities in a literally dehumanized way. The sooner we stop that, the better.

As far as the weblog games go: if the word meme deserves to die, then what should they be called? Well, what about the good old word idea? As in: Here’s an idea that I got from Rox Populi. I’m passing it on here because [I think it’s fun / I’m hard up for material / I want to start a discussion / I want to rant about memetics / etc. etc. etc.]

Take responsibility for the contents of your own mind! Écrasez la niaserie!

Today is coronation day. I may have more to say about that shortly, but in the meantime, here’s an idea I got from Fred at Stone Court. Instead of indulging in stupid symbolic actions that no-one will see or stupid direct actions that no-one will be affected by, or blacking your web page out for the day (which, quite honestly, strikes me as taking the imperial pomp on its own terms way too seriously), why not at least do something that involves a bit of thinking and might provoke a bit of argument? In this case, the idea is to construct a “Fantasy Administration” that you’d like to see in place of the jerks who are being installed or re-installed over the next several days. You can take a glance at Fred’s; I sympathize with a lot of his choices (Howard Dean for President might be an ultimately limited platform, but it’s one I’d gladly take instead of the current mess). But my list is going to turn out a bit different, I guess:

• President: Nobody

• Vice President: Nobody

• Secretary of State: Nobody

• Secretary of the Treasury: Nobody

• Secretary of Defense: Nobody

• Attorney General: Nobody

• Secretary of the Interior: Nobody

• Secretary of H.U.D.: Nobody

• Secretary of Education: Nobody

• Secretary of H.H.S.: Nobody

• Secretary of Veterans Affairs: Nobody

• Department of Homeland Security: Dear God, nobody, please.

• Chief of Staff: Nobody

• Drug Czar: Nobody

You might worry, “Hey, the Constitution and the U.S. Code say we have to fill these offices with somebody, so why shouldn’t we put better people in place?” But I don’t recognize the legal authority of the Constitution or the laws passed under it, and neither should you. You might also object, “Look, you have to deal with political realities here, and even if everyone in your administration resigned on the first day, that’d just make Dennis Hastert President, and he’d appoint a bunch of people worse.” I’m sympathetic to that worry; I’m not a voluntaryist, and I don’t object to voting or office-holding as a defensive tactic against State oppression. On the other hand, worrying about the practical realities of implementing a fantasy cabinet seems a bit strained. If you really insist, then I’d say: any reliable libertarian will do, as long as she will enter on the understanding that her job is to step into office, repeal one or two things, pardon any nonviolent prisoners she can, appoint more reliable libertarians down the chain of succession, and as soon as her successor is confirmed, tender her resignation. With luck, this should mean an average term of somewhere between a couple weeks and a couple months per office-holder. Wash, rinse, repeat.

It just goes to show, once again: everything’s easier when you’re an anarchist.

P.S.: I want to thank Fred for calling his post Great Idea. In the same spirit, this post is passing along an idea; it is not the replication of a meme. There are no such things as memes. I will keep pointing this out until it becomes the anti-meme and puts this pseudoscientific mummery out of its misery. Just in case you were wondering.

Mythistory Monday is on a holiday break this week. Since today is the observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m inclined to take a bit of a break from knocking knuckle-headed distortions of history for a bit of a celebration of something that most of us know.

There is a lot to complain about in the way that Dr. King’s life and career have been handled–both in the uncritical hagiography that has been made of his life and also in the way that that same process has obliterated so much of his real thought and political commitments from living memory that even hard Rightists who spent their college years fighting the civil rights movement tooth and nail, or happily working alongside those who did, can now come back and claim to be speaking in Dr. King’s voice by piously intoning a few words snipped from a single sentence out of his most famous speech. There’s a lot to complain about, but for it all, there’s a hell of a lot to celebrate too. Underneath the television specials and the holy martyr imagery, there is a real man, who has been put on a pedestal, who has been abused, who has been ignored at the same time as he is piously invoked, but who, after it all, cannot be struck out of our memory and who remains a testament, in living memory, to what is possible for this world.

That’s what I want to remember today: the living Dr. King. No holy martyr, but a real person, a Black preacher who found himself in the midst of the most profound struggles of American history. In spite of his work with the Montgomery Improvement Association and in forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he was always more of an agitator than an organizer–a maker of speeches and a preacher of sermons who often showed up late in the game for campaigns that others had started. He was frankly prone to showboating at times, and frustrating on more than one occasion for the men and especially the women who did the long, hard, thankless work of organizing in groups such as SCLC and SNCC–from Rosa Parks to Ella Baker to Bob Moses to Fannie Lou Hamer. And yet also an indispensible man–not just as a symbol, but as a thinker and an actor and a moral guide, who gave long years of his life to the struggle to end Jim Crow, who remained, through that struggle’s greatest triumphs and its darkest hours, in the face of agonizing doubt and the ugliest sorts of violence, to a new kind of nonviolent politics on behalf of freedom and compassion for all. We must avoid the lazy politics of invoking Dr. King’s name as a way to deride just revolutions or calls for forceful self-defense; we have to be careful about how we universalize the lessons of the Freedom Movement; but I don’t think anyone can reasonably deny that the nonviolent politics that Dr. King and Ella Baker and others developed, drawing from and expanding on the past examples of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Sanger, and Mohandas Gandhi, is a force that has changed the world–and changed it for the better.

• Jason at Negro, Please links to his MLK Day post from last year, noting, sadly, that nothing relevant has really changed since he wrote it.

• David Grenier and Jeffrey Tucker remind us of Dr. King’s statement against the war on Vietnam:

  Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on. …

  As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent….

  These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest….

  — Beyond Vietnam, 4 April 1967, New York City

• Rox Populi offers an MLK Random Reader, including:

  For nonviolence not only calls upon its adherents to avoid external physical violence, but it calls upon them to avoid internal violence of spirit. It calls on them to engage in that something called love. And I know it is difficult sometimes. When I say love at this point, I’m not talking about an affectionate emotion. It’s nonsense to urge people, oppressed people, to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. I’m talking about something much deeper. I’m talking about a sort of understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men.

  — Address at the Freedom Rally in Cobo Hall, 23 June 1963

• Amazonfemme gives us this from Dr. King’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize:

  I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him.

  I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

  I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

  I believe that even amid today’s motor bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men.

  I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land.

  “And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.”

  I still believe that we shall overcome.

  — Acceptance Speech at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, 10 December 1964

• I close with two of my favorite quotes. Only one of them is by Martin Luther King Jr.; the other is about him:

  It is time to reorder our national priorities. All those who now speak of good will and who praise the work of such groups as the President’s Commission now have the gravest responsibility to stand up and act for the social changes that are necessary to conquer racism in America. If we as a society fail, I fear that we will learn that very shortly that racism is a sickness unto death.

  — Martin Luther King Jr., 4 March 1968

  And, on the subject of King’s real radicalism, and the role of radicalism generally in the struggle for justice, Malcolm X has this to say:

  I’ll say nothing against him. At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a Communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King.

  — Malcolm X

• That first quote, by the way, I lifted from a remix of Dr. King’s speeches that I couldn’t possibly do justice to with a description. You really should listen to it.

All of these things happened while my parents were in college, not 40 years ago. Think of what Dr. King’s efforts, and the efforts of the countless heros–those whose names we know and the thousands of ordinary people who haven’t made it into the books or the teevee specials–have meant for the world in those few years. Yes, we are living through dark days, but think of what it was like just within living memory of today. As Dr. King put it: Let us remember that the arc of the Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I hope so. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

(Thanks, Tom Tomorrow. I got a million of ’em.)

George W. Bush, speech in Cincinatti, Ohio, 7 October 2002:

After eleven years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.

George W. Bush, remarks to reporters, 3 May 2003:

We’ll find them. It’ll be a matter of time to do so

George W. Bush, interview with TVP Poland, 30 May 2003:

But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.

Washington Post, 12 January 2005:

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

…

Duelfer is back in Washington, finishing some addenda to his September report before it is reprinted.

There’s no particular news in them, just some odds and ends, the intelligence official said. The Government Printing Office will publish it in book form, the official said.

The CIA declined to authorize any official involved in the weapons > search to speak on the record for this story. The intelligence official offered an authoritative account of the status of the hunt on the condition of anonymity. The agency did confirm that Duelfer is wrapping up his work and will not be replaced in Baghdad.

Scott McClellan, White House press briefing, 12 January 2005:

MR. McCLELLAN: … But the President is going to continue working closely with our friends and allies to confront the threats that we face —

Q How can he do it again —

MR. McCLELLAN: — and we continue to take steps to improve our intelligence. That’s what the President is going to do. We have very good relationships with countries across the world because of the President’s efforts over the last few years. He’s worked to build strong relationships with our friends and allies, and worked to make sure that we’re confronting the threats that we face. It’s important that we act together to confront the threats that we face. And it’s important that when we say something, that we follow through on what we say. That’s why the President is also —

Q Even if the information is wrong?

MR. McCLELLAN: — that’s why the President is also working to strengthen the United Nations and make it more effective. That’s something that we’re working on, as well, because it was very clear what the international community expected of Saddam Hussein, and he continued to defy the international community. It was a very unique threat that we faced in terms of Iraq. And in a post-September 11th world, it was a threat you could not ignore.

George W. Bush, 12-14 January 2005:

…

Further Reading

• GT 2004/10/06: It’s Official
• GT 2004/02/08: What you mean “We”?
• GT 2003/02/02: War hawks fail to make the case