I think we’ve reached Peak White Martin at last. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders began Wednesday’s press briefing by “honoring” the memory of the murdered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by reading the last few paragraphs of his “mountaintop” speech, which he delivered at the Masonic Temple in Memphis, Tennessee the night before he was shot down on a motel balcony.

Watching SHS, functioning as the official voice of a president* who started his road to the White House by spreading lies and slander about the first African-American president, reading those words in her dead-eyed Weekend-Anchor-in-Fort-Smith voice was enough to make me feel radically non-non-violent, which really is not the proper way to feel on this solemn occasion.

At this point, I think it’s time to give White Martin a rest. In his death, the country that did so much to hinder his work in life fashioned up White Martin to make him useful in death. His work on economic inequality and against the atrocity that was the war in Vietnam was soft-pedalled into oblivion and replaced by an almost fanatical devotion to one line in an epic speech he gave in 1963, that one about the content of someone’s character. White Martin was a conciliatory figure, instead of the Martin Luther King, Jr. whose house was bombed, whose phones and hotel rooms were bugged, and who was violently driven out of Chicago when he tried to lead an open housing march. If Martin Luther King, Jr. was so damned conciliatory, why did someone shoot him in the head?

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White Martin is an offense against history. It is a crime against memory. And to have this White House, and this president*, even mention the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. in public is to watch that crime unfold in broad fcking daylight. Just shut up, OK? Shut your bloody gobs about him. You don’t have the right.

(Even some liberals have a tendency to wrap themselves, at least partly, in the spirit of White Martin. I admired Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. I admired the courage it took for him to walk into the streets of Indianapolis and tell a crowd gathered there that Dr. King had been murdered, and I admire the eloquence he showed that night. But, if that’s your principle memory of that dreadful night, I’m sorry, but you’re doing it wrong.)

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The 50th anniversary of his murder comes at a propitious time. His true spirit is walking the streets again. It walks with the people who march against murder under color of law. His true spirit walks with the teachers who march for the means to teach children properly. He walks with the schoolchildren who demand that something be done about this country’s insane affection for its firearms. He walked with everyone who marched on the day after this ridiculous president* was born. He did not walk with Sarah Huckabee Sanders to the podium in this White House for the purposes of profaning his memory. Even in death, he’s smarter than that.

White Martin is an offense against history. It is a crime against memory.

You want the real spirit of the movement? Listen to Michael Eric Dyson, speaking on Wednesday in front of the Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum. The spirit of any movement has to move, not stand still. White Martin is a vehicle for historical petrification. White Martin is an addictive anesthetic, and we’ve been hooked on it far too long.

Watch the video of that whole speech in Memphis. Before the prophetic part at the end, Martin Luther King rails against the injustices being visited by the local government upon the striking sanitation workers on whose behalf he came to Memphis, where he was murdered. At that moment, they were under a court injunction forbidding them to march and, in that very speech, Dr. King told them that the injunction would not, and should not, stop what they were doing. In truth, he was telling them to break the law.

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His whole philosophy was based on breaking unjust laws. His whole career was made up of acts of lawbreaking. That’s who he was. That was his job. That was his mission, and that should be his memory. Non-violence is not the opposite of anger. It never has been. It is the repurposing of anger to constructive purpose, and that constructive purpose was the destruction of systems of oppression. If that’s a profound contradiction then, dammit, this country came into being as a profound contradiction. "How is it," sniped Samuel Johnson, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberties from the drivers of negroes?" We are a people of contradictions. So was Martin Luther King, Jr. We should make the most of that.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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