Two Federal Holidays, One Federal Offense

I already had today’s subject in mind when a reinforcing email appeared in my office in-box late yesterday afternoon.

It was from a physical therapist I’d best not identify, given that my employer, the American Physical Therapy Association, is steadfastly nonpartisan and hasn’t even ever taken a stand—unlike many health care organizations—on the soon-to-be-trashed Affordable Care Act. She was writing to me about something work-related, but felt compelled to lead her message with this:

“Happy Martin Luther King Day weekend. I am still trying to wrap my brain around starting the week by celebrating the work of Dr King and ending it with the coronation of our new president.”

I might have put it a little differently myself: “I am still trying to wrap my shell-shocked brain around how today we’re celebrating a great man who sacrificed his life to the highest of ethical principles, yet on Friday we’re elevating to our nation’s highest elective office a petty, self-serving man who takes pride in sacrificing nothing, siphons money from his own sham charity, and just the other day childishly tweeted that one of Dr King’s leading foot soldiers, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, is “all talk and no action” and impoverishes his own constituents, simply because Lewis had the temerity to question the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s Russia-aided Election Day victory.”

But, hey whatever. Different strokes of the keyboard for different folks. (And many more strokes of the keyboard for the likes of long-winded me.) Regardless, our point was the same. This is one strange, and ethically discordant, week in these Disunited States.

If I were Donald Trump, and thus looked only at my personal bottom line, I’d have good reason to praise Dr King and him equally, without convolution. I mean, the dead freedom fighter and the regrettably very much alive soon-to-be president of the United States each has given me a day off work this week, since both King Day and Inaugural Day are federal holidays, and my workplace closes on federal holidays. Trump praises anyone—a rogue’s gallery that stretches from Steve Bannon to Vladimir Putin—who, in one or another, scratches this back. Thus, if Trump were my role model, I might be sitting at our home PC at this very moment, late on a weekday morning, wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt and exclaiming, “Praise the man and pass the Lucky Charms!”

(In fact, I am sitting at the PC so clothed, and I did just finish a bowl of Lucky Charms—a breakfast cereal that I still, at age 58, find magically delicious, even while I concede its nutritional noxiousness. It occurred to as I was slurping down yellow moons and green clovers that this act of nutritional disobedience toward the healthy-eating agenda of Big Sistah—outgoing first lady Michelle Obama—probably was the most bipartisan thing I’ll do all week. Well, other than listening to bluegrass music, which appeals to both Blue and Red fans of  the fiddle because it references, more or less equally, New Deal populism and Our Savior Jesus Christ.)

So, where was I? Oh, I was noting that a Trumpian approach to the optics of this week would be simply to say, “Ethics, schmethics! A day off is a day off! Ain’t America great (again)!?” But that’s not at all how this week feels to me. It feels, rather, like cruelly ironic juxtaposition.

A few caveats here. I would never suggest that Martin Luther King Jr was a perfect man—“perfect man” being an oxymoron in and of itself. He serially cheated on his wife, for example, and he plagiarized parts of some of his speeches. Donald Trump, on the other hand, may well have done something nice for somebody, at some point in his life, without any expectation of, or demand for, credit and praise. While I’m extremely dubious that’s ever happened, I do allow for the possibility. And, finally, John Lewis’s suggestion that Trump’s election is illegitimate because of Russia’s electronic interference strikes me as hyperbolic and needlessly provocative, given the intelligence community's consensus that nothing Russia did was definitive in securing a victory for Trump that required only a fateful confluence of voter fear, anger, ignorance and insistence on change at any cost.

All of that written, though, to get at the heart of why the contrast between these two holidays feels so devastating to that PT, to me, and, I have to think, to anyone who still believes in actual facts and unassailable human values, one need only imagine what Donald Trump would be tweeting today to Dr King, were the reverend not to have been slain in Memphis in 1968 and were he instead to have celebrated his 88th birthday yesterday with a statement denouncing—in defense of a just and pluralistic America; nothing personal—the substance and tone of pretty much everything Trump has said, tweeted and done since his nomination, on subjects ranging from health care to housing (Ben Carson at HUD? WTF?!) to guns (for) and environmental safeguards (against).

“MLK old and senile! SAD! Never created a single job! DID help create LA riots in ’90s and record murder rates in Chicago today!!”

Did that exceed the Twitter character count? He might have completed the thought in a subsequent tweet, adding “I have a dream … of making America great! Not of every black person living in a horrible ghetto!!!!”

If you doubt that, just look at the way Trump attacked Lewis—a man who’s probably done more in any given week to try to improve the lives of those less fortunate than himself than Trump has done in his entire lifetime. It isn’t just the vitriol. It’s the utter lack of any historical perspective or personal restraint—qualities that seem certain to define the presidency of a man who hates to read, has zero patience for instruction and always must win.

I’m hardly a fan of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who’s a “true” conservative in every scary sense of that word. But it’s reasonable to assume that he—like a Bush or Reagan of past years—would have responded much more generously to Lewis’s remarks.

While I’m no presidential spokesman, I feel secure in speculating that Pence’s response would’ve sounded something like this: “I have the deepest respect for Congressman Lewis, who fought for equal rights for all Americans alongside Dr King, whose birthday we celebrate on Monday. I find the congressman’s comments on the president-elect unfortunate, however, given the absence of any suggestion that Russian actions decisively affected the execution of a democratic process that Dr King gave his life to promote.”

Now, how hard would it have been for Trump—instead of tweeting his typically infantile version of “I know you are, but what am I?!”—to have issued a civil, rational statement pairing a compliment with a complaint, in time-honored political style?

Answer? Very hard. Impossible, in fact. Because, unlike Dr King and John Lewis, who had so much self-control in the service of principle that they preached and acted with nonviolence even toward those who would, and did, do violence toward them, Trump has no self-control in unprincipled pursuit of his relentless quest to elevate himself, whatever the cost to others.

I noted this past weekend that Trump took a few seconds out to tweet his praise of Detective Steven McDonald, the New York City cop who was famous for forgiving the young gunman who’d shot and paralyzed him in 1986. When McDonald died from a heart attack the other day at age 59, Trump called him “a real NYC hero.” For once, Trump got something right. But it surely was lost on the president-elect that McDonald stood for everything that Trump—who’s brooked precious little adversity since being born with a silver spoon in his mouth 70 years ago, and who, in the interim, has dodged drafts and done everything else he could to avoid any personal danger or meaningful public service—does not. I found it interesting to note, in a newspaper account of McDonald’s funeral, that David Letterman was there, and that he had, in fact, been one of McDonald’s closest friends in the decades since the shooting. The retired talk show host had, in a New York Times piece in the run-up to last fall’s election, struggled to understand the frequent cruelty and utter lack of introspection of Trump—a nevertheless crowd-pleasing showman who’d been his guest many times over the years. Letterman finally settled on the word “damaged” to describe the real estate mogul, using it as the epitaph to a candidacy seemingly doomed to die from a thousand self-inflicted blows.

Except, of course, that what surely would have killed Trump in a more-reliably Blue America only made him stronger in a blindly enraged Red one that gave him the electoral votes he needed to put him over the top.

So, now here it is, Martin Luther King Jr Day, and we honor the bravery, resilience and predominant goodness of this man whose root message was one of love and respect for all Americans. On Friday, we will inaugurate as president a man who in many respects is King’s opposite. I think about how Dr King literally put his life on the line for years, as his own safety and his family’s were relentlessly threatened, and how he courageously continued to do so until the day he was gunned down while trying to help striking sanitation workers get decent benefits and a living wage. I think about how, conversely, in  2017, I’d never put a “Black Lives Matter” bumper sticker or an anti-guns decal on my car because I’m certain my vehicle would be vandalized, and I fear that I would be assaulted, and that a bullet might even find its way into my house.

This acknowledgement frankly makes me a bit ashamed of myself. But it makes me more ashamed still to live in a country that’s rife with people who would punish those who try, in whatever small ways, to honor the values King championed. It makes me despair, too, that we’re about to swear in as president a man whose selfishness and intemperance has encouraged and exacerbated today’s hothouse atmosphere of impatience and absolutism.

I plan to attend the Women’s March on Washington this Saturday. Its recently published “Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles” references a wide range of social-justice issues—not just gender rights, but economic, legal, reproductive, environmental and immigration rights, as well. It will make me feel good, I think, to end this strange and unsettling week by doing something that Dr King would surely do. And yet, I’ll be ever so slightly concerned, as well, for my own safety, never mind the heavy police presence.

That fear will in part, be on you and what you’ve encouraged, President Trump.