In Homes of Pat Boone and The Beach Boys (April 4, 1968) (ROUND 18)
scent of the day: Blue Civet Dream, by Pinoy Sirun
My benchmark tangy civet. This is like civet paste—unaged civet paste—in a spray form. It is so bright and sour it gives the impression of rose. Because this zooms in so much on civet, it surpasses Murasakino and even Civet Regal as a reference civet—or at least a reference unaged civet (the agred reference must go to Russian Adam and Sultan Pasha’s Civet de Nuit).
*Let’s workshop this poem about bigots who weaponize child death to mask their hostility, invoking those losses to shift attention away from an assassinated speaker they cannot bear to see mourned.
*I worked on the poem today—editing and tightening.
In Homes of Pat Boone and The Beach Boys (April 4, 1968) —in memory of CK, 1993-2025
Evil orgasms in its slither beneath borrowed care. Just minutes after the lead flower muzzled his throat (black blood blasting like prank snakes in a can, velour ribbons blubbering with grubbier bluster than any broken heart could pu-dump), the bitter bigots—abhorring the man for his “incendiary sophistry,” his “stupid smug face,” his “hate speech,” yet too polite in their creamed jeans to gloat at his sputtering bulk, at how his eyes probed
their sockets (let alone to slap his big cartooned head on t-shirt, “Debate CLOSED” in stencil font drooling cherry porn)—lunged right to deflective work (more jean-creamery): shanking the headlines of mourning with child-grave arithmetic never old, grief practiced down even to the throat phlegm. “What of our boys, our heroes—dozens of our boys just last week? Names, they keep piling. And we’re to overlook that news?”*
* Both Dr. King, the subject of this poem, and Mr. Kirk, to whom this poem is dedicated, share much more than that they flapped and flopped around like pathetic flounder after a wet thud of cowardice nipped their free expression—their “agitating speech,” their “inciting appeals,” their “angry disruptions”—right in the bud, the bullet’s soft metal core in each case displacing and shredding not just meat and sinew but critical plumbing (blood pipes, gas pipes) as it mushroomed through the throat in a kinetic-dump domino of gurgling devastation that to any open mind would insinuate that the sanctity of human life reaches no higher than that of tree bark: unreal liters of dark purple glug-glugging under the bright arterial spray, the space—made “safe at least for now,” the cancelers purr—both mucked and misted with a macabre ballet of fluid dynamics and finality—a drama worthy of Stravinsky in full orchestral cry enveloped in the olfactory plume of bladder and bowel, the soaked hair of some flamboyant conductor flying as he whips time with his bloody baton atop a podium of books no one gives a shit about anymore anyway.
Many of their haters—the ones who still had just enough counterfeit civility not to break into some Lollipop-Guild jitterbug jig—fought to stanch the outpouring of attention toward these men with a quieter blade (a paring knife drawn across the throat of grief like a hostage situation), these sneaky munchkins weaponizing dead children even as both men—paradigms of courage, conviction, and service—still found themselves like skull-stunned lambs transfixed by retinal flares—funny-colored auroras with carotid rhythm, angels perhaps—ushering them into eternal black. In King’s case, the chorus of haters croaked: “What about our young heroes dying in Vietnam”—a lame swipe, and doubly so since he had damned the war with his own voice. In Kirk’s case, a similar chorus: “What about the teenagers shot at school?”—another lame swipe, and double so since he had been the one shouting for detectors and guards at those very gates.
There was so much more the bigots had to say. It is tempting to sweep them into one dung-heap and walk away, perhaps even—so the bigot in our own heart would have it—light the match. Slandering both moral and intellectual conscience in their rabid partisanship, many willfully rip words from context so their preconceptions can gorge like Augustus Gloop. Many plain lack even the toddler-level skills of logic. Right after Kirk was assassinated, for example, we heard the group-think horde spout off their “gotcha” certainties, as if Kirk’s being a gun victim had any relevance to the truth-value of his infamous claim that, just as the benefits of high-speed mobility are worth the cost of roadway death, the benefits of the Second Amendment are worth the cost of gun death—an inevitable cost, he might say, in an imperfect world of stray barrels and misfires and messy justice: a sudden hemorrhagic stroke while out skeet shooting with a buddy; a college kid, like in the case at hand, hypersensitive to the curricular and extracurricular safe-space brainwashing that would have “zim” dehumanize any speaker who utters statistics “vulnerable populations could find offensive,” “zim’s” bullets inscribed with messages like “Hey Fascist! Catch!”; a landlord finally at his wits’ end after over two years of a squatter not only refusing to leave but even subletting rooms to drug dealers in a state that will only give the landlords fines for resultant code violations instead of any help to remove the scum. Kirk’s gun-casualties-are-worth-it logic stands or falls on principle, not on whether he himself wound up in the body count. Yet the monkey brains crow and caw as though his third-rail-dance death somehow falsified his own stance—as though, if somehow yanked back into life and told he had been shot, he would collapse into a ball of regret, renouncing his belief. The reality could not be any further from such bunk. All he would do is nod and wait, two or perhaps three beats, until perhaps breaking the silence with: “And—your point?” (Crazier still, as if you could get much crazier in a country of Kardashian Botox and fast-food diets and reality-TV presidents—some of those who croaked their “gotcha” homage to dumbness went further, declaring Kirk’s death a public good: “♪ Ding dong the wicked witch is dead! ♪” But in doing so they only put their own case in a Derridean stranglehold. For to praise the “gotcha” bullet as a boon is to baptize the very arithmetic they say they abhor.)
But let us aim for nuance, not hagiography. If we are really to honor what both men stood for (open dialogue over violence, the primacy of reason over rage, liberty yoked to justice), it is important to hear the bigots out. In a spirit of openness both of them extolled (even though in practice, as humans and especially as Christians, could not help but be closed, dogmatic, deaf to detractors), we should be fair to the bigots. Two pragmatic reasons stand out. First, history shows that bigots are often won over to the light simply by giving them a space where they can hear their own bile bounces back at them off the walls of silent listening. Second, and more pertinent here, it brings into better relief the significant overlap between Kirk and King. That overlap matters. It keeps us sober about the true nature of these men: fallible, fierce, flesh—they were just men rather than gods or demons. Such sobriety is important not just for truth but for our souls. For if we can hold them as men rather than idols, we may yet kindle in ourselves the humility and charity they strained to awaken in us.
Where do we start? Well, first we should push aside the blatant lies. Many have been lobbed against King and Kirk. One example for each man should suffice to clear the way to more significant concerns.
It has been said that Kirk’s desire to curb the influx of Mexican immigrants was due to worry about the country becoming less white—a Great Replacement smear. Push such nonsense aside. Kirk called all people to excellence and knew that the level of excellence rises the more everyone’s excellence rises. He was worried not about the skin color of immigrants but about their tendency to vote for nouveau Democrat policies he saw as dangerous (especially ones that kept some of the most struggling groups spoiled on a plantation of dependency, where their aims could go little higher than handouts)—that, plus the worry that an influx of immigrants might reduce job opportunities for native-born citizens and could involve an increased demand for housing and healthcare and education, straining public systems and raising costs for everyone. If he pressed so hard on the importance of black excellence, which he did, it was because he took Christian-neighbor offense at seeing what he regarded as rot in the core of black American culture—emphasized especially in the deleterious glorifications in rap music, which he denounced in company with King’s compatriot C. Delores Tucker). He believed such rot could corrode the character of the entire nation, a reasonable belief given the growing hegemony of this culture in the USA. Kirk wanted a country made more excellent, more secure, more prosperous for everyone. He believed the crumbling of one group could hold back the whole country.
It has been said, on the other hand, that King’s dream was really a mask for hating America, that beneath the rhetoric he aimed to tear the nation down—or even put whites under black rule. Push such nonsense aside. King was not an enemy of America but one of its fiercest patriots, appealing to the Constitution and the founding fathers as much as to the bible and the prophets. He urged the country to live up to its own promises and sought a community where the dignity of all would be secured together, not one group at the expense of another. And King, for that matter, was no hater of white people. Some of his closest allies, dearest friends, and even intimate lovers were white. He was a hater of injustice. His entire message, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the March on Washington, was that the destiny of black and white together was bound up in the same fabric. He spoke of “the beloved community,” where justice meant not revenge but reconciliation. If he pressed so hard, which he did, it was because he believed that racism could corrode the character of the entire nation, not just the oppressed. He wanted a country made more excellent, more secure, more prosperous for everyone. He believed the flourishing of one group could never come at the expense of another.
Even when we push aside such lies, there is nothing here to sugar coat. Both men carried attitudes and habits easy to ding as faults. Their passion for the cause, their taking even remote injustice as deeply personal (an autistic intensity that surely made them strange swimming fish, especially to the people they grew up with)—such a ferocious style of being meant that, no matter how well they honed their temperance, there would always be fire. King could thunder out phrases of lawlessness such as “A riot is the language of the unheard” (the classic excuse for free TVs) and many other precursors to some of today’s best ditties such as “It’s not stealing, it’s reparations” (the new excuse for free TVs). Kirk, in his turn, demanded Nuremberg-level trials for gender-affirming doctors who rushed children into interventions. Their zealotry made both men susceptible to selective empathy. They might keep hammering, in spectrum-disorder fixation, on their pet issues while minimizing other issues, even pressing ones. Indeed, one should not put it past men like this to keep hammering even when their pet issues have cooled. It is sort of like the tragic case of the agent-orange Vietnam vet who, even decades later in the exotic produce section of a supermarket, continues to trauma rage against Charlies and Gooks long gone—the nonexistent bogeymen he built his life around fighting, built his life around to such an extreme extent that letting go would mean fuck-the-foreplay confrontation with what chronic avoidance has rendered him all the more sensitive to: the void of obliteration sucking each of us closer and closer.
Both men’s directness burned combative. Their bluster and air of certainty, although great for baiting backlash and manipulating emotion like a film score, often read as confrontational or dismissive. Their confidence could bomb out rooms with the aldehydic reek of martyr hauteur: smug, rhetorical, too proud of their words. Both preached bridge-building, no doubt. But that did not mean they refused to brandish provocation (“rage bait”) as a key instrument. Shutting out more people than either would have liked (had they listened harder to their better angels), both were trolls for the cause—especially Kirk, whose “prove me wrong” campaigns often played less as dialogue than as spectacle (humiliations dressed up as engagement). Like all men who live by rhetoric (and do not we all to some extent?), King and Kirk were known to wander and even leap into misstatements. King, for example, overstated statistics about unemployment and poverty, his sweeping language flattening regional and situational differences. And we get reams of such ends-justify-the-means yarn stretchers, of course, with Kirk. He said things like “Higher ed is an indoctrination camp,” a statement that (however much it bulldozes nuance and steamrolls variation) does capture the spirit of the indoctrination—indoctrination to which, after nearly two decades in American universities as both student and professor, I can wholeheartedly testify, one pernicious and dehumanizing refrain louder than all others: that being white is the summum sin, a sin no allyship penance (perhaps even mass harakiri) could expiate (“Not good enough! Not good enough!” always the belittling shriek of “antiracists,” zealots typically as lily pale as Gordon Ramsay himself); that being white is the ultimate moral disease, a disease whose best-yet-leaky quarantine demands endless rituals of pathetic groveling that make the keiretsu shame sessions of Gung Ho! look like play dates at the water park.
As expected in light of all this, both men met the charge of being sophists—not in the mercenary sense of willingness to argue any side of an issue so long as the pay is right, but in the colloquial sense of willingness to pepper their otherwise reasoned arguments with oratorical sleights-of-hand. It is true that both used rhetoric as a weapon of persuasion. Both were first and foremost activists. And activism, by nature, operates outside the gray regions in which scholars love to dwell—one reason the scholar in me, the Goethe and Nietzsche in me, has long despised activists of any stripe. Pathos-heavy metaphors that feel self-evident but oversimplify nuance are always on the activist’s table. Campaigns for practical ends demand the most forceful appeals. And so we hear, from King, the heavy-handed slogan “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” which ignores the obvious: an injustice could occur in a contained environment. Justice here on Earth, for instance, fails to be threatened by injustice in a faraway galaxy—although King could always insist, albeit at risk of undercutting the practical force of the slogan, that this is no counterexample because it is logically possible for even that distant injustice to reach Earth (and, besides, that distant injustice still threatens the moral universe). As for the heavy-handed slogan on Kirk’s side, we hear “Culture is upstream from politics,” which also ignores the obvious: sometimes culture is in the downstream position. Black American attitudes, to use Kirk’s own example, shift more to victimhood and dependency, to tying success to one’s status as oppressed and needy, in the wake of excessive affirmative action and public assistance—although Kirk could always insist, in his own rhetorical escape hatch, that this is no counterexample because, even though there is a feedback loop between politics and culture, it seems more natural to say that prior cultural disposition motivates political interventions (and, besides, culture ultimately was on the scene first, setting the whole loopy chain off).
The key commonality between Kirk and King, however (and it is the thing that saves them from the brunt of Plato’s anti-sophist ire), is that they deployed rhetoric tactics in service of do-gooder principles. Sure, they sometimes smoothed over complexity or spoke with ambiguity, sacrificing precision for persuasion. But that flowed from commitment to something higher than themselves, not nefarious trickery or deceit. Both would say, for instance, that “x group is disproportionately punished everywhere you look.” Was this strictly accurate? By no means. It was a dramatization meant to rouse anger at a systemic problem. Both overstated crowd sizes at marches. But that was born of shrewd awareness of human psychology: people might feel hesitant to join if the numbers are so low. Both saw themselves as defenders of moral truth and America’s foundational principles. They deployed every tool of language to carry out that defense. Even King’s rampant plagiarism, even his supposed lies (such as not being tied to Marxism), were ultimately in service not of personal glory but of the cause. Neither man was a sophist—unless, of course, we broaden the definition so far that it swallows most of us too.
Critics often cast the activism of both men as divisive or destabilizing. Just as Kirk’s “Prove Me Wrong” campus tours drew resentment, so did King’s sit-ins and mass protests. Kirk perhaps never went as far as King, but both leaned into a “Polarizing Prophet” role. King made his willingness to antagonize clear: moderates who refused to speak against injustices (such as judging people by identity rather than merit) were a greater stumbling block than outright opponents. Surely Kirk would have said the same thing to people who refused to speak up against medical interventions imposed on children before the age of consent. Yet for both men, however much they agitated, their rhetoric was rooted in nonviolence and appeals to justice. They were “polarizing” not because they reveled in chaos, but because they challenged entrenched systems of power. King especially, but Kirk as well, was squeezed from both sides for that very reason. Radicals scolded him for refusing violence—not just for self-defense but for offensive justice. Mainstream outlets, meanwhile, painted him as an agitator inciting unrest. And so he—like Kirk, many of us know firsthand—was blocked from speaking at universities, or else saw invitations rescinded on the grounds that he was a “troublemaker”—yesterday’s word for today’s unthinking monkey-femur cudgel, “problematic.” Even at campuses that allowed him to speak, hecklers shouted him down. Despite his nonviolent rhetoric (his insistence that words replace weapons), many felt—and they were right to some extent—he incited violence by forcing confrontations.
Both men were also opportunists. No, neither was out—primarily at least—for personal glory. But both could be Machiavellian for the cause. King grasped the power of visibility and media. He timed campaigns for maximum national attention, selecting protest sites where cameras would catch the starkest images. He knew violent responses would generate shocking television footage, and he leaned into it big time. This was no accident but deliberate strategy: he called it “constructive tension.” Incendiary rhetoric was part of the design, provoking backlash that could then be wielded as political capital. That is why he prioritized protest sites where violence was likely to erupt. Kirk perhaps was not as extreme. But I think he would respect this in King and would have done the same in similar circumstances.
Of course, many would not regard the things I mentioned as negatives—even though, yes, the rage-addicted chimps, enamored more with hate than with truth, have come out of the woodwork to slander Kirk for habits they otherwise excuse in King. That said, both men shared many beliefs whose unsavoriness seems difficult to deny. If their stubborn-preacher comportment were not bad enough, add into the mix their tendency toward superstition—albeit it should be said that Kirk, orthodox in his Christianity, was much more superstitious, believing in doctrines King largely rejected (at least in his early rationalist years at seminary school): virgin birth, resurrection of the dead, sea-parting miracles, and so forth. Yet even King, in what renders his supposed secret Marxism a difficult sell, oriented his life around a supernatural God who, rather than hidden (deus abscondus) or inactive (deus otiosus), is personal—someone, in fact, he famously chatted with after a threatening phone call during the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott—and yet also the living ground of history—continually active in the unfolding of reality not in the sense of stepping in for a magic fix (intervening, for example, to repair the toddler’s drunk-uncled womb) but in the sense of predetermining things to play out ultimately for the greater good. The point is that if you are willing to be superstitious to some degree, imagine what else you will be convicted about—a point that damns Kirk far more than King.
Both men also harbored conservative views of sexual ethics. Both counseled against premarital sex, for instance. King even once told a teenager who was attracted to someone of the same sex that homosexuality was a problem, a deviation from God’s intentions. Indeed, and in what might get anyone shot today for saying out loud (a day where more than just one of us around the Thanksgiving table would gun down Mr. Rogers himself, execution style, if we heard him caroling one of his transphobic toxicities (“♪ Boys are boys from the beginning. Girls are girls right from the start. ♪”), King largely saw homosexuality as a “culturally acquired habit,” a dangerous fad, that could be treated with psychiatry. Kirk, a product of an era with a different DSM, would not go that far. Still, it is hard to see Kirk disagreeing in spirit. He might soften the phrasing, yes. But his orthodoxy points the same way: sex, if ethical, should be confined to a man and a woman—a married man and woman, he might add. And while Kirk would be more likely than King to concede that some portion of same-sex attraction is inborn (the skyrocketing numbers not totally reducible to cultural contagion and social-capital incentives), he would not valorize it. He would frame it in terms most of us would find as repugnant as we used to find—in barbaric times, before we learned better—those Keith-Haring-era images of disease-infested fecal matter scuzzing the fudge-packing member (head to hilt, head to hilt) like the surf-snot scum, the mermaid cappuccino froth, of a sewage beach’s animal fertilizer tideline. That is to say, he would frame it as a cross to bear, a character-building thorn in the flesh, rather than—however much it stanks so good—a gift to celebrate.
Both men also held conservative views on marriage. King once advised a woman, distraught over her husband’s infidelity, to reflect good and hard on whether she nagged him, neglected her appearance (hygiene and grooming, he insisted, were crucial), or failed to make him feel important. Born in an age that scoffs at the “How to Keep Your Husband” advice columns of 1950s grocery-store checkouts, Kirk would not go that far. It does seem safe to say, here too, he would agree with King in spirit, though. Social-media clips of Kirk counseling young couples—“share the same faith,” “have common ethical commitments,” “put Jesus at the center,” and so on—suggest as much. Strip away the gloss and the ethos is the same. Stability comes from traditional roles: women keeping themselves in line and men manning the helm. Kirk, for better or for worse, would be quick to tack on clarifications that blunt charges of chauvinism: a woman is to submit only to her husband, not to other men (aside from the hell harrower himself), and her husband has to be someone worthy of submitting to, which in his estimation (an estimation we now call “toxic masculinity”) ultimately boils down to willingness to die for her rather than to height and dick size and bling—the sort of Kardashian currencies flaunted in TDS campaign-trail anthems of twerkerific pandering, anthems steeped in enough gaudy spectacle and vulgarity to prove that Trump was our president long before he ran and will be our president long after he is dead: “♪ Beat it up nigga! Fuck me good, uh! ♪”
If we really are to honor truth (as opposed to going about this like the spider monkeys that have come out of the woodwork seconds after both neck shots), it is important not to pull any punches. Many of us already know that King plagiarized sizable chunks of his dissertation and other writings. And many of us already know that, a womanizer through and through, he had a long string of extramarital affairs. Fewer, though, reckon with the darker details. FBI surveillance files and sworn accounts place him at drunken sex orgies in D. C. and, of course, Miami. (What is this ghetto-ratchet culture fascination with Miami?) These Dionysian freakoffs, preambles to the cloaca stuffings of Diddy shindigs, sometimes involved prostitutes engaging in natural and unnatural sex acts (oral, anal, golden showers) for the entertainment of onlooking men—men, often enough, succumbing to homoerotic indulgence in the nubian heat of it all: mere harmless ball fondling and ball slaps, perhaps a few ball kisses, quickly blooming into a pound town of Carl Winslow proportions, its grunting oomph self-sustaining enough that the hoes could slip away unnoticed. One recording even suggests King stood by—possibly even encouraging from the sidelines like a soccer mom—while a fellow minister forced himself on a woman. And according to his close confidant Ralph Abernathy, King—on some pimps-up-hoes-down shit (indeed, on the very night before karma’s assassination)—beat the piss out of at least one of the women he had been screwing.
Despite the thinking of our current era where nothing you do is good if you make one mistake (especially if you are white and thereby already on probation), none of this should ever undermine the value of King’s mission and legacy—a point that Abernathy himself reminded readers even in the midst of damning details. And while it is unlikely that Kirk ever stooped so low in moral failure as King, no man is flawless. Kirk too is a human, and humans leak. Maybe if the Bureau had wiretapped Kirk with the same mania it did King, the files would waft the livestock fecality of a Diddy party on an overcrowded Rajasthani bus: ghetto-gagger grotesquery that would make the sex-trafficking exploits of the founding fathers look no more corrupt than JonBenét beauty pageants, soft-skulled infants of unstoppable suckling reflex exploited (J-Hov dick, J-Lo clit) like plowland newborns (calf, piglet, lamb) for all we know—although I would say it is highly unlikely, if only given Kirk’s money-where-his-mouth-is crusade to out the jet-set vacationers of Epstein Island coupled with his public disgust at how awful King was as a person (and, perhaps we might also add, with his picking Kendrick Lamar as the diss-battle winner merely on grounds that Drake, the opponent, might have done to young Millie Bobby Brown what we all wanted to do, our desire to rough-handle the nymphet star of Stranger Things stoked all the more by the uncomfortable yum of her crew-cut androgyny).
Yes, Kirk was a goody-two-shoes—borderline killjoy, no doubt: never drinking or smoking, always warning against pornography, never masturbating behind a newspaper on the train even as the teenyboppers—smelling lamby and ferrous—dare each other to “suck that nerdy nigga’s cock” (you being that nerdy nigga), and all the other anti-live-a-little trademarks of a squeaky-clean man on a starch-collar mission. But even if Kirk never dabbled in cocaine like King, I would bet he dabbled in energy drinks—the cocaine of our era. And it gets worse. Anyone who has ever stared into the incognito-mode glow of a phone in that witching hour, that time of peak demonic activity where Pazuzi stretched Reagan in ways we never saw on screen or even in Blatty’s book, knows how quickly sanctimony buckles—or, should I say, “unbuckles”? Even if Kirk never clicked into those no-turning-back regions that render you unable to get it up even for prime Beyoncé (Destiny’s Child) without a screen showing depravity at least on mute (German diarrhea-pamper porn, Dominican horse-bestiality porn), we only have to search our own hearts—and perhaps remember as well the gay-meth-orgies trope (perhaps embodied by King himself, minus the meth) of so many no-homo preachers—to envision the evils of which he was capable. The dirt is always there, even if you never track it across the floor. No, we are talking much more than the white-collar dirt, much more than Kirk’s pocketing funds from his Turning Point USA organization to buy extra cars. We are talking what could have gone down in those cars. Just as King likely would have been tempted to skim much more from his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference if it had the level of donations of Turning Point, in different circumstances Kirk might have beaten up non-wife holes—insisting on all levels of double-penetrative nastiness with the bulbous stick shift. King started slurping and unloading into reams of other pussy (and maybe even into man ass) only after the five year mark—as far as historians know. Kirk had not yet reached that milestone, the suffocating breaking point for so many men: same face, every goddamn day! In the very least we know that Kirk must have strayed in his heart and he might have strayed much earlier than King if he had to wake up to Coretta’s face each morning. For every human, preacher and prophet included, harbors the same shadow.
Now that we have given the devil his due, plenty of room for admiration remains. Beyond their courage in courting danger for justice’s sake, both men championed values that many would still hail as virtues.
Some of these, I confess, I balk at. But that might just be me.
“A strong nation must uphold enduring moral and family values rather than celebrate lifestyles that undermine them.” (This feels too close to a euphemism for homophobia. That said, both King and Kirk made it clear that—even though homosexual behavior is a sin—we should welcome homosexual people into our families and organizations and not deny that they are our moral equals. King was less comfortable, certainly: he sometimes distanced himself from Bayard Rustin, his openly gay strategist. But that was mostly due to the political pressures of his era.)
“Things run smoothest in the home when women respect traditional roles in marriage.” (This reads like a euphemism for old-school patriarchy—for the way things were in a time before men were more likely to be underpaid and underemployed, more likely to fall behind in school and drop out of college, more likely to be excluded from scholarships and grants, more likely to be stripped of custody in court, more likely to be pathologized as toxic, and more likely to be destroyed for a word that could be misinterpreted by “vulnerable populations.” In other words, the claim sounds—and likely both men meant it this way—like a thin cover for a call back to a world where men stood at the public-facing helm while women tended home and child. That said, and even though I welcome other arrangements, I can see the logic. After all, men tend to be more thing-oriented (machines, systems, objects), industrious, assertive, entrepreneurial, physically tough, and thereby more progressive—pushing into more disruptive roles where borders are broken open for the sake of a growing nest: inventors, explorers, entrepreneurs, soldiers. Women, by contrast, tend to be more people-oriented (relationships, care, communication), agreeable, conflict-avoidant, risk-averse, anxious about threats to routine, and thereby more conservative (exactly what you want at home base)—leaning into more stabilizing roles where borders are kept closed for the sake of a secure nest: nurses, teachers, social workers, psychologists.)
“Religious faith should serve as the moral conscience that keeps government accountable to higher principles.” (Once government claims to answer to an unaccountable “God,” citizens lose their right to question. That makes me worry. But maybe I skew this too much. After all, King and Kirk did also affirm that morality is knowable by reason, even if they rooted it metaphysically in God. And they both stressed that religion should critique the state, not control it. That reassures me somewhat. Yet likely neither would take the extra Spinozistic step I see as necessary by insisting that the state should intervene on religion if it threatens to undermine civil peace.)
“Faith in God and love of country can work hand in hand to strengthen the nation.” (This one I find dangerous. Marriage of cross and flag easily breeds a sense of chosenness. It could very well justify imperialism abroad and suppresses pluralism at home while muting the critical spirit democracy requires. Maybe they meant something gentler. I hear the threat all the same.)
As far as overlaps of clearer-cut positivity, there were many. Kirk and King fought for and led organizations dedicated to promoting black excellence—even if haters maligned those organizations as white supremacist, anti-American, or extremist. That is one of the most important in my book. But really they shared many aspirational ideas.
They shared ideas on discourse and democracy.
“Open debate and free exchange of ideas, especially with whom you most profoundly disagree, are essential to a healthy society—when dialogue fails, violence begins.”
“Violence—even mere demonization of opponents—only sows cycles of resentment; debate is the higher path to justice.”
“Unjust laws must be resisted and reformed.”
“America has strayed from its founding ideals and must be called back to them.”
They shared ideas on fairness and charity.
“Diversity must be authentic and substantive, not reduced to shallow quotas or tokenism.”
“Discrimination can be just (who else but a black actor should play a black historical figure?), but failing to choose on ability and character once the pool has been justly set—that is never just.”
“Law enforcement and media must apply their standards fairly, without favoritism or double standards.”
“Great leaders of the past, even those we admire, were imperfect human beings with both achievements and failings.”
They shared ideas on family and morality.
“Parents have the responsibility to provide moral guidance for their children, especially regarding sexuality and character.”
“Strong families are the cornerstone of a stable society.”
“A society that abandons moral integrity weakens its foundation and erodes the strength of the nation.”
“Education should form not only the mind but the moral character.”
“Everyone has a duty to contribute to society for as long as they can.”
They shared ideas on faith and identity.
“Communities are strongest when grounded in shared moral commitments, even amid cultural differences.”
“Western ideals of democracy, justice, and human dignity—as expressed in the Hebrew prophets, the teachings of Jesus, and the Declaration of Independence—remain guiding principles for the world.”
“True freedom carries risks and sacrifices, which must be accepted if liberty is to endure.”
Taken together, these claims reveal why these mavericks among men could both inspire and unsettle. They called people to virtue, responsibility, and sacrifice—all while tying morality to larger cultural and even religious ideals.
King and Kirk are astral brothers in their core values. On many of the particular racial issues of our day perhaps King, were he alive, would have agreed (albeit at a stretch) with his celestial counterpart—and, praise Jesus, with a growing number of HBCU students who refuse to drink both the literal Kool-Aid of Kraft Heinz and also the figurative Kool-Aid of black victimology.
King might have lamented not only the overblown claims of systemic racism but also that those claims feed a victimology industry vested in keeping blacks hobbled and forever hooked on help, hooked on special privileges and exemptions (lowered expectations of intellect and conduct) that have become a greater poison than what they were intended—as an emergency measure—to cure: undermining the very self-reliance and dignity King himself fought to instill in the black soul, an undermining that conveniently promotes the very disparities that the industry then smothers (almost as if there really were an antiblack plot in this country) with more “helping” handouts—opioids to quell the sufferings of opioid addiction.
King might have shone a light on the reprehensible behaviors of George Floyd instead of sweeping them under the rug on a mission to make a saint of the fentanyl abuser and violent criminal whose heart-exploding speedball concoction turned him into super saiyan in hour of his murder. (Or, in the very least, King might have excused himself from kneeling alongside all the white people during the public-weeping ritual at the US Capitol, a stage-managed event mistakable for Pyongyang pageantry were it not for all the round-eye penitents draped in kente-cloth cosplay.)
King might have raged at the new “antiracist” rituals that dress segregation in woke drag (black-only dorms, black-only graduation, black-only days on campus) only then to condemn its quota-driven remedies as “race-baiting injustice,” insisting instead upon colorblind standards even when merit-based selection offends fashionable outcomes.
King might have warned that today’s “antiracist” catechism—“the answer to past discrimination is new discrimination”—manufactures bigotries most acutely among whites who already choke with frustration at the one-directional mockery of whiteness normalized and even encouraged by cultural products (TV, film, TikTok), at the socially-sanctioned stereotyping (“Small dick,” “Karen,” “white fragility,” “white boy”), at the casual use of “white” as a pejorative and “black” as a laudatory (“I’m a black woman. Ain’t no damn way Imma let some white lady raise her voice to me”), at the limits placed on their freedoms, at the culture where being offended means you are right unless you are white, at the chronic gaslighting that whites (even rural whites who lack healthy food, clean water, reliable healthcare, legal jobs, suitable homes) hold all the power—hold all the power even though whites (the only major U.S. demographic in modern history to suffer a multi-year decline in life expectancy outside war or plague) are more susceptible not only to deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose) and homelessness and declining mobility and to those ominous workplace “equity trainings” that dictate how they can speak or behave (“always capitalize the “b” in “black,” never the “w” in “white”), but also to career termination and public shaming and permanent reputational ruin simply for stating statistics or for making observations or even for just uttering a word (“Boy”) that a black person could freely use.
King might have said “Hell no” to stripping police from the neighborhoods that need them most, refusing to stoop—no matter the paycheck—to the lows of BLM hustlers who turn black lives into pawns for clout and cash—and so will do their told-ya-so damnedest to make sure that black urban spaces remain cold world right out of a GZA fever dream: project stairwells where stick-up kids crouch under the lone flickering light like shadows; dice games littered with blood and shell casings; hand-me-down coats ripped open by deliberate rounds to the back (“Ain’t no fleein, nigga”); mothers pressing towels to wounds while sirens wail down the avenue to somewhere else; stray bullets through Kennedy Fried Chicken claiming snot-nosed kids mid-bite.
Some of the above points, I do admit, might be overblown especially given a key difference between the two: Kirk thought the government bureaucracy had grown too much, doing more harm than good, with its attempts to make Band-Aid fixes on unfortunate disparities whereas King—a democratic socialist, some even say (in conflict with his nonviolent stance) a Marxist—thought we should expand the role of government, that the government should have a foothold when it comes to things like housing, jobs, and wealth redistribution. Wishfully, naively—I do speculate, however, that much of this difference concerning especially governmental tinkering would go away if King were in the current era and saw so much of the damage these interventions had inflicted on black people. Who knows, though? Perhaps King, like the bad hombres who have taken up his baton, would just be another race hustler fattening himself upon the suffering and bitterness of his own people. And I say likely, not just hopefully. For King might have been a pussy vampire like ODB, the one Ason. But I do not sense that he would keep his people down even if it meant pussy multiplied and flapped at him from every direction like the miracle of the fishes. I believe he really cared for humanity just as much as if not more than pussy.
Kirk, too, bore flaws of his own. Yes, it is easy to give King a hard time, especially on the sexual front (our obsession since Plymouth Rock), given his track record. But surely even Kirk, like so many hatched into the digital cesspools of the internet age, milked the Twitter search bar to the breaking point of meat-market excess—if only in one of those late-night deliriums that can snag any of us. Surely Kirk, who we have clips of singing the sort of sexualized rap music he publicly denounced as toxic to black people, at least once in his short life sunk, tab after tab, into the freak-show slime of algorithmic civet paste until he found himself typing in “EbonyPYT,” that hashtag of universal access to downy-kinked closeups on Muhammad-approved holes—pink and brown no older than twelve—self-glucked by hairbrush handles into an if-only-we-had-smell-o-vision cream (the ribbing on these handles pronounced enough sometimes to motorboat the grippy flesh with every pullback, an audio-visual trill like horse lips at the trough sputtering foam). Might Kirk—a recovering porn user by his own admission—have then typed in the otherwise innocuous “NoLimits” to unlock carnival rides even rustier, the kind of clicks that leave a permanent shadow on the soul: a Venus of Willendorf ogress, for example, slurping an infant cock like a clit while she splatters his empty scrotum and her moaning face with maternal sustenance, the Montgomery braille of her pancake aureolas big enough to seem like nipples all their own? I dare say that Kirk, needing more on the brink of his own explosions, might have stooped to typing in “Anyage” (at least once in his short life, no?), issuing his own commands (“Get it, little slut!”) at the pixelated glow of a preschooler—one of her hands, its purlicue rammed into the scrotal base as if it were the throat of an enemy, throttling as much of the girth as it could (a pathetic amount but still, if more for psychological reasons than actual squeeze, with the vein-distending impact of a cock-ring); her other hand, unbroken in its stroking stride like a master jazz drummer even through her own “Tuah” spit shots (remarkably self-initiated), accelerating its pump with a see-it-through-to-the-end fury (this clearly not her first time at the rodeo) and yet still smiling her all-I-want-for-Christmas-is-my-two-front-teeth smile even through the fourth and fifth blasts of procreative gak upon her science-fair fascination, gobbledygoop too solar-flare-like in its eye-squinting violence to be called what the faceless cameraman calls it (as if there were any need to encourage her cleanup eating): “that candy rain.” I say it is likely. Like King, though, I believe he really cared for humanity just as much as, if not more than, masturbating to CSA or whatever it was that scratched his deepest itch.
And that is the central point. To dwell only on flaws is to miss the happier truth. However human they were (combative, simplifying, opportunistic, and even brimming with lechery), no fair person would deny that King and Kirk were lovers of justice and humankind. They wagered that words could defeat violence, that courage plus conviction could shame a country closer to its promises. If their calculus was brutal, it was also honest—and it is why the sanctimonious tallies of their enemies still ring hollow.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
