An honorable service

Many people, including many who are usually more politically astute, have criticized the funeral services of Coretta Scott King as having been politicized and opportunistic.  They’re just not getting it.

I invite you to consider the perspectives of a couple of writers, conservatives with whom I seldom agree, but who do get it.

First, the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan:

That funeral honored us, and the world could learn a lot from watching it. The U.S. government should send all six hours of it throughout the World Wide Web and to every country on earth, because it said more about who we are than any number of decorous U.N. speeches and formal diplomatic declarations.

A moment for a distinction that must be made. Some have compared Mrs. King’s funeral to the Paul Wellstone memorial. It was not like the Wellstone memorial, and you’d have to be as dim and false as Al Franken to say it was. The Wellstone memorial was marked not by joy but anger. It was at moments sour, even dark. There was famous booing.

The King funeral was nothing like this. It was gracious, full of applause and cheers and amens. It was loving even when it was political. It had spirit, not rage. That’s part of why it was beautiful.  

And Opinion Journal’s blogger in chief, James Taranto:

After reading about it on the Drudge Report, we expected to be appalled by the Coretta Scott King funeral, which, according to Drudge, “turned suddenly political as one former president took a swipe at the current president, who was also lashed by an outspoken black pastor!” More on the “former president” in a moment; the “outspoken black pastor” was Joseph Lowery, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. According to Reuters, Lowery “gave a playful reading of a poem in eulogy of Mrs. King”:

“She extended Martin’s message against poverty, racism and war / She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar,” he said.

“We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there / But Coretta knew and we knew that there are weapons of misdirection right down here / Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions more but no more for the poor.”

Lowery is a civil rights hero, as this biography makes clear:

Lowery began his work with civil rights in the early 1950s in Mobile, Alabama, where he headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association, an organization devoted to the desegregation of buses and public places. During this time, the state of Alabama sued Lowery, along with several other prominent ministers, on charges of libel, seizing his property. The Supreme Court sided with the ministers, and Lowery’s seized property was returned.

He is also a lousy poet and a worse foreign-policy analyst. Hey, nobody’s perfect. But when we watched a TV clip of part of his poem, we just could not be offended. This is one of those cases in which tone is more important than substance, and the tone of this funeral, from what we’ve seen, was largely a high-spirited and celebratory one–in sharp contrast with the creepy manic rage that prevailed at Sen. Paul Wellstone’s funeral in 2002. 

They get it.  One hopes their fellow travelers on the right wing express are educable.

Well, they mostly get it…  Does Mr. Taranto really suggest wiretapping random Americans is somehow bringing us closer to taking out al Qaeda?  Apparently he’s employable, so he must be smarter than that.  But by and large, his article is worthwhile.