Columnist
What would Martin Luther King Jr. have made of the recent confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito? Even amid the direst circumstance, the civil-rights leader was known to be fetched by humor. Irony also engaged him, as did self-righteous duplicity by empty, windbag politicians working beyond the reach of satire.
First the gloom. A half-century after the Montgomery bus boycott, King would probably be disappointed at the makeup of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In light of his life’s work, the all-white panel reduces the staged hearing to something of a mockery all these years later.
Yet, under bright chamber lights, the most racially exclusive power club in America shamelessly toyed with itself for four days to fill a seat on the second most racially exclusive power club in the republic. Only one African American, a freshman, sits in the 100-member Senate, and the lone black justice robed up on the Supreme Court is the token to beat all tokens.
The mere mention of Clarence Thomas’ name incidentally, would likely bring great belly laughs to King. His old buddy the Rev. Gardiner C. Taylor uses this Thomas ploy to draw ripples of laughter from church audiences. It is a laughter to keep from crying, granted.
Such self-effacing jokes, according to associates, were known to break King up in laughter as he rolled that swept-back head of his, even as he felt sympathy for the brunt of the joke. Laughter this tortured and full of pain might well have lightened King’s brow – even as he grieved for the racial harmony of his country – had he been afforded a chance to watch the Alito hearings.
It would not have escaped King, during the hearings, that his civil-rights struggle all these years later has not rid the nation of racial bigotry but merely driven it underground in politically correct discourse. Consider Sen. Lindsay Graham’s granting of absolution to Alito after he had been roughed up for misremembering his misassociation with an ultra-white Princeton alumni club.
“Are you really a closet bigot?” Graham asked rhetorically. “I’m not any kind of bigot,” the judge replied. “No, sir, you’re not . . . because you seem to be a decent, honorable man,” Graham said. “I’m sorry you had to go through this.”
Graham thus demonstrates this post-civil rights trick that allows white men to take the test, then grade their own papers. Most instructive for King would have been the manner in which Alito moon-walked away from his membership in the exclusive, Concerned Alumni of Princeton club. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy lashed into the judge for bragging about his CAP membership in an application for a job with the Reagan administration. Alito first claimed that he had no memory of actively participating in CAP, and then break-danced around this dim recollection.
When it seemed possible that Kennedy might tether Alito to the disreputable group, supporters accused the senator of claiming guilt by association. In hoisting CAP membership to impress a potential conservative Reaganite employer, however, Alito himself, appeared to be attempting innocence by association.
King would have perceived the irony, if not the hypocrisy, of even the liberal members of the all-white Senate panel throwing rocks at the clubhouse of Alito’s exclusive CAP group, before retreating to their very own exclusive glass bungalows.
Carol’s Journal will return next week.