Harvey Wasserman
by Harvey Wasserman, The Smirking Chimp, August 27, 2010
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” is one of history’s greatest orations, as well as one of its most beautiful arias.
To truly honor him and the heartfelt genius he brought us, we must do the one thing that most hurtfully blocked his Dream: we must end the imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, at long last, bring our troops home from all over the world.
Because I use it in my US history classes, I have heard Dr. King’s speech scores of times. I play it on a scratchy video whenever possible and never tire of it. It is more sung than delivered, and his sonorous voice and perfect cadence are the equal of any operatic oratorio ever written. Close your eyes and you are in the greatest of all concert halls.
But its message cuts the core of our entire history. It contains beautiful descriptions of much our national landscape. It references Stone Mountain, Georgia, where we suffered the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, and Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, the origin of the infamous Scottsboro Boys legal persecution.
It sings with perfect pitch of our most spiritual president, Abraham Lincoln, and the promise made to African-Americans still being given a bad check for 250 years of unrequited labor.
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