The Once and Future Lego Queen - Coretta Scott King

Anyone who has ever tried to play “Montgomery Bus Boycott” at home probably realizes how hard it is to make Martin Luther King out of Legos. First of all, it’s difficult to find black minifigures unless you buy the NBA 3-packs which feels, if you think about it, either deeply insulting to black people or to white basketball players. Secondly, the hair. Put a black minifigure in a suit with accompanying hair and it will look like a second string Eddie Murphy character from “Coming to America”. In fact, Legos are so poorly representative of ethnic diversity right now that the posted versions of Martin Luther King Jr. on Flickr look identical to the posted versions of Will Smith as Agent J in “Men in Black”; right down to the suit. It’s hard to tell, from a distance, if he has a dream or a neutralizer.

As hard as it is to get good Martin out of little plastic blocks, it’s even more complicated to get a good Coretta Scott King. Legos are notoriously bad at replicating women in minifigures as well. For most of her husband’s non-plastic life, you would find her right behind him, supporting him. In reality, Mrs. King had the singular distinction of being witness to every single “Lego Block” that went into building the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s. Each piece of this fight for justice went through her hands at one point or another. If anyone were looking for deeper insights into what King believed and how he followed the arrow of justice, looking through her eyes is our greatest opportunity.

Mrs. King was reluctant to take up the role as leader of the civil rights movement after her husband’s death. In fact, she went to Josephine Baker, asking her to act as leader of this community. When she declined, Coretta Scott King became the soul and heart of American Civil liberties. She fought to ensure that even though Martin Luther King was gone, his dream would be visible, relevant, alive. She made sure that he had a voice even when surrounded by people without her unique insights into his mind. She made it clear to the world that the battle for civil liberties and freedom did not end at the color of people’s skin. Just as Frederick Douglass found that he couldn’t be free as long as anybody remained in chains, fighting for Irish Home Rule and the women’s suffrage, Coretta Scott King explained that the Civil Rights movement was there for the poor, for women, for LGBT people, for everyone.

In 1968, during a Solidarity Day Speech, she called for women to “unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war.” She opposed Apartheid when the word was unknown to most people. In her fight for equality for gay people everywhere she spoke out to say “Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group.”

She indelibly linked the fight for gay rights to the Civil Rights battle in one of her most famous speeches of all, calling out that, “I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people…But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.” She was completely unequivocal and absolutely clear. In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to be a part of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington. She crossed bridges to support a group she wasn’t a part of - to honor the dream. She fought for the equality guaranteed to all of us when she fought for equal marriage, calling an amendment preventing marriage equality “a form of gay bashing that would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriage.” She took the hardest road she could and she handled it without falling.

On Martin Luther King Day, this year, I want to honor the woman that he honored when he said “without whose love, sacrifices, and loyalty neither life nor work would bring fulfillment…” There is still a long way to go, but to the woman who got every single building block right, the woman who understood every word he said better than most of us, the woman too beautiful to be constructed out of Legos - to you I want to say thank you.

Jim Marcus is a singer/songwriter, director, photographer, writer, performance artist and social activist. And really, that list doesn’t even touch the surface of all the things he’s done or is doing.

A founding member of the seminal Industrial band Die Warzau, Jim Marcus has worked with artists in all genres, from Bjork to Revenge, Steel Pulse, Pansy Division, Machines of Loving Grace, George Clinton, KMFDM, Gravity Kills, Pigface, Little Louis, and more. Die Warzau’s latest release, Vinyl88. Not the Best of DW, will melt your face and is available wherever you buy or steal your music.

A Season in Hell

Just about everybody had that friend in high school who got busted smoking. Maybe his dad walked in on him and some friends smoking in the basement. Or maybe his mom found a pack in his coat (this was the scariest Brady Bunch episode, ever, by the way - we all knew that the ciggies weren’t Greg’s, though). Maybe he burned down the block with a cigarette, killing hundreds including the entire population of the geriatric home down on the corner, whose inhabitants died scraping their gray, grizzled fingers raw on the bars outside their windows, screaming to be shot in the head by passing policemen so as to avoid the charring, searing agony of having the very flesh melted from their aged, brittle bones. This, as an aside, WOULD have been the scariest Brady bunch episode ever if it hadn’t been for those damn censors.

Actually, I didn’t have one of those friends. But I did have a story from a friend about what happened to his cousin when his dad caught him smoking. Some parents live on the edge a little and I guess my friend’s cousin’s parents lived there, too. His dad made him smoke 2 entire packs of cigarettes at one sitting, while he watched. The idea was “Hey, many smokers smoke 2 packs a day once they’re addicted. Let’s show you what that feels like.” Supposedly, it worked, as my friend said his cousin got so sick he never smoked again. Happy ending, right? Beautiful. Everyone went out for ice cream and all was right with the world. We called this the immersion method.

I think I had my doubts about the methodology, but I couldn’t think of a better alternative. I’d never found a way to talk anyone out of smoking and I’d never seen anyone who had. No one believes they will actually get sick or get hurt in any way. Maybe this immersion works. I lived, later, with a friend named Doug who kept falling asleep in his chair holding a cigarette and lighting various clothing on fire. I soaked his chair in non-flammable plastic at his request. We spent hours out at various clubs talking about how to forestall the inevitable fiery death he faced one day when he fell into a slightly deeper sleep. I was ready to start missing charred little Doug. Sometimes it’s important to get emotionally prepared. We had a little eulogy and funeral at the Metro in Chicago. Great guy. Not much left. Smelled bad on the way out.

So he suggested a radical version of this immersion method. Maybe a group of people should show up at your house and kidnap you, drag you off to a dungeon somewhere where you’ll spend weeks tied to a wall, covered in ashes with ashtray filth and tar-filled water filling the room up to your neck. It would be a very expensive but effective program. A big moneymaker if we could get funding. We called it “A Season in Hell” after a book of poems by Rimbaud. This was not to be the final marketing name, although it did have a catchy logotype.

By the way, this was our second big moneymaking self-help program idea. The first was the Coma Diet Plan. Our ultimate easy weight loss plan. People of heft (politically correct term for the chubby) would sign up for 50,000 dollars a piece and be put into an artificially induced coma for 3 months. During that time orderlies would exercise them by moving their limbs to prevent atrophy and build muscle mass. They would be fed intravenously a minimum number of calories and the weight would just drop off. They would wake up 3 months later, having gone through no extensive trouble, lean, fit and ready to dive right into their new skinny lives. Sweet. And after 3 months away, their families could be expected to be so happy to see them. We even had cards made, for fun. The coma diet plan. My old friend, the photographer Steve Diet Goedde was in a pretty interesting punk band named Coma Diet as well. It’s where the “Diet” in his name came from (There was a time when people in Chicago used to call people by their first names and band names. Eric Spicer was Eric Raygun. I heard myself called Jim Warzau. The first person who ever introduced me to Paul Barker called him “Paul Blackouts” which, disturbingly, made him sound both plural and like a drunk. Chicago.)

So we never did it. The millions of dollars we might have made from our revolutionary self-help plans never materialized. My big idea dreams are smaller now, like entering the Pillsbury bake off (it’s a million dollars if you win, people). But maybe the ideas are sound. Does immersion work? Give people exactly what they want and they realize that it sort of sucks? Can you cure an addiction by letting the person wallow in the results of their addiction?

Whether this works or not has become more relevant to me lately. We have a unique addiction happening in this country. It’s an addiction to magic. This isn’t magic like on Bewitched where we, as a nation, were expected to believe that Nicole Kidman would want anything to do with Will Ferrell. Not like Harry Potter Magic or Buffy the Vampire kind (too bad, really, because I could totally get with a little more Buffy). The kind of magic we’re addicted to is magical thinking.

We’ve seen a growing support for pharmacists refusing to service women because it went against their religion. We’ve seen popes and trains of their followers fight against reasoned, scientifically proven sexual education and contraception because it went against their religion. We’ve seen churches do battle with laws that would protect children from sexual predators because they would potentially force their religion to behave in a reasoned way. We’ve seen attacks on science from all angles because the traditions of various religions are impacted - Muslim speakers advocating beating their wives, Christian speakers fanning the flames of anti-gay violence, Seventh Day Adventist speakers feeding into sectarian genocide, Jewish speakers treating a whole group of genetically near-identical people as de facto inferiors because their religion, again, pits magic against science, revelation against reason, superstition against introspection.

And the addiction to magical thinking seems to be growing. Well over half of Americans now believe that, despite scientific evidence to the contrary, God created modern man as he exists now through the process of creationism. Over 2/3rds of Americans want Creationism to be taught in schools - hundreds of millions of people.

A comparison of peoples’ views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower. The widespread popularity of American fundamentalists, aided by politicians who want to curry favor with that influential voting block, has created an environment more averse to science than we find in other countries, even those far less developed than we are. The primary advocates of Creationism are not accredited scientists. They are pundits and laymen, politicians and theologians. Our addiction to magical thinking in this country has created a set of conditions that put non-scientists in charge of the scientific education of the population.

At the same time, a movement has begun to replace the findings of doctors and professional people of compassion with more magical thinking. Recently, in Danbury Connecticut, the school observed a day of silence. This was meant to honor and remember people, gay, straight, black, white, etc. who were victims of violence just because of who they are. Local religious institutions fought for, and won, the right to stage their rebuttal to this idea with a “day of truth” where they advocated for homosexuality to be considered sinful, unnatural and wrong. By positioning their event as a rebuttal, they made it clear how they felt about the Initial event, whose sole focus was to remind people that violence in the service of intolerance is wrong. Valerie Pinnex, the pastor who instigated the Day of Truth refuted the intent of the Day of Silence by asserting, in opposition to the findings of medical professionals, psychiatrists, etc. that homosexuality was a clinical condition and unnatural. An ex-police officer and security guard, Valerie has exactly zero years of medical experience or training. And yet, hers was the medical advice heard by the population of the school. A message of distrust, division and alienation, specifically intended to counter a message of nonviolence. And paid for by tax money.

We have in front of us a strange addiction. But I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a cure. It’s brutal and painful, like the rabies cure, a long string of painful shots. It’s expensive, like the most elaborate cold remedies that involve ground up animals, endangered and rare. And it’s ugly. Sort of like a proctology exam.

Let’s just let them win.

I suppose we need to let the hatemongers into schools to counter the conversations on tolerance. For every Martin Luther King Day or Harvey Milk Discussion, let in the The Ku Klux Klan and a Valerie Pinnex. For every scientifically verified and exhaustively researched finding on the origins of human life, let in the magicians, preachers, pundits, and grade school graduates with dissenting opinions. For every responsibly compiled history text, let in a work of collaborative fiction detailing what might have happened, how we didn’t walk on the moon, the Holocaust didn’t happen, etc.

And when a generation of American politicians have been raised to hate and fear what’s different, the religious right can bask in its triumph. When a generation of American doctors have been raised to elevate wishful thinking above science, the American Religious Right can visit those doctors with joy, prescriptions in hand for antibiotics, taken without respect to the evolution of the various diseases countered. And when a generation of American historians have been raised to think that whatever revisions they want to introduce into history are as valid as what is documented, the Religious right can enjoy the results of their work. As we descend into sickness, intolerance and ignorance, we can light candles along the way, mutter newly learned magic words and forget what tools we sent thousands of years developing, all to make political communication a little more vital - a little more understandable.

What would a country like that look like, just one generation from now? I couldn’t say with any degree of certainty. But maybe it’s time to stop fighting and let the addiction win. Many of the pro-theocratic members of the religious right in this country have never lived under a theocracy - never lived in a place where religion and magic determined the entirety of public policy. If they don’t have the vision to understand what the most vocal and outspoken theological voices in our community would do with even more power than they enjoy right now, maybe we should supplement that vision with empirical experience. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll only sacrifice one generation before the nation wakes up and rises to the countrywide challenge to pass through dark ages swiftly and without regret. Maybe only one group of men and women will have to be sacrificed to absurdity before we wake up as a nation and resume our movement towards the future.

It’s probably time to give the fundamentalist what they’ve been wanting. A true American season of hate and ignorance. A return to superstition and the intellectual jungle. A Season in Hell. Let’s see how they like it.

Written by Jim Marcus

im Marcus is a singer/songwriter, director, photographer, writer, performance artist and social activist. And really, that list doesn’t even touch the surface of all the things he’s done or is doing.

A founding member of the seminal Industrial band Die Warzau, Jim Marcus has worked with artists in all genres, from Bjork to Revenge, Steel Pulse, Pansy Division, Machines of Loving Grace, George Clinton, KMFDM, Gravity Kills, Pigface, Little Louis, and more. Die Warzau’s fifth album, “Supergangbang” is slated for release in October of 2006. Mr. Marcus is also currently at work on his first solo release, entitled “Wonderland”.