Jay Ambrose: Martin Luther King was an example too many are not following

Martin Luther King Jr. died 50 years ago, on April 4, 1968, but he is not dead to me, not in what he did, not in what he achieved. While he hardly made it go away, he took the dread of American racism, and, out of his Christian love, his patriotism, his inspired leadership, he helped change it into something wondrously lessened.

Here was one of the great Americans of my lifetime.

Because of fresh, often justified anger and lingering, hurtful issues, it is apparently easy for some to forget how terrible things were before King and how much better they were after him. It is obviously easy as well for some to embrace his opposites, and now I am talking about people like Ta- Nehisi Coates. He is a gifted man, an AfricanAmerican writer of exceptional talent and sharpness of intellect, but also someone who, in my view, will only make things worse.

Considered by some as America’s foremost public intellectual, Coates is a regular writer for the prestigious, liberal Atlantic magazine and the author of a much- praised book, “Between the World and Me.” It focuses on white oppression while simultaneously insisting blacks are in no way responsible for what goes wrong in their lives. If they kill each other in frightening numbers, that is because whites designed things that way.

Conciliation of a King kind? No, what he likes is infuriated confrontation of the kind his father had exhibited as a Black Panther.

Coates says a chief focus of Western civilization has been to dehumanize blacks for the advantage of whites, who seem unlikely to him to ever reform. Some of the worst cruelty has been in America, he writes, and, to be fair, his description of 250 years of slavery is powerful stuff. When you arrive at the 1960s, the period in which King and others began to change all of this, helping to beget the 1964 Civil Rights Act as one example, Coates says phooey. The movement did nothing.

To Coates, all police are “menaces of nature,” even black ones. He sees America as criminal throughout its history. The American dream is nothing but whites seeking comfort and pleasure. His own answer to racism is reparations under which whites would hand over enough money to make blacks on average equally well off. I myself can think of little more likely to worsen racial tensions.

The point in all of this is not to beat up on Coates in particular or even to insist none of his stances have merit. It is to underline a widespread, overall take on things that seems to me more about revenge than rectification. You see as much in so many who seem to think like him even if they do not know about him.

I happen to agree that those of us who do not walk around in black skins cannot really know what it is to be black in this society. We can, however, read other black writers of note who grant the horrors blacks have had to endure while saying blacks do have self- responsibility for making things better. Shelby Steele, a Hoover Institution fellow, says that liberals, with their selfappreciative, shame- erasing largesse, degrade the human capacities of blacks. Jason L. Riley of the Wall Street Journal points to the deprivations of single- parent families and cultural inadequacies that blacks themselves must deal with. No one else can do it for them.

King was like this. He did not disparage dreams. He had a dream. He did not believe in judgments based on skin color. It was character that counted. He believed that someday blacks, like whites, could be free at last, free at last.

Thanks to him and others like him, we are surely closer. ABOUT THE WRITER: Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol. com.

It was left to “philosopher” Rob Lowe to summarize why the first episodes of the reboot of “Roseanne” were such a massive ratings success.

Lowe tweeted, “The secret to Roseanne’s massive ratings is that it celebrates people with huge political differences who are able to laugh and love together as they passionately disagree.”

I think Lowe is on to something, but there are a number of reasons why this show is being talked about so much.

The New York Times reported that on the morning after the 2016 election, ABC executives gathered and concluded they had to learn about the people and the areas that delivered the election to Donald Trump. They concluded that “Roseanne” was the show that might still reach working class Americans.

The new show reached the heartland with the top markets being Tulsa, Okla.; Cincinnati; and Pittsburgh. The show did well in Chicago but that is attributed the connection to the fact that the fictional town of Lanford, Ill., is the hometown of the fictional Conner family. The Philadelphia market ranked No. 12 in ratings for the show and maybe it reflects a blue collar base.

The success of the show and the Roseanne character’s support of Trump has triggered liberals across the country. Roxanne Gay, author of Bad Feminist, wrote in the New York Times that she laughed a lot and thought that the reboot was excellent. She then wrote: “This fictional family, and the show’s very real creator, are further normalizing Trump and his warped political ideologies. There are times when we can consume problematic pop culture, but this is not one of those times. I saw the first two episodes of the ‘Roseanne’ reboot, but that’s all I am going to watch. It’s a small line to draw, but it’s a start.”

Chrissy Teigen tweeted out that “Roseanne” was really helping to normalize Trump.

I don’t know whether the show “normalized” Trump, but it did once again help to “normalize” some of the people who voted for Trump. The people who Hillary Clinton called “deplorables” during the 2016 presidential campaign. It showed true diversity of opinion in the battles over Trump between Roseanne’s character and her liberal sister, Jackie, played by Laurie Metcalfe.

Network television has few shows that feature working class families. I like “The Middle,” a sweet show that addresses the continued economic challenges of a Midwestern family. However, it does not pack the dramatic punch of “Roseanne.” The strong ratings of this show have apparently gotten Fox to consider bringing back Tim Allen’s “Last Man Standing.” The show was canceled two months after Allen told Jimmy Kimmel that an actor had to be “careful” in Hollywood if you were a conservative or Republican.

Of course, it will be interesting to see whether the show has staying power. I know that the Trump debates in the first two episodes gave it added juice. I think the Trump base of supporters is as loyal as any I have seen for any politician. The opposition to Trump is the most vitriolic I have ever witnessed. The resistance wants to tear Trump apart.

The unfortunate consequence of this hatred is the savagery of attacks mounted against decent men such as Rep. Ryan Costello and Sen. Pat Toomey. Neither man has really been a Trump supporter; Costello didn’t even attend Trump’s inauguration. Neither man is a rabid public figure in tone or policies. However, Costello has had his office invaded by angry anti-Trump mobs and shouted down at many public events. Because of angry mobs, Toomey has had to move his Philadelphia office to the protection of a federal complex and can do almost no public events in Philadelphia.

I realize many local commentators see these actions as necessary to stop Trump, and they even romanticize the people committing them as guardians of democracy. They are not guardians of anything, and the excesses of their actions help Trump in many ways.

It’s projected that future episodes of “Roseanne” will deal with illegal immigration and the opioid crisis. These are issues that affect workingclass Americans more than most. This show might reach people on these issues more than most news shows.

I hope America is watching.