Christie’s “I Have a Scheme” Speech

“Different Boats for Different Folks” (listen!)

Am I the only one who was disgusted by Governor Christie’s State of the State address abuse of Martin Luther King Jr.’s boat metaphor?

Wrapping up a divisive, partisan rant – including a whole new level of attack on the public school system and a race to the bottom, “drown government in the bathtub” tax cut for the wealthy plan – the Demagogue in Chief said:

I cannot do it alone. Republicans cannot do it alone. Democrats cannot do it alone.

Because, as Martin Luther King once said, “We may have come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now”

I don’t know what Yatch Christie and his cronies are sailing, but the small, old, leaking boats I see and care about are being capsized in the wake of his greed:

Christie engaged in the most tawdry form of partisan political revisionism of the meaning of Dr. King’s work and legacy.

If I were to hijack Dr. King’s “we’re all in the same boat” metaphor as cynically and opportunistically as Christie, I would say that the boat we’re in is the Titanic and the iceberg we’re hitting is global warming – while Christie is Captain of the Ship of Fools (listen). But I don’t play those games.

King was a champion of economic justice and truth.

Christie is a champion of wealth and power.

King was a spiritual black minister who deeply understood and spoke eloquently of the obscenity, injustice, and suffering of the slave trade: millions of kidnapped Africans brought to America on slave ships and thrust into chattel slavery.

Christie has never struggled (except with his weight) and understands nothing – as Molly Ivans said of George Bush “he was born on third and thinks he hit a triple” – and simplistically uses a King quote to whitewash that history and promote the opposite of Dr. King’s social democratic vision.

Burgeoning deep economic inequality, unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and destruction of the social safety net, etc all disproportionately impact and impoverish blacks.

The imposition of what Michelle Alexander calls the “The New Jim Crow” with “more African-Americans under correctional control today “in prison or jail, on probation or parole” than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began” and 1/3 of young black men in the criminal justice prison complex, Gov. Christie’s remarks are particularly out of touch (and no my good old liberal friend Tommy Moran, all that is not somehow magically erased or ameliorated by his drug war comments.

I’ll close with a completely different and honest use of the “all in the same boat” metaphor, from Malcolm X’s famous 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet”:

Although I’m still a Muslim, I’m not here tonight to discuss my religion. I’m not here to try and change your religion. I’m not here to argue or discuss anything that we differ about, because it’s time for us to submerge our differences and realize that it is best for us to first see that we have the same problem, a common problem, a problem that will make you catch hell whether you’re a Baptist, or a Methodist, or a Muslim, or a nationalist. Whether you’re educated or illiterate, whether you live on the boulevard or in the alley, you’re going to catch hell just like I am. We’re all in the same boat and we all are going to catch the same hell from the same man. He just happens to be a white man. All of us have suffered here, in this country, political oppression at the hands of the white man, economic exploitation at the hands of the white man, and social degradation at the hands of the white man.