Angry?! Good!!

Michael Gerson used to be Bush 43’s top speechwriter. He is now on his own. On July 4, he wrote a commentary that indirectly endorses angry Bill Moyers. As noted here, Moyers used the Declaration of Independence to frame his attack on present-day America for tolerating gross disparities in wealth.

Gerson praised an 1829 July 4 address by firebrand abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison [pictured], who raged, Americans should "spike every cannon and haul down every banner" because of the "glaring contradiction" between the Declaration of Independence and the practice of slavery. The grievances of slaves, he argued, made the grievances of the American colonists look like trivial whining. "I am ashamed of my country," Garrison concluded. "I am sick of our unmeaning declamation in praise of liberty and equality; of our hypocritical cant about the unalienable rights of man."

Moyers had to have been delighted with this bit of Gerson research. According to Gerson, “Garrison laid bare the central contradiction of the American experiment: that the land of the free was actually a prison for millions of its inhabitants.” Gerson then moved forward to Martin Luther King, speaking on July 4 a hundred years after the Civil War. To King, the Declaration said, "You may take my life, but you can't take my right to life. You may take liberty from me, but you can't take my right to liberty." And King added, this creed of "amazing universalism" calls "America to do a special job for mankind and the world . . . because America is the world in miniature and the world is America writ large."

Summing up, Gerson said—in words that directly parallel Moyers denunciation of the rich—“The privileged and powerful can love America for many reasons. The oppressed and powerless, stripped of selfish motives for their love, have found America lovely because of its ideals.” Ideals expressed in “All men are created equal.”