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[ by Charles Cameron — the moral arc of history from Billie Holliday via MLK to Obama — and beyond, who knows? ]
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Our topic here is foresight — prediction, prophecy, prognosis, projection.

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The Legatum Institute today tweeted a Pew Research projection of Muslim and Christian growth 2010-2050.

It is now 2015, so for practical purposes, we’re thinking here about prophecies and predictions that offer what their authors hope will come close to 35-year foresight.

Short form: I don’t get it.

Obama, like him or not, Christ or Antichrist, Peace-Nobelist or Pol, is now US President and has — whatever his strengths, failings, or both — some influence on how the earth turns, which way the moral arc of the universe bends, and or what history will be seen and written once the future is present.

Short form: How does history happen?

I’ll raise that question by posting three videos along one such arc of history — and I’ll avoid the usual genre of “news” and work with song, dream and sermon.

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Describing the impact of Billie Holliday’s song, Strange Fruit, David Margolick wrote in his “biography of a song“:

An “historic document,” the famed songwriter E.Y. “Yip” Harburg called “Strange Fruit.” The late jazz writer Leonard Feather once called “Strange Fruit” “the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism.” To Bobby Short, the song was “very, very pivotal,” a way of moving the tragedy of lynching out of the black press and into the white consciousness. “When you think of the South and Jim Crow, you naturally think of the song, not of `We Shall Overcome,’” said Studs Terkel. Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary record producer, called “Strange Fruit,” which Holiday first sang sixteen years before Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, “a declaration of war … the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

As Shelley reported, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

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Preaching borders on prophecy when it addresses dreams, as in Martin Luther King’s great 1963 oration, spoken decades after Abel Meeropol published Strange Fruit as a poem in 1937 and Billie Holliday recorded it in 1939:

It’s surely notable that a singer had a part in that speech, too. As Wikipedia reports, citing DD Hansen‘s The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation:

The focus on “I have a dream” comes through the speech’s delivery. Toward the end of its delivery, noted African American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted to King from the crowd, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” King stopped delivering his prepared speech, and started “preaching”, punctuating his points with “I have a dream.”

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The President of the United States is an acknowledged legislator, constrained by checks and balances that preachers and poets do not face, yet his voice too has been raised from rhetoric to song:

Here are the Here are the “three rhetorical aspects” of Obama’s speech that James Fallows singled out for special praise:

The choice of grace as the unifying theme, which by the standards of political speeches qualifies as a stroke of genius.

The shifting registers in which Obama spoke—by which I mean “black” versus “white” modes of speech — and the accompanying deliberate shifts in shadings of the word we.

The start-to-end framing of his remarks as religious, and explicitly Christian, and often African American Christian, which allowed him to present political points in an unexpected way.

Amazing Grace now takes the place of Strange Fruit, and a President that of a poet and a singer — much has changed, yet much remains.

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My own Prior Art on prognostication:

Recently, in Simply so much.. 02 here on Zenpundit, I pondered the nature of foresight in terms of a Marine Corps forecast:

I’m thinking of Lise Meitner as I view the Marine Corps’ ambitiously titled Security Environment Forecast 2030-2045. Who would have thought in 1919 that Hahn, Meitner and Strassmann in 1935 would begin a program that resulted in 1939 in her 1939 paper Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction — which in turn led to Moe Berg‘s attending a lecture by Heisenberg, the Trinity test at Alamagordo, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

And yet the period from 1919 (Treaty of Versailles) to 1939 (fission theorized) is only 20 years, and from 1919 to 1945 (nuclear warfare) is 26 years — equivalents, respectively, to the periods from 2015 (today) to 2035 (a third of the way into the USMC’s period of prediction) and 2041 (still within the UMSC timeline).

That’s my attempt at a sober assessment of how difficult it is to “see ahead”.

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My Art of Future Warfare story, War in Heaven, is set — as the contest rules required — in 2090.

By twenty-ninety, in my fanciful hypothesis, we may well have learned how to choose which timeline we want to live along in a “manyworld” of constantly branching possibilities – “words are many, worlds are many more, if possible” I wrote, and supplied portals to worlds secular, magical, religious and fictitious:

Forty some years from now, in the wake of John Hardy Elk’s vision and its definitive corroboration “in the external” by physicists at the CERN Diffraction Lab, Shamanism is overturning “the Enlightenment” as the preferred intellectual basis for inquiry. With its gestalt understanding of the interconnectedness not only of space and time but of chance and will, context and perspective, self and other, the Shamanic method of burrowing into deep external space “in the internal” has proven more powerful, faster, and – yes — way more creative than what are now known as the old “heavy lifting” methods of transport.

With schools of Tibetan, Navaho, Benedictine and other forms of contemplative instruction now rapidly surpassing CalTech as the educational venues of choice, and Oxford morphing back towards its earlier life in which theology was Queen of the Sciences, a great many talented explorers have now visited realms considered impossibly “far away” even a decade earlier, the “digital” has fallen away at a time when communication between the like-minded is achieved telepathically, and “radiance bombs” vie with “dark bombs” in the end-of-century duels scattered across many galaxies in which “white” and “black” magics compete — under the law, some would say theory, of the Conservation of Moral Balance.

Who knows? Who can really say?

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And then there was the ChicagoBoyz Afghanistan 2050 RoundTable. Introducing the RoundTable, Lexington Green noted:

40 years is the period from Fort Sumter to the Death of Victoria, from the Death of Victoria to Pearl Harbor, from Pearl Harbor to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. It is a big chunk of history. It is enough time to gain perspective.

The event, then, was pitched five years past the Marines’ forecast, though still forty years short of my War in Heaven. And once again, though more explicitly this time, I relied on the branching worlds idea.. Here, though, I attempted –- not unlike a circus performer astride two horses -– to bring together the physical and moral universes:

Historians — on the world-line this is written from, and consequently in those cognate worldlines in which you are reading me — tend to date the by now (2050) clear shift in priorities (if not in actualization) currently emerging along these world-lines to the 2020 joint publication in Nature and Physical Review G of Dogen’s confirmation of the Everett-Klee Transformation Hypothesis, which stated (in its minimal formulation) that free choice is the mechanism by which a human individual switches tracks in a given “present moment” from a “past” world-line to a particular “future” world-line, branching “in that moment” from the first.

We don’t, I posited, move across parallel “shadow” worlds by diving into portrait size Tarot cards, walking a kundalini-enhancing maze, or substituting the sky, landscape and other furniture of one world-line into that of another, though the great Roger Zelazny in his Amber series posits these as methods for planet-hopping.

My suggestion: we chose which routes we take when faced with the constant bifurcations of the manyworlds by the moral choices we make.

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And in all this I attempt, however playfully, to glimpse how the past and present might prefigure our possible and impossible futures — and how one or more of those futures may pass through the sieve of the onward-pressing present to become history

[ by Charles Cameron — my bilingual six-letter DoubleQuote for the day ]
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in the upper panel, in Hebrew, the word MeLeK. I’ve put the three consonants in capitals down here, and the vowels in lower case, but it’s a three letter word as you can see above, and the letters are (from right to left) MLK.

Which is interesting.

Because in translation, it means, as does the lower panel: King.

[ by Charles Cameron — human beings are a whole lot more interesting than was previously thought, evidence suggests ]
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First, you should know that the English Defence League is, by its own account, “an inclusive movement dedicated to peacefully protesting against Islamic extremism.”

Now read on..

Or as Qur’an 49.13 puts it:

O mankind, We have created you male and female, and appointed you races and tribes, that you may know one another.

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The Gospel suggests, Matthew 5.44:

Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you…

and I am put in mind of this pair of images, both of which feature people I learned about for the first time in just the last couple of days:

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Rev. Will D Campbell is the one shaking hands with Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy after the MLK assassination, in the top panel of the DoubleQuote above. He was a rare man — as the NYT puts is, “one of the few white clerics with an extensive field record as a civil rights activist” — which naturally reminds me, too, of my own mentor, Fr. Trevor Huddleston.

C.P. Ellis was a Ku Klux Klan leader until he met civil rights worker Ann Atwater, with whom he is pictured immediately below Abernathy and Campbell.

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Wait, there’s more —

The first pair of images, above, comes from the UK, and the second pair from the US. So what’s the difference?

Apparently, the Brits serve tea while the Americans sip whiskey…

Abernathy’s reverend friend is the gentleman described in the lower panel here, the one who drinks whiskey with Klansmen. Go figure: love trumps hate.

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To get the full charge of these various stories, you might want to read:

Woolwich Attacks: Muslim Leaders At York Mosque Invite EDL In For Tea

EDL March With Muslims In Ipswich In Memory Of Lee Rigby

Rev. Will D. Campbell, Maverick Minister in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 88

The Ann Atwater approach

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Of course, the type of beverage you offer on these occasions must depend to some extent on the dietary habits and restrictions of both parties…

[ by Charles Cameron — mostly about a fascinating quote from Martin Luther King ]
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Let’s start with the Code of Hammurabi, 196-97:

If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out. If he break another man’s bone, his bone shall be broken.

A few days ago, I found I was feeling mildly exercised by one Dan Hodges writing in the Telegraph:

Indeed, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” quoted by one of Lee Rigby’s suspected killers, comes from the Bible, not the Koran.

Hodges was quoting Michael Adebolajo, who had said on camera:

The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers. And this British soldier is one. It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone.

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It is true that Deuteronomy 19.21 reads:

And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

and Exodus 21.23-25:

And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

— but its is clear that Adebolajo — who was brought up devoutly Christian in Nigeria, converted (“reverted”) to Islam, and now references suras of the Qur’an using their Arabic names — would also be aware of Sura Al-Ma’ida (5) 45:

And therein We prescribed for them: ‘A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation’; but whosoever forgoes it as a freewill offering, that shall be for him an expiation.

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The quote “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” is often attributed to Mohandas Gandhi, but I checked with Quote Investigator and found it was originally used by one Louis Fischer to paraphrase Gandhi’s teaching, although the Gandhi family apparently think it sounds authentic. But what interested me most was that a form of the same phrase can safely be attributed to Martin Luther King, who is quote in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, p 208, as saying:

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction of all. The law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. It is immoral because it seeks to annihilate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

That’s quite a paragraph.

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Of note, besides the parallel structure with which King addresses violence as both impractical and immoral, are two matters I have often pointed to here on Zenpundit:

Self-reference:

Violence ends by defeating itself.

and polyphony:

It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue.

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Gandhi’s position seems to come close to that presented in Matthew 5. 38-48 — in which Christ clearly countermands the lex talionis as promulgated in Exodus and Deuteronomy:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

And. for that matter, to The Richmond Declaration of Faith of 1887, as quoted today by my friend, Friend Marshall Massey:

We feel bound explicitly to avow our unshaken persuasion that all war is utterly incompatible with the plain precepts of our divine Lord and Law-giver, and the whole spirit of His Gospel, and that no plea of necessity or policy, however urgent or peculiar, can avail to release either individuals or nations from the paramount allegiance which they owe to Him who hath said, ‘Love your enemies.’ (Matt 5:44, Luke 6:27)

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How — without denigrating those who are of either the Deuteronomic or the Gandhian persuasion — does one nudge the world-system gently away from justice and towards mercy, away from revenge and towards reconciliation, away from war and towards peace? Towards a new and more viable homeostasis?

[ by Charles Cameron — Anonymous use of sound clips from movies ]
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Taste in movies varies. As the Hollywood Reporter reported just the other day:

Orson Welles‘ Citizen Kane no longer enjoys the moniker of greatest film of all time, a plaudit it has held for 50 years. The movie has occupied top billing in the British Film Institute-published magazine Sight & Sound‘s once-a-decade international critics’ film poll since 1962. But that crown, according to Sight & Sound‘s 2012 survey of 846 movie experts who participate, has now passed to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

I thought it might be interesting to look at the recently released Anonymous YouTube video encouraging people to do whatever it is they do — “only you know what is right for yourself” — at the Republican National Convention.

To see where their taste in movies takes us.

I’ll include a few screen shots and some of their own techno-voice commentary, but it’s only the borrowed clips I’m really after — taking a look at what they choose to quote, what they leave out, and where there may be questionable truths or conflicting assertions.

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Their opening line is:

Greetings, world. We are Anonymous.

Then, over some chest-thumping music, one of those rotating globe thingies that let’s you know what’s coming next is Important — the Onion has a good one — resolves into the Anonymous question mark logo:

A techno-voice speaks:

We are not terrorists, but are your greatest allies. We wish to liberate you from suppression and oppression, and no matter how many of us fall in battle, Anonymous cannot be defeated. We are Anonymous, we are legion, we do not forgive, we do not forget. Expect us.

Then, in white text over some groovy graphics:

Each of us has our own path but each of us share the same goal… a free Humanity. Together we stand…

The groovy graphics then add a small inset frame from Tonight, on CNN Presents, very cool:

The clip has some neat journo-thrilled-to-be-important-speak:

Anonymous — they live in the shadows.

an (anonymous) quote:

This is the closest thing to a global revolution that we have ever gotten.

and more journo-thrill:

But their message and tactics have ignited a movement around the world.

We then cut, after some thunder-like sounds, to a mechanical nodding and smiling anonymask speaking in techno-voice:

We are the ideology of truth , we are uncompromising, we are the most powerful underground resistance the world has ever seen. We were once a minority but now we are the majority. No matter how hard they try they cannot stop us now.

It’s right around here that things get filmic.

We have Al Pacino as Tony D’Amato in Any given Sunday, voice over:

We’re in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And, we can stay here, get the ** kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell… one inch at a time.

More of the mech-nodding techno-voice:

We all are angry, very very angry…

Which segues nicely into Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Paddy Chayevsky‘s Network saying, over images of one guy jumping on the roof of a cop car and others smashing the windows:

I want you to get mad! … First you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’ … I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’

Classic!

More inspirational movie sound clips follow in voice over.

There’s Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in Rocky Balboa:

But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits,

Vince Lombardi — I’m not sure where this one comes from, a newsreel perhaps?

I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is the moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious

Winston Churchill — yes, the late military historian and Conservative Prime Minister of the undaunted British, addressing the boys of Harrow (a private school roughly equivalent to Phillips Academy or Groton in the US):

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

— spoken with true British upper-class schoolboy fortitude!

Then we go back back to Anonymous’ own text, noting that “main stream news media”:

have labeled us all as domestic terrorists. We are here to tell the public to not be afraid of Anonymous, to not be afraid of Black Block or [techno-mumble] Block. Our aim is not to cause violence to the public. We are no danger at all to American citizens. The people of america need to know we are on their side. We fight for true freedom, we take a stand for the hungry, the poor, the suffering citizens of this country, who are sick of politicians doing what they please at our expense.

The only difference between us and protesters of the past is that we believe in fighting for our rights. We indeed are not pacifistic: if the oppressors fight us we will fight back ten-fold. … Do not believe the lies your government feeds you. Instead, join us at RNC and take a stand with us. United by one, divided by zero.

Okay, that’s the invitation. And then, whoosh back into an American (I suppose you might say) equivalent to the Churchill news clip — this one from MLK, complete with the original visual:

I have a dream, that one day this nation will rise up..

Another classic! But we’ll talk about that a bit later.

Next up, over video of cops in riot gear, we have Will Smith as Christopher Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness:

Don’t ever let somebody tell you… You can’t do something. [ … ] You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period.

And Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks in Miracle, over an image of the streets aflame:

Great moments, are born from great opportunity. And that’s what you have here, tonight.

Okay, we’re coming to the close. The music shifts to some semi-classical piano, and the nodding technanonymity says a few words… then, over some tranquil shots of the globe we live on…

Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Gaines in Friday Night Lights tells us:

Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn’t let them down, because you told them the truth. And that truth is that you did everything that you could. There wasn’t one more thing that you could’ve done.

Can you live in that moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? With joy in your heart?

Fade…

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Okay, we got — what? American football, boxing, hockey, a Conservative politician, a non-violent Civil Rights leader, a salesman-entrepreneur, lots of police and rioting, no military that I could detect, unless you count Churchill’s speech…

Funnily enough, V for Vendetta (image at the top of the post) isn’t among the movies they’ve clipped from, although the Anonymous mask is a Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask.

Interesting that in the quote from Network, after the words “I want you to get mad!” and before “first you’ve got to get mad” they’ve omitted the words:

I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot…

Funny that in quoting Any Given Sunday, they chose a version that has “shit” bleeped out of the soundtrack, so Pacino says:

We’re in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And, we can stay here, get the ** kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light…

Funny that they say:

The only difference between us and protesters of the past is that we believe in fighting for our rights. We indeed are not pacifistic: if the oppressors fight us we will fight back ten-fold.

and then quote Martin Luther King Jr, the Gandhian practitioner of satyagraha…

Funny that they say, “now we are the majority” and a little later, “we can not win this fight alone”.

Ooh! And that’s a great (math) line at the end, though I don’t know quite what it means:

United by one, divided by zero.

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I’m more of a Gandhian, pacifistic, lay down on my back and let them roll over me, foolish school myself — and I don’t watch many sports movies, so I wasn’t the ideal target audience here.

The Martin Luther King speech might just take my “best documentary” award. And I’m with the critics on Vertigo.

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Look, you close with the question:

Can you live in that moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? With joy in your heart?

While you are “very, very angry”? I don’t know, I’m inclined to doubt it. But I’m pretty sure that if, as you claim, you “don’t forgive” you can’t.

That’s just not the way “love in your heart” works.