Lean Left

There is a Murphy’s-Law-type rule holding that any time you flame someone for a spelling error, your flame will contain a spelling error. Aside from the simple childishness of it, that’s one reason why grammar and spelling flames on the Internet are considered uncool.

The right wing – abetted by the sadly diminished Washington Post and CNN – is now ginning up a Web-wide flame war over an “error” WaPo writer Jamie Stiehm claims to have found in Obama’s new Oval Office rug- the one that has quotes from American historical figures around the margin. Naturally, it isn’t an error. And naturally, the wingers are in high dudgeon mode, with cluelessness shields fully deployed.

Stiehm notes:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports [sic - hee hee!], this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from [Martin Luther King, Jr.].

Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. . . .

King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long? Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.

Yet somehow a mistake was made and magnified in our culture to the point that a New England antebellum abolitionist’s words have been enshrined in the Oval Office while attributed to a major 20th-century figure.       . . .

Parker said in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

As Stiehm’s own article makes explicitly clear, the phrase on the rug is in fact a direct quotation from King, whose statement was a paraphrasal, but not a quotation, of Parker. Parker expressed the sentiment first, using particular and notable language, but King’s words – while obviously paraphrased – are his own formulation, pithier and distinct in its own right. It is that statement that is quoted on the rug, and it is properly attributed to King. Nothing about that quotation asserts that King did not have inspiration for the language he used, but the words quoted are his, and it is correct to say so. (Perhaps the rug needs a footnote. It’s heartening to see a sudden enthusiasm for scholarship and factual accuracy emerging from the right wing.) Contrary to Stiehm, it is, in fact, a “King quote”. King got it from elsewhere, changed it, and made it his own. As Stiehm notes, he didn’t hide that fact – but that also doesn’t mean that his own version of it was not his own words. If the quote on the rug were attributed to Parker, that would be an error. The attribution, to King, of King’s words, is correct.

This is standard practice in every scholarly field – the APA, MLA, and Chicago manuals all specify exactly accurate quotations with attribution to the source of those words. (It might also be in order to acknowledge that they were paraphrased from elsewhere, but that is an issue of completeness, not accuracy.) Ironically, the styleguides used by major news outlets, including the Washington Post, also specify strictly accurate quotation. By the rules of the newspaper that published this story, attributing that quotation to Parker, as Stiehm insists on, would be invalid. But the Post has joined the right-wing rabble of late, and their standards have slipped badly. I don’t know if this is scandal-mongering on their part, or just a too-clever-by-half  reporter playing “gotcha”, but it’s factually wrong, and irresponsible.

It’s especially so in the case of King, who was known for his erudition and his frequent quotations and paraphrasals from famous sources. The Civil Rights Monument in Montgomery, AL, is inscribed with the quotation “. . . until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream” – attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a paraphrasal of a verse from the Bible. There is no footnote. Maybe they know something the Washington Post, and our legions of slavering wingnut epistophobes, do not.