Americans can take some time to reflect on Martin Luther King who led African- American citizens to the long- overdue bright light of freedom and equal acceptance. At the same time compare the final address of President Dwight Eisenhower. The ideas presented by both men are remarkably congruent and prescient.

Here is Martin Luther King as he spoke in August, 1963:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

Here is Dwight Eisenhower, from January 17, 1961:

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle – with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in the newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research – these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well in the face of threat and stress.

But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise.

Of these, I mention two only.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

King speaks to a nation arbitrarily divided with the rump excluded from a common prosperity. King paints the exclusion was a moral fault by both the measures of the founders alongside of those of ‘modernity’ which even in the early 1960s demanded a shallow conformity and trivial ‘trend cosmopolitanism’.

In tail- fin America there would be no place for Jim Crow or the shabby night- riders of the Klan; for segregated lunch counters or even lunch counters. Martin Luther King contrasted the idealism of the American federal state with apartheid and institutional racism. At the same time, he promoted commercial ‘progress’ as a moral force. Racism was not only evil but more-so it was obsolete.

King was un-ironically demanding equal admission into the matrix.

Eisenhower divided ends and means. The General who had led the Allies into Nazi Germany understood that withstanding great danger meant making sacrifices rather than going shopping. The retiring president demanded something other than a passive citizenry watching television.

King was Eisenhower’s activist, the limits of that role he acknowledged even as he pressed them. He was leading the American Negro nowhere in particular, but what other choice did he have? In 1963 the American dream of accessible modernity and Warholian irony was shiny and new. James Hansen’s price tag had not yet appeared around the corner and Ike’s warning of the dangers of material progress for its own sake could be perceived as a kind of short sale or ‘reverse psychology’.

King and other activists could ask where were the white people voluntarily choosing to live like oppressed and pathetic blacks in dismal and rotting ghettos? White people lusted after automobiles and suburbs and by God blacks were going to have these things, too! King:

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

Grasping for the illusion as it slips out of reach: Eisenhower’s view was the dream was metastatic:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.


The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Both Eisenhower and King grasped the same insolvency metaphors, acknowledging the possibility of a bankrupt notion of progress. That the human race and its embrace of the American- style ‘dream’ would soon enough harvest the bitter crop of strip- mined ‘freedom’, the discourse and practical use of which is vacant of any real possibility. Our grandchildren will harvest what, exactly?

Thermodynamics is relentless and cannot be negotiated with. Eisenhower’s warned against a ‘scientific- industrial establishment’. Science is both corrupted and corrupting. This allows its ‘users’ to pick and choose which forms of science it wants to pay attention to.

The amalgamation of the ‘commercial- creative establishment’: of marketers and credit enablers crafted containers for both a Detroit- then Chinese- manufactured ‘pseudo- dream’ along with an unresponsive and unyielding security apparatus. King:

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

King’s dream became the hollowed out premise that all men created equal. American Apartheid was a rear guard action that in the end resolved to zero.

We are equal now, so what?

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

King’s dream has morphed into dispiriting and depersonalized techno- fantasy. In 1963, King’s negroes were American society’s fools in the market. American business success required more than cheap inputs and credit. It needed a low- cost ‘insolvency sump’ which could provide a ‘market of last resort’ for useless surplus goods and property along with a reservoir of the cheapest and least accountable labor. King argued the country had moved past that point of need. He could not calculate the forces that Eisenhower warned of equalized by enslaving on a much broader scale. The “larger ghetto” that King railed against was engulfing the entire world. Black and white Americans, Chinese and Europeans were being recategorized as consumers — or worse — and being dehumanized in the process.

Here’s Patrick Deneen:

Tocqueville discerned over 125 years before Eisenhower that the utilitarian pursuit of scientific knowledge would imperil democracy, above all by leading men to live and think in the short term. “To minds thus predisposed, every new method that leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine that spares labor, every instrument that diminishes the cost of production, every discovery that facilitates pleasures or augments them, seems to be the grandest effort of the human intellect. It is chiefly from these motives that a democratic people addicts itself to scientific pursuits.” In a brief but telling section of his address, Eisenhower warns against the tendency to “live only for today,” urging his fellow citizens to think in terms of generational debts and obligations lest democracy become “the insolvent phantasm of tomorrow.”

We now tend to think our various forms of insolvency—economic, certainly; in natural resources, as gathering evidence suggests; and morally, at the root of our bankruptcy—can be answered by the application of better scientific technique. What America’s second voice has warned all along, and what Eisenhower powerfully articulated 50 years ago, was that our faith in science will not save us, but may in fact be the very source of our insolvency. What is needed instead is a sounder idea of liberty—in which (to paraphrase the forgotten second verse of “America the Beautiful”) we confirm our soul in self-control and find liberty in law.

What does morality allow us in a world that has been purposefully created as ‘post- morality’  and expedient. Dreams are both undermined and undermining because they have been corrupted fatally by commerce and a culture that equals commerce with art.

This way, commerce constantly reinvents itself mimicking science process while pimping itself as ‘creative’ at the same time.

Some progress, some dream. This — the evil of banality — is what we are stuck with. The article of faith was that the unholy matrimony of art and commerce would conjure a form of ‘value’. This union could not earn any value in any marketplace. The outcome is commerce- abandoned and endless blight, the wasting of the Earth and all that inhabits the Earth.

Artcommerce or commerceart or whatever the marketers intended to label it could never support itself and was never supposed to. The outcome is not and never has been the triumph of a techno- establishment but that of the unscrupulous. King’s failure was his appeal to the “better angels” of human nature, Eisenhower’s was to appeal to rationality and tradition. Neither could imaging the full scope of the waste- based economy. The angels have been turned into street whores and reason baffled by incoherent nonsense.

Tradition, like money is a time- value. Over time the abandoned and rotting big box stores become ‘traditional’ along with ‘traditional’ Detroit, ‘traditional’ Las Vegas, ‘traditional’ Ireland and ‘traditional’ Spain. This is what citizens must begin to get used to.

We are all niggers, now.