Martin Luther King and Lab Mice

Behind me my wife is watching the stars and near-stars walk the red carpet to the Golden Globes. This is one of the stupidest rituals in pop culture -- this red carpet stroll, with airhead entertainment parasites asking inane questions that some of the stars seem exasperated to answer. "Who are you wearing?" "What did you eat for lunch?" and so on. It's like a competition to see which talking head can ask the lamest question.

This is particularly difficult for me to take, after lying on the sofa this afternoon, finishing Philip Roth's magnificent novel, I Married a Communist. Roth has written some stunning novels about 20th century America -- the Human Stain, American Pastoral, and I Married a Communist -- novels which detail our contradictions and hyprocrisies, our fear and paranoa, our weakness and confusion. Roth writes about flawed characters -- human beings, in other words, who strive, who fail, who seek revenge, who lie (for all sorts of reasons), who hate, and on and on, the full human panorama. What a pleasure it is to read Roth's sentences, the perfect cadence, the pitch, the blinding intelligence and insight, the powerful narrative drive. I was disappointed when the novel came to an end.

My children tested me today, as only they can do, with their arguments and fights, their screaming and whining, their demands for immediate gratification, their smiling obstinancy. I separate them like a referee stepping between two prizefighters, point them toward neutral rooms, only to hear them going at it again as soon as I turn my back. They know how to push my buttons, and far too often I respond like a mouse in a laboratory experiment; my kids make me perform for bite-sized food pellets. C'mon, Dad, stand on your head, one more time!

As the afternoon turns to evening, I wonder what Martin Luther King would say if he could see America, circa 2006. Would he still express hope for social and economic justice? Would he look at what Bush & Cheney have done to America in less than half a decade and still feel sanguine? Could he listen to leading Democrats without declaring the whole shebang a hopeless mess? We give Martin sainthood, but of course he was merely a man, human, as flawed as any Philip Roth character.