VIENNA, Va —Sept. 4, 2010__ My laugh of the Labor Day weekend has been the information that one of the quotations on the new rug in the redecorated Oval Office was incorrectly attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I bring this up because one of the correct quotations was from Abraham Lincoln, which brings it within Civil War purview.
The décor of the redecoration has been soundly excoriated by one and all and, in truth, instead of “Oval Office” it now qualifies as “Boring Beige Box” with its plethora of builders’ beige from one end to the other, including the overly downscale (even if comfy) plushy sofas and a chair or two upholstered in what looks like (horrors) wide wale corduroy. Like in the children's book about a bear.
This is not someone’s family room or den, it is The Oval Office, the main province of the president, and it used to look . . . presidential. No longer.
But back to the rug. Around its perimeter (and it looks extremely small in diameter) are favorite quotations of President Obama from former presidents John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Though he was not president, Martin Luther King Jr. is much admired by the current president, and he found a quote used by King, which he liked, and included it. Stitched into the rug, once and for all.
Only while King may have said it, he didn’t originate it. Aye, there’s the rub. [Wm. Shakespeare]
It seems that the man who first spoke the immortal words was not King but a Massachusetts abolitionist and Unitarian minister named Theodore Parker, who used these words back some eight years before the Civil War. He said, “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.”
Parker was a minister and Bible believer, and, by the time the Civil War was on the horizon, he had become an avid abolitionist. He wrote what has been described as a scathing paper entitled “To a Southern Slaveholder” in 1848 and urged others to violate the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, his family being one who harbored illegal slave runaways.
King used the words in a speech in 1957 and apparently even he failed to add the normal attribution type phrase, “As Theodore Parker once said…,” and so the quotation became, perforce, a King quote.
In this era of our lives, when every bit of minutiae may be checked on a dozen Internet sites at the stroke of a key, one has to wonder why this error was allowed to be stitched into the little rug that occupies a central beige point in the beige room.
One learns -- as must the president and his staff members (and expensive decorators) -- that accuracy is a jewel to be desired! We all goof up occasionally, but not in such a prominent and permanent way in a prominent (if boring) looking room.
Just my thoughts – but, on this Labor Day holiday weekend, the Oval Office could use a bit more of the red, white and blue and skip the beige.
Have a great holiday!!
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