XPost: alt.politics.conservative, alt.politics.democrats, dc.politics   
   XPost: soc.culture.african.american   
   From: rkoch@banmlkday.com   
      
   This must be a black thing, plagiarism.   
      
   Or, rather, it would be embarrassing, if King’s plagiarism of   
   his Ph.D thesis hadn’t been systematically covered up so that   
   few know about it. In fact, King did not plagiarize the quote by   
   Theodore Parker that was falsely attributed to him by Obama’s   
   rug. But King’s word for word stealing of massive parts of his   
   Ph.D thesis forever taints his reputation. What kind of person   
   would do something like that?   
      
   On third thought, it is very embarrassing. As we see from the   
   photo, the new carpet, with its outer border of pithy liberal   
   statements, most of them by U.S. presidents, dominates the Oval   
   Office. Now that the misattributed quotation has been   
   discovered, what is Obama going to do? Have the carpet redone,   
   with Martin Luther King’s name replaced by Theodore Parker’s?   
   But that would spoil what is undoubtedly the carpet’s main   
   appeal for Obama, that it memorializes King and puts him on the   
   same level with several presidents. Or leave the carpet as is,   
   with the false attribution intact, thus serving as a permanent   
   reminder that the main hero of black and liberal/neocon America   
   was a serious plagiarist?   
      
   The September 4 Washington Post reports:   
      
   Oval Office rug gets history wrong   
      
   By Jamie Stiehm [What a stupid name for an adult human being. Is   
   this Jamie male, female, who knows?]   
      
   A mistake has been made in the Oval Office makeover that goes   
   beyond the beige.   
      
   President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach,   
   with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt,   
   Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther   
   King Jr. woven along its curved edge.   
      
   “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward   
   justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama   
   company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.   
      
   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.   
   Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you   
   may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist,   
   Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the   
   end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He   
   died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.   
      
   A century later, during the civil rights movement, 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. That is a shame, because the slain   
   civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate was so   
   eloquent in his own right. Obama, who is known for his   
   rhetorical skills, is likely to feel the slight to King—and   
   Parker.   
      
   My investigation into this error led me to David Remnick’s   
   biography of Obama, “The Bridge,” published this year. Early in   
   the narrative, Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, presents   
   this as “Barack Obama’s favorite quotation.” It appears that   
   neither Remnick nor Obama has traced the language to its true   
   source.   
      
   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.”   
      
   The president is at minimum well-served by Parker’s presence in   
   the room. Parker embodied the early 19th-century reformer’s   
   passionate zeal for taking on several social causes at once.   
   Many of these reformers were Unitarians or Quakers; some were   
   Transcendentalists. Most courageously, as early as the 1830s,   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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