Muting the Dream

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Source: commons wikimedia
Source: commons wikimedia

It’s difficult to judge if King knew what taking his discourse out of the public domain would mean. 

The release of the film Selma this month adds meaning to the holiday honoring Martin Luther King’s birthday.  But some details about what the producers had to do to put King’s courage on view add a slightly sour note to this year’s tribute.

Most Americans probably do not know that the great civil rights leader’s words may not be rewritten or replayed without payment to King’s heirs.  Soon after the famous “I have a Dream” speech on the National Mall, King moved to legally retain legal ownership of it, and eventually other statements made by him throughout the years of his struggle. He copyrighted his public rhetoric in a way few would ever think possible or desirable.  It’s difficult to judge if King knew what taking his discourse out of the public domain would mean.

The family’s explanation for monetizing and controlling the leader’s rhetoric is that he and they did not want his words used for commercial or unintended purposes. If you want a video copy of the speech, you will need to buy it from Amazon or some other seller of audio content. If you are a documentary filmmaker seeking footage of the era, payment would be required for any portions that include statements from King. And if you are retelling key moments from his life, his words are off-limits, even though the family has apparently licensed segments for use in commercials.

The challenge was especially great for the producers of Selma, who were forced to write their own King-like oratory to recreate the fateful 1965 march. The exclusive film rights to those words have apparently been sold to DreamWorks’ Steven Spielberg.

It even gets even more peculiar. Stanford University runs the Martin Luther King Institute that oversees a “King Papers Project.” But getting access to the papers is not easy. Here’s their online warning:

The Institute cannot give permission to use or reproduce any of the writings, statements, or images of Martin Luther King, Jr. Please do not contact us for this purpose.
Inquiries regarding the use or reproduction King's writings or statements should be directed to the manager of the Estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:  Intellectual Properties Management (IPM).

How very strange, for several reasons.  First, in my years in academic publishing, I’ve rarely encountered an editor who had to pay a license fee in order to reprint speeches and statements from major political or social figures. I’m sure it has happened somewhere. But most principals or their estates understand that the nation’s civil culture is predicated on widespread dissemination of foundational documents. The general guideline is usually that it’s more about the ideas than monetizing them.

Second, when you put a price on jeremiads that called on others to join a collective struggle, claiming legal ownership of those words undermines the very ethic of personal sacrifice they are ostensibly about. King asked much of his followers, especially when they were recruited to march—as in Selma—without any police protection.  Given the willingness of so many to selflessly further the cause of civil rights, It’s difficult to understand why he set up an intellectual property mechanism that would put his rhetorical legacy on the auction block.  Freely sharing his words would have been better served the idea that this was a collective struggle.  Surely documents that are part of a nation’s social and cultural advances deserve a better fate than being sold to the highest bidder.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

The Strange Business of Fronting For Others

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Flight Attendants for Singapore Airlines Source: Wikipedia.org
Flight Attendants at Singapore Airlines.  Source: Wikipedia.org

 Fronting is the requirement to represent in speech and body language the interests of others who have a specific lexicon and level of enthusiasm they want you to employ.

Most of us have heard writer David Sedaris’ story of gaining seasonable employment by becoming one of Santa’s elves in Macy’s New York store.  It’s funny in part because we know that it cannot be easy for a sardonic man to put on green tights and prance around in fake snow.  The job comes with the built-in need to be a happy supplicant to overstimulated children and demanding parents.  As Sedaris first explained it on NPR’s This American Life, he mostly did his part.  But each time we read or hear the tale we are aware of the yawning gap between the prickly man and the fantasy of simple innocence he’s required to enact.

This imperative to perform in a non-congruent role has a name: fronting.  It’s a handy term because it identifies one cause of the angst we experience when a communication task seems daunting.  Specifically, fronting with apparent conviction is often a lie, made worse if we’re born with a strong sense to recognize our own hypocrisies.

Formally, fronting is the requirement to represent in speech and body language the interests of others who have a specific lexicon and level of enthusiasm they want you to employ.  It’s the primary job skill for work in customer service, sales, teaching, lawyering, and most forms of inter-organizational communication.  Typically, in manufacturing engineers will front and protect each other, not necessarily revealing departmental differences to the sales people one floor up.  Professors front for their disciplines to students or deans.  Lawyers remain the very picture of client loyalty, even when they have significant doubts.  And let’s not forget restaurant servers, who usually know enough to be more optimistic about the food coming out of the kitchen then simple devotion to the Truth would allow.

There is an obvious performance aspect to all this. Professional actors front so well that they seem to become their characters. Who knew that actress Alexis Bledel hated coffee?  Her character dutifully carried a paper cup of the stuff with her everywhere in the hundred and fifty caffeinated episodes of The Gilmore Girls. The rest of us are simply amateurs, and often uncomfortable with the gap between our assigned roles and the authentic person we claim to be.

There is some evidence that airline attendants carry around more fatigue than most of us, partly because fronting for air-carriers today means remaining upbeat in the face of the countless real and perceived affronts to passenger dignity.  Look carefully, and you can almost see them straining to keep their frustrations out of view. It can be very stressful to serve the interests of an organization if we believe it betrays a core value.

The most difficult kind of fronting  is when an individual is induced to deliver as their own what is essentially another’s message. It’s the burden of allowing oneself to seem to be the active agent in an exchange.  Thus spouses and partners will sometimes ask the other to represent themselves as a committed believer to a point of view, when no commitment exists.  One instructs the other about what to say, as in “When you call the Fredericks back, be sure to remind them that we are opposed to attending any event that. . . [Insert the offending feature here]”  Whatever principle is at stake, it is the protesting partner who has passed along the task of an impassioned reply that the other may not share. Couples provide this stress-inducing service to each other all the time.

There is an interesting final irony about fronting.  My impression is that its burdens are eased if a person is wearing a uniform.  The official garb of an organization implicitly says to all clients and customers, “I am performing my assigned role.  I have clothed myself in the firm’s attitudes, but know that underneath I am still my own person.” A policeman has sartorial support to claim that the ticket he is giving you is simply an application of the law.  Besides, who would quarrel with anyone with both a gun and a club?

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