Dr. King and Trucks

On the Sunday before he was murdered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, that magnificent edifice where America officially mourns its great following their passing. On that Sunday the nation had no way of knowing that it soon would mourn King.

His sermon that morning was The Drum Major speech, one of the great moral lessons in American oratory. In it, King uses a Biblical story to explain our innate need for attention, the “drum major instinct,” he called it. He decried our desire for attention, almost at any cost. Early in the sermon he says, “Now the presence of this instinct explains why we are so often taken by advertisers, you know those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion, and they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying.”

One of the lines in the speech says, “Did you ever see people buy cars that they can’t even begin to buy in terms of their income.” A new Ram pickup truck costs upward of thirty thousand dollars. Why mention the Ram truck? The company used recordings of that very speech to try to sell us its trucks during the Super Bowl in one of the foulest, most disgusting advertising pitches in the history of television, and that’s an area with stiff competition.

The ad, which cost more than five million dollars to air, ignored the first part of King’s speech and used the part where he admonished us to serve. “If you want to be important, wonderful”… “He who is greatest among you shall be your servant.” Cut to a video of a truck.

What an obscene, disgusting display of crass commercialism! Selling trucks few people can afford by twisting one of the great speeches in American history, by ignoring its core message, and attempting to brand a truck with one of the world’s great moral teachers.

I was there at the National Cathedral that Sunday in April of 1968. I was a young reporter assigned to cover King’s sermon and a news conference that followed. I was moved by the sermon and its message and it was still in my mind as King, at his news conference, announced details of his planned Poor People’s Campaign later that spring. The Poor People’s Campaign would call attention to the desperate plight of Americans living in poverty, black, white and brown, people who never in their lives would be able to buy an expensive pickup truck. They barely had enough to eat.

All of that, the speech/sermon, its core message, the Poor People’s Campaign, all of it, was roiling in my mind as I recoiled from the obscene ad. To me it represented the worst of our desire to have shiny things at the expense of our souls.

As Dr. King said in his Drum Major speech, “You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”

Amen.