The Lamplighter

I just finished reading the new biography of Justice William Brennan and highly recommend it to everyone discouraged by the apparently unstoppable steamroller of antediluvian political victories by troglodyte rethuglicans.

I was born within a few years of Brennan's elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court, and was raised in an FDR-JFK-RFK-MLK political household. But I never realized until reading Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion just how much my life - the freedoms I enjoy and take for granted - has been shaped by the battles William J. Brennan fought. Not even just the ones he won, but the ones he lost and turned into victories anyway.

When Brennan lay in state after his death in 1997, thousands of people stood in line for hours for the opportunity to pay their respects. One person asked by a reporter why she stood in line replied: "I am a woman. I am black. What more can I say?"

Brennan may well have offered his best insight about how he would like to be remembered before he joined the Supreme Court. It came at the end of his February 1954 Saint Patrick's Day speech in Boston, remembered for its veiled attack on McCarthyism. Brennan recounted a story once told by a nineteenth-century Scottish comedian, Harry Lauder, of sitting at his window before the advent of electricity. Lauder watched as a lamplighter worked his way down the street, climbing his ladder to light each lamp before moving on to the next one. Eventually, the lamplighter was no longer visible, and the storyteller could see only the lamps he had lit. Brennan concluded his speech by saying:

So it is, my friends, with you and me of Irish blood. As we go through life, may we be found lighting the lamps of truth and justice and righteousness, even as our Irish forebears before us, so that as time passes and we move from the scene of action, our own chilren and their children after them, though we be lost to view, may tell the way we went by the lamps we lighted along life's pathway.

Read this book now, and not for the nostalgia high of a time when liberalism marched forward with strength and conviction.

Read this book now for the courage and inspiration we so desperately need today, when liberalism is in retreat from an American fascism that would reject the Birchers as hippies.

Read this book now for a lesson in what it takes to beat back the never-truly-defeated forces of fear and darkness and hate.

And when the next U.S. Supreme Court seat comes open, demand that Barack Obama's appointment at bare minimum be another William J. Brennan.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....