According to Reuters, on January 20, 2001 in Washington, the special guest at the Florida state inaugural ball was introduced by the country singer Larry Gatlin. He said, “In France it was Joan of Arc; in the Crimea it was Florence Nightingale; in the Deep South there was Rosa Parks; in India there was Mother Teresa, and in Florida there was Katherine Harris.”
I leave it to my Indian, Crimean, and French colleagues to determine how the Florida secretary of state is or is not similar to Teresa, Florence, or St. Joan. As for Rosa Parks, Katherine Harris can get in line. Because people around here can’t stop comparing themselves to Parks. To wit:
The mayor of Friendship Heights, Maryland, has proposed an outdoor smoking ban because, according to The Washington Post, citizens “with asthma or other illnesses ‘cannot have full access’ to areas where smokers are doing their evil deed. The mayor compares this horrific possibility to Rosa Parks being sent to the back of the bus.”
A California dairy farmer protesting the government’s milk pricing system poured milk down a drain in front of TV cameras, claiming that he had to take a stand, “just like Rosa Parks had to take a stand.”
A street performer in St. Augustine, Florida, is challenging a city ordinance that bans him from doing his act on the town’s historic St. George Street. The performer’s lawyer told The Florida Times-Union, “Telling these people they can exercise their First Amendment rights somewhere other than on St. George is like telling Rosa Parks that she has to sit in the back of the bus.” (Which is, coincidentally, also the argument of another Florida lawyer, this one representing adult dancers contesting Tampa’s ordinance outlawing lap dancing.) I would also like to mention the rocker, marksman, and conservative activist Ted Nugent, who in his autobiography, God, Guns and Rock ’n’ Roll, refers to himself as “Rosa Parks with a loud guitar.” That’s so inaccurate. Everyone knows he’s more like Mary Matalin with a fancy deer rifle.
Call me picky, but breathing secondhand smoke, being subject to unfair dairy pricing, and not being able to mime (or lap dance), though they are all tragic, tragic injustices, are not quite as bad as the systematic segregation of public transportation based on skin color. And while fighting for your right to lap dance and mime and breathe just the regular pollution is a very fine, very American idea, it is not quite as brave as being a middle-aged black woman in Alabama in 1955 telling a white man she’s not giving him her seat despite the fact that the law requires her to do so. And, oh, by the way, in the process, she gets arrested, and then sparks the Montgomery bus boycott, which is the seed of the civil rights movement as we know it. The bus boycotters not only introduced a twenty-six-year-old pastor by the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., into national public life but, after many months of car pools, walking, and court fights against bus segregation, got the separate but equal doctrine declared illegal once and for all.
It’s not just people on the right like Katherine Harris and Ted Nugent who seem especially silly being likened to Parks. I first cringed at this analogy trend at the lefty Ralph Nader’s October 2000 campaign rally in Madison Square Garden. Ever sit in a coliseum full of people who think they’re heroes? I was surrounded by thousands of well-meaning, well-fed white kids who loved it when the filmmaker Michael Moore told them they should, like Rosa Parks, stand up to power, by which I think he meant vote for Nader so he could qualify for federal matching funds. When Nader himself mentioned abolitionists in Mississippi in 1836 and asked the crowd to “think how lonely it must have been,” he was answered, according to my notes, with a “huge, weird cheer.” I think I’m a fine enough person—why, the very next morning I was having people over for waffles. But I hope I’m not being falsely modest by pointing out that I’m no Harriet Tubman. And I’m certainly no Rosa Parks. As far as I’m concerned, about the only person in recent memory who has an unimpeachable right to compare himself to Parks is that Chinese student who stared down those tanks in Tiananmen Square.
I was reminded of those Naderites watching a rerun of the sitcom Sports Night on Comedy Central. Dan, a television sportscaster played by Josh Charles, has been ordered by his network to make an on-air apology to viewers because he said in a magazine interview that he supports the legalization of marijuana. He stands by his opinion and balks at apologizing. His boss, Isaac (Robert Guillaume), agrees but tells him to do it anyway “because it’s television and this is how it’s done.” Dan replies, “Yeah, well, sitting in the back of the bus was how it was done until a forty-two-year-old lady moved up front.” A few minutes later Isaac looks Dan in the eye and tells him, “Because I love you I can say this. No rich young white guy has ever gotten anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks.” Finally, the voice of reason, which of course was heard on a canceled network TV series on cable.
Analogies give order to the world—and solidarity. Pointing out how one person is like another is reassuring, less lonely. Maybe those who would compare their personal inconveniences to the epic struggles of history are just looking for company, and who wouldn’t want to be in the company of Rosa Parks? On the other hand, perhaps people who compare themselves to Rosa Parks are simply arrogant, pampered nincompoops with delusions of grandeur who couldn’t tell the difference between a paper cut and a decapitation.
In defense of Ted Nugent, the street performer, the mayor, the dairy farmer, the lap dancers, the Naderites, and a fictional sportscaster, I will point out that Katherine Harris is the only person on my list of people lamely compared to a civil rights icon who, at the very moment she was being compared to a civil rights icon, was actually being sued for “massive voter disenfranchisement of people of color during the presidential election”—by the NAACP.