Last night was a giddy night for TV watchers, with an important Giants game, a new episode of Downton Abbey, and the Golden Globe Awards on all at once.  I watched the awards show, thinking I could catch Downton in a rebroadcast and the Giants (fearless prediction) in the SuperBowl.  It wasn’t until I spotted Viggo Mortensen at the Globes with a MLK pin on his tuxedo lapel that I remembered that it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.  Octavia Spencer mentioned Dr. King in her acceptance speech, but no one else at the ceremony took note of the holiday, the man, or his mission.  I thought the pin was a perfect gesture.  The image of Viggo wearing it was tweeted and posted online immediately, and included on television fashion recaps the next day.  It seemed more than merely fashion, as it does sometimes when actors in formal dress sport red ribbons, pink ribbons, and flag pins.  Because Viggo has a history of political concern and unorthodoxy (he endorsed Dennis Kucinich in 2008), the gesture seemed heartfelt.  And the small pin, which simply spelled out M-L-K, was discrete and pointed.

But where did this pin come from?  Are we a culture that can’t behold any feeling, any memory, any idea, until it’s transformed into a product?  It was unseemly to me when, before the holidays, Barack Obama kept tweeting about giftable Obama for America merchandise like a coffee mug with his birth certificate on it (“Made in America” ), and another with a likeness of the Vice President (“Cup of Joe”).  Of course Dr. King, who possessed an awesome personal dignity, died before he and his movement could profit financially from his likeness.  But his family has been accused of peddling his legacy by copyrighting works like the “I Have a Dream” speech, and friends have attempted to profit by selling his letters and other documents.  The Martin Luther King Jr. National Monument that was unveiled last summer on the lawn in Washington DC depicts him with pharaonic authority.  And while the representation is richly-deserved it seems cliched, not getting at the complexity and difficulty of his work.  The best way to honor him might be to think long and hard about what he did, and to keep doing it.