Megan McArdle Was Wrong About Martin Luther King
MEGAN McArdle highlights a tweet doing the rounds after Osama Bin Laden’s death was confirmed by official sources:
Bin Laden’s death, the following quote came across my twitter feed:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr
McArdle analyses the message and decides it’s a fake. She typed it into Google. She goes to quotation sites. She might ever have spoken to one of King Junior’s pals and asked him if they ever heard him say that line. It was the pastor’s misfortune to have lived before the age of Twitter. Had he lived now, he might have provided us with neat quotes on The Simpsons, Jose Mourinho, EastEnders and his favourite breed of fish.
She can find no mention of the quote other than on Twitter. So. McArdle says it must be a fake. It looks like people with no salient thoughts of their own will have to look elsewhere to make sense of Bin Laden’s death in the fewest characters possible.
Anorak can tell McArdle that she’s been looking in the wrong place. The quote was uttered by Martin Luther King Junior, the other one, over a post fox hunt lunch at pub in Leckhampstead, Berkshire.
With that cleared up, the media can now get to work on making up quotes that one day other other journalists will cite…
Posted: 3rd, May 2011 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
