VIDEO REVIEW : Nightmarish ‘Tribute’ to King’s Dream

Is Martin Luther King Jr. proudly blushing from the great beyond at the new video “tribute” offered him by the rap group Public Enemy, or rolling over in his grave?

The self-consciously inflammatory “By the Time I Get to Arizona” video not only dramatizes violent recrimination for civil-rights wrongs but actually portrays Public Enemy as trigger-pulling, bomb-igniting, poison-lacing, righteous assassins who mow down supposedly racist Arizona officials. Wouldn’t the nonviolent King have recoiled at such a sordid, vengeful scenario?

Not at all, insists Chuck D., the usually sensible Public Enemy leader who now seems to believe he knows King better than all the friends, associates and historians who’ve tried to live out King’s plans.

“I’m tired of people talking about Martin Luther King in 1963 and ‘I had a dream,’ ” Chuck D. says during an MTV interview that will precede some of the video’s airings. “Dr. Martin Luther King wasn’t kickin’ that ‘I have a dream’ stuff in 1967-68. He was a little bit more hard-core, leaning toward really what Malcolm (X) was saying.”

This sounds suspiciously like Oliver Stone insisting beyond the shadow of a doubt that J.F.K. at the time of his death was secretly planning to pull the troops out of Vietnam. Stone and Chuck D.--revisionist soul mates, separated at birth?

Chuck D. might also wish to borrow Stone’s usual mantra--that you can fudge on some of the facts to get across a larger truth--to explain why he’s fictionalized and exaggerated the political situation in Arizona. The video portrays Arizona politicos unanimously opposing a King holiday, and therefore being murdered by the group. (The present governor favors the holiday.)

Mixed in with a re-creation of King’s assassination is the imaginary scenario of an Arizona civil rights march--reminiscent of the horror of the early ‘60s, but set in the present day. We see police use attack dogs and fire hoses on blacks, and waiters splatter spaghetti on sit-in protesters’ heads.

In response, Public Enemy dons military gear and heavy arms, delivering a poison Candygram to a fictional Arizona senator (seen keeling over), aiming rifles at a coterie of other government officials (we’re spared the sight of gunshot wounds) and, finally, detonating a bomb placed under the governor’s car (Chuck D. himself pushes the button).

“We like to think that this video finishes the work that Martin Luther King Jr. started,” Public Enemy spokesman Harry Allen told The Times this week, elevating the video from mere incendiary agitprop to something with delusions of grandeur.

It’s unlikely that PE fans will take this as incitement to assassinate officials. But it won’t be because the group went out of its way to avoid that interpretation.

“By the Time I Get to Arizona” might be understood as a vicarious revenge fantasy, a good vent for mass rage in the face of Arizona’s continuing stubbornness to enact a King holiday.

Yet even as he characterizes it as “fiction,” Chuck D. resists interpreting its grotesque literalism as merely symbolic, instead indicating in interviews that he really does believe in an eye for an eye as justice for King’s death, regardless of whether it’s possible now to visit it on the original perpetrators.

The video’s approving caricature of terrorism only obscures Public Enemy’s constructive core message--let alone what it does to King’s. Far from “finishing the work he started,” this seemingly pro-assassination video is just another sad footnote to the assassinated leader’s legacy.