Given how little money she has, it's no shock that her campaign won't say how much they're planning to spend airing the ad. Here's the script:

Who would know, that for the girl, being arrested and going to jail at seventeen would change her life, and ours, forever? Would it matter, to have a mayor whose heart contained that much determination - whose intelligence, turned hope into action. Others talk - she listens, builds, demands. Affordable housing? Jobs? She's done it. Imagine the difference courage could make. Imagine a great mayor. C. Virginia Fields, Mayor.

UPDATE: Watch it here.

Meanwhile, here's my favorite (printable) nomination so far, from a West Side reader:

"I'm afraid I have to nominate Brian Thomas Johnston, skater punk
candidate for Manhattan Borough President.

"He dropped off the scene as suddenly as he arrived, leaving only sweet
memories of his insistence on reciting the Letter from Birmingham Jail
before captive audiences and a retinue of DFNYC meetup-goers puzzling
over his 'I was trying to out Ken Mehlman and someone was like "you
should run for Borough President" and that's why I want to strengthen
community boards' campaign narrative.

"Also, he used to get really upset if anyone asked 'Um, are you the
only gay thirty-something-year-old white Brian in the race?'"

Nominations to politickerblog@gmail.com.

I've been looking for an excuse to say this, to write about Martin Luther King Jr. for some time now. Faithful readers may recall how I shoehorned a reference to Dr. King into a recent column about John Walker Lindh. I'd been recalling the way, years ago in the mid-80's, I'd been badgering my old mentor Dan Wolf (when he was an Ed Koch adviser) about the Mayor's refusal to give city employees Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday off (this was before it became a national holiday). A terrible symbolic error, I thought. (In fairness, I should add that Ed Koch was one of those honorable New Yorkers who risked going down to Mississippi to support the Freedom Riders.)

It was the tip of the iceberg of a feeling about Dr. King I'd had ever since I was a kid. My parents wouldn't let me go to the March on Washington to hear him speak, so I listened instead on the radio–and had some dim intimation of how grateful we should be for having had M.L.K. among us. That we might just as easily not have been blessed with as loving and inspirational a leader, healer and prophet. And that, as bad as race relations may seem at times in America now, things might have been immeasurably worse. In fact, we can see just how much worse in the years after King's assassination.

But a couple of things have held me back from writing a King column. First of all, there's the drawback to praising virtue: the imputation that you are somehow seeking to seem virtuous for doing it, and I make no claims to being a particularly virtuous person. But as an observant outsider to virtue, I do know it when I see it in others.

And second, it's more difficult (for me, anyway) to write about things one admires earnestly than about things one can scoff at ironically. Fortunately, though, I think I've found a way to do both, at least in this column. Praising Dr. King will allow me to question the claims to virtue or at least consistency–to being always on the side of morality and human rights–by some conservative figures. In fact, just about all the ones who preen about morality and human rights now, but were shamefully silent–or, worse, scornfully critical–of Martin Luther King at the time when he most needed support: when he was bringing America's most shameful human-rights issue to the fore.

I will totally concede that liberals (or at least many leftists of the Marxist persuasion) have this problem when it comes to their silence about Marxist police states during the Cold War. I recall some lefty prof preening in moral indignation not long ago in the pages of The Nation about the Cold War surveillance of some writers by the F.B.I. Yes, it was bad, but his knee-jerk sneers at "Cold War" this and "Cold War" that as somehow an exclusively American shame were so dishonest–conveniently ignoring the fact that the Cold War was waged against a regime that didn't just keep files on dissident writers, but murdered them and locked up poets in death camps. It didn't just subject dissidents to surveillance, but put millions of them to death. Where was the indignation about those writers and dissenters?

Even now, some manage to remain in denial about the fact that mass murder committed in the name of Marxism might perhaps call into question their faith in the cult of Marxist "science." When will they find the courage to admit that some of the things they believed at age 22 have been proven wrong by history? No, it's so much easier to sneer at "the Cold War" as some American delusion. Really brave.

Still, one wants to ask those conservatives who are forever investigating the Cold War pronouncements of every left-wing "fellow traveler" just why they were silent during the great moral struggle on the home front: the civil-rights movement of the 50's and 60's. It's not true of all conservatives; I recall reading in one of Ben Stein's journals that he traveled with tapes of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches to inspire himself. And Andrew Sullivan quoted (a bit tendentiously) from King's stirring "Why We Can't Wait" speech on Martin Luther King Day this year in his Web zine. But I wonder how widespread this is among conservatives.

Perhaps it's time for some responsible conservatives (or some leftists who want payback) to do a detailed investigation of just what the conservative movement was saying about Dr. King and the human-rights issue here in their backyard back in the 60's: a decade that the "values" crowd loves to dismiss as a time of decadence and degeneracy, but which, in fact–at least when it came to the civil-rights movement–was a time of great honor and moral courage. But not for the mainstream of the conservative movement, where one could find plenty of "fellow travelers" of out-and-right racists such as James Eastland and Strom Thurmond–fellow travelers who failed to speak up against the racist terror that ruled the South. Perhaps some responsible conservatives ought to investigate just what flaw at the heart of moralist conservative philosophy prevented them from seeing the racist violence of the segregated South as a moral issue, a "values" issue. As a question of good and evil.

There were a couple of things that brought all this back to me. First, rereading the first volume of Taylor Branch's amazing King biography Parting the Waters , which was a kind of life-changing experience for me when it first came out. At a very depressed period of my life, it reminded me of the stirring potential of people to rise above the innate crumminess of human nature and resist evil. Not just King, of course, but all those brave civil-rights activists, black and white.

And then I came upon a provocative essay posted on the Poynter Institute for Journalism Web page as a resource for M.L.K. day, an essay by Peter A. McKay, a writer at The Wall Street Journal who argued that too much attention has been paid to the "I Have a Dream" speech. He recommended instead that media people memorializing Martin Luther King Jr. on his holiday should look at King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written in 1963 at the height of one of the ugliest, most brutal and most decisive moments in the civil-rights struggle. It was King as "doer not just dreamer," Mr. McKay says. It was a smart suggestion, and what struck me on rereading King's "Letter"–in addition to its erudition and eloquence–was how deeply he'd been affected by the relevance of the Holocaust to the question of civil disobedience in the face of evil. "Everything that was done to the Jews in Germany was done 'legally,'" King wrote–which calls into question unquestioning obedience to laws that enforce and protect a deeply immoral system.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail" is important in relation to the "faith-based" conservative movement–today's "values" crowd–because it was addressed to a group of self-proclaimed moralists: to the white ministers in Birmingham (and, alas, a rabbi, too) who publicly called on Dr. King to hold off on his campaign to confront one of the most wretched racist police states in the South–the one run by Birmingham "Commissioner of Public Safety" Bull Connor–so as to avoid "raising tension" in the city.

Don't disturb the peace, these small-minded, faith-based cowards told Dr. King.

To which he replied, in one passage from the "Letter" (which you can read in full at http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.html):

" … I must confess that I am not afraid of the word 'tension.' I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive non-violent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, [we must] create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the magnificent heights of understanding and brotherhood."

And then there was the serendipitous arrival in the mail of the new paperback edition of Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home , a remarkable, often thrilling account of what its subtitle calls "Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution"–the one that resulted in Dr. King's arrest and that powerful "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

What reading Carry Me Home did was carry me back to an America–the America as close to us as 1963–that supported what was essentially a brutal and sometimes murderous apartheid regime in the South. I don't buy the idea that the de facto segregation of the North was as shameful as the de jure segregation in the South. (Blacks in the North could vote without being terrorized, and it made a difference.)

It's the kind of moral-equivalence argument that white-supremacist theories of the Civil War have long pushed: that Northern "wage slavery" was as bad as Southern whip-and-chain human bondage. Good try.

It was a disgraceful period, the Jim Crow era in the South; it was similar in kind if not in degree to the treatment of the Jews in Germany in the 1930's, and it had the broad support, alas, of one and a half of America's two major political parties. The Republicans were eagerly and shamefully seeking ways to exploit racism for their "Southern Strategy." And the Democratic Party tolerated a racist "solid South" wing that ruled Congress and protected segregation with committee chairmen like Thurmond and Eastland and Howard Smith (the longtime House Rules Committee boss).

And where were the current conservative champions of human rights in China and morality in America back then? Well, those old enough to make a choice to join Dr. King on this most fundamental question of human rights were, with very few exceptions, hiding their faces behind disingenuous "states' rights" arguments–when they weren't actively scorning and attacking the civil-rights movement. And where are the conservative human-rights activists of today, who may not have been old enough to be held responsible for their position on Dr. King when he was alive? Making cracks about "affirmative action," without ever having taken on the racism that gave rise to it. Slandering the 60's as nothing but Marxists and hippies in a disengenous refusal to see that the defining aspect of the 60's in American history was the civil-rights movement–because to admit that would force them to face the shameful history of conservative cowardice, hypocrisy and often outright racism in the 60's.

Am I going too far? Then remind me of the conservatives who did speak out against apartheid in the South. Who were they again? We know the rise of the Bush political dynasty was cemented by Daddy Bush's disgraceful vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a Texas Congressman–which made him acceptable to the "Southern Strategy" Republicans.

Show me the editorials in the conservative periodicals which said, "We disagree with civil-disobedience tactics, but then, as conservatives who believe in human rights, we have an even greater responsibility to do everything in our power to change ugly racist laws in traditional ways–and to repudiate conservatives who support racism."

Did I just miss reading them, or were conservatives too busy spreading scurrilous rumors about Dr. King's sex life to concern themselves with the real moral issue at hand?

Isn't it about time for those conservatives who failed to recognize what an astonishing, unearned blessing Martin Luther King Jr. was to America–and whose moral neutrality and hostility, at a moment when Dr. King was combating a great evil, was nothing less than shameful–tore examine their own consciences, as well as their movement's history and its failure of nerve back then? Or perhaps to discover, at long last, that Martin Luther King Jr. should be their hero, too? After all, he led a "faith-based" moral revolution in America, while the preening moralists who preach "faith-based" everything now were silent on the sidelines.

I'll close with a great line from "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which Dr. King quotes from St. Augustine on the silence of such types:

"Those that sit at rest while others take pains [to resist evil] are tender turtles and buy their quiet with disgrace."

Perhaps it can be blamed on the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which has conspired with the Met to bring us this dispiriting exercise in cultural nostalgia. As every visitor to the Musée d'Orsay is made vividly aware, its administration has from the outset shown itself to have a hearty appetite for the inanities of 19th-century French academic painting. It may thus be understandable that an institution favoring work of this persuasion would welcome an opportunity to demonstrate that in the latter decades of the 19th-century France was not alone in countenancing such a woeful descent into artistic decadence. For such a dubious purpose, the art of Sir Edward Burne-Jones is indeed an appropriate object of scrutiny. But this would still not explain why the Met has been so eager to lend its prestige to this morbid attempt to disinter a reputation that is beyond retrieval.

One possible clue to the muddle that has animated this preposterous event may be found in some lines from the foreword to the oversize catalogue of the show. I refer to the passage in which the claim is made that "it is now, one hundred years after his death, possible once again to admire Edward Burne-Jones as the greatest British artist of the 19th century, after Turner and perhaps Constable." What nonsense! It would be a lot closer to the truth to say that the entire Pre-Raphaelite movement, of which Burne-Jones was a particularly gruesome representative, was the greatest blight to be visited upon British painting in the years following the high achievements of Constable and Turner–a blight, I dare say, from which British pictorial art has in some respects never fully recovered. From the perspective of that protracted blight, the vogue of Gilbert & George in the 1990's is remarkably similar to the vogue of Burne-Jones in the 1890's. Plus ça change …

Notwithstanding the Met's claim that "upon his death a century ago, [Burne-Jones] was widely considered the most important painter in Europe," the greatest critic of 19th-century European art at the turn-of-the-century–the German writer Julius Meier-Graefe–took quite a different view of this pathetic figure. "He should never have sat down to paint," wrote Meier-Graefe. "[William] Morris rescued what was best in his friend when he forced him to draw. This delivered us from the salamander-hues of [Burne-Jones'] female nude figures, which even in photographic reproductions sometimes make the observer's flesh creep."

Meier-Graefe correctly saw that "English Pre-Raphaelitism, posturing before the Italian painters, was a wild aberration," and he has left us a summation of Burne-Jones' characteristic pastiche which has never been improved upon: "He displays a Madonna by Perugino nude, or clothes her with the draperies of Mantegna, puts in an angel from the fragment of a primitive nimbus and makes a background of an English village church, some conventional foliage à la Botticelli, or a piece of Renaissance architecture. The influence of Rossetti is manifest throughout and to him Burne-Jones owes the predominant type of his faces. These are, of course, almost exclusively female; men become women when he paints them."

To which Meier-Graefe added: "This is mere handicraft," and the same may accurately be said of the entire exhibition at the Met, which numbers some 170 paintings, watercolors, drawings, tapestries, embroideries, stained glass, ceramic tiles, painted furniture, illustrated books and jewelry. Except for one or two portraits–particularly the portrait of the artist's wife Georgiana–the paintings, alas, are tiresome beyond endurance, crowded as they usually are with acres of that inert drapery, gaggles of facial expression borrowed from the formulaic emotions of Victorian melodrama and versions of the medieval past that are pure comic opera. Much of the rest of the exhibition has the look of an elegantly installed flea market.

As for the claims made in Burne-Jones's defense by some of our own contemporaries, a very telling one is quoted in the catalogue from the memoirs of Sir John Pope-Hennessy. Sir John was, of course, one of the greatest authorities on the Italian masters, but he was not a writer generally regarded as a connoisseur of modern painting. This is what Sir John wrote about Burne-Jones in recalling the exhibition of his work in 1977 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, of which Sir John was then the director: "A cartoon for a stained-glass window by Burne-Jones of the Good Shepherd had been acquired not long before by the Victoria and Albert, and the figure, with its silky, over-shampooed hair, its sensual lips, and its glassy, introspective eyes, corresponded very closely with the models for male fashions shown in the window of Harrods in the Brompton Road. If this was what the young wanted to look like, they would, it seemed to me, be ripe for Burne-Jones. This proved to be the case." In other words, the show proved to be a smash precisely because of its "relevance" to the shallowness of contemporary taste.

Sir John's words may not be the single most cynical observation ever to be recorded by a 20th-century museum director, but I, at least, know of nothing in the literature of modern museology that quite matches its cavalier combination of insouciant condescension and cynical complicity in the market mentality. H.L. Mencken once famously stated the same principle with his characteristic candor: No one ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public. Apparently the same may now be said of Britain and France as well. The exhibition remains on view at the Met through Sept. 6, after which it travels to the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham, England, and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

And yet when I hear, as I recently did at Avery Fisher Hall, an organization like the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra led by a conductor like Sir Simon Rattle, I am reminded that there are few experiences, in or out of the concert hall, more powerful than a great performance of a great symphony. The saga of how, beginning in 1980, this angelic-looking, mop-haired maestro turned a deeply provincial English orchestra into one of the world's most admired ensembles is, of course, the orchestra-construction story of our time-Britain's answer to what George Szell achieved in a similar setting with the Cleveland Orchestra a generation earlier. Making their New York debut, the Birmingham players and their leader (who, this fall, is stepping down after 18 years) revealed that the vibrancy heard on their many compact disks for EMI was only a taste of what they are like in person.

There have been conductors who've gone for the sound (Herbert von Karajan); conductors who've gone for the emotion (Bernstein); conductors who've gone for the score (Szell); conductors who've gone for the soul (Wilhelm Furtwängler). Mr. Rattle goes for the sheer excitement of communication. He does not seem to me a big-picture conductor, unveiling the work as if it were some pre-envisioned grand design. Nor is he overly fastidious about detail. (His violins lacked sheen at times, and there was some rough playing in the horns.) He is a conductor concerned with getting the most out of every moment. And, by means of what must be the most goading, gleeful and graceful body language of any conductor on today's podiums, he makes the business of playing music sound like the best conversation in the world.

His programming was at once familiar, daring and calculated to show the Birmingham in all its colors. Sunday afternoon consisted of three works composed, astonishingly enough, roughly 20 years apart: a dance suite from Jean-Philippe Rameau's tragédie lyrique , "Les Boréades," in which the courtly groundwork for the great age of 18th-century classicism was, as it were, laid immaculately bare; Haydn's Symphony No. 86 in D major, the apotheosis of the composer's unrivaled skill at juggling high seriousness with high spirits; and Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, the great bridge between the elegance of the Enlightenment and the heroic fervor of Romanticism. As with all truly satisfying concerts, one was grateful as much for the passing beauties-the translucent Beethoven, in particular, seemed literally to be dancing straight out of the composer's imagination-as for one's accumulating sense of illumination. Here was a lesson in classical varieties and verities that would have profited and delighted any schoolchild whose only previous musical tutors were Ice Cube and Snoop Doggy Dogg.

The following night, Mr. Rattle began with the Third Symphony by the contemporary British composer Oliver Knussen, an exuberant exercise in orchestral coloration, which splattered vividly, if not terribly meaningfully, in the air. (It was received rather grimly-which prompted Mr. Rattle to remark unruefully during the intermission, "Well, that one received what we call a crouching ovation.")

The second half was devoted to what has become obligatory for orchestras visiting New York-a Mahler symphony, in this case the not-often-played Seventh. Resistant as I am to Mahler-mania, I love this odd-man-out in the Mahler canon for its wonderful obliquities (which arrive from some other world, without a shred of Mahlerian schmaltz), its spectral serenades, its concluding crazy revelry. Mr. Rattle's hyper-expressive body and face (such as I could see it, from my seat in a side balcony) seemed possessed by this marvelously nutty stuff, and his forces were ablaze with responsiveness. This was Mahler in-your-face, and if some of it was flung rather rudely, one welcomed every bit of it. After one nakedly smudged horn entrance, I studied Mr. Rattle's face for the slightest frown, the slightest wince. If anything, his expression became even more rapturous, in full confidence of his Pied Piper's ability to take us wherever he wanted us to go, knowing that we would follow, no matter how stony the path.

The Birmingham's triumph was all the more vivid to me when, a few nights later, I found myself in the same hall, mired in the Seventh Symphony of Shostakovich, the so-called "Leningrad" Symphony, as played by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Kurt Masur. I have always felt that there was something slightly cheesy about this politically charged work, whose wartime premiere put Shostakovich on the cover of Time . Scholars still aren't sure whether its strident ferocities were meant to be anti-Hitler, anti-Stalin, or both, but played with the right swagger and edgy wistfulness, it can hold its grip for the nearly 80 minutes it lasts. In Mr. Masur's hands, it didn't grip.

We are up against a conundrum: Why-when the orchestra played the notes as brilliantly as this one, when the balance was impeccable, the rhythms crisp, the climaxes mighty and the pianissimos ravishing-did I find (as I often do at the Philharmonic) my mind wandering, waiting for the end? Is it too much control on Mr. Masur's part? Too much the sense that all we're hearing is the unfolding of the music without enough of the mystery behind the music? Or is it that what's missing is a degree of passion in the engagement between the conductor and his musicians, some spirit absent from the chemistry? Whatever the problem was, I can only say that at Mr. Masur's and the Philharmonic's Shostakovich, I felt superb competence at work; at Mr. Rattle's and the Birmingham's Mahler, it was palpable joy.