Flight attendants will announce the presence of an active service man or woman to cheers from the rest of the plane. At anti-war demonstrations, protesters wave banners proclaiming "Support the troops, oppose the war." The nation may be irrevocably split on the moral value of any war, but when it comes to backing the people who are executing it, they speak as one.

Like all great oratory its brilliance was in its simplicity. Like all great speeches it understood its audience. And like all great performances it owed as much to delivery as content. But it stands out because it was both timely in its message and timeless in its appeal. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" is still pertinent, even though many of its immediate demands have been met, and it is still relevant, beyond America's borders and the context that it addressed. Yet, if President John Kennedy had had his way, it would never have been delivered. And if King had been left to his own devices it might have been forgotten.

Hancock, who works at the Bob Moates Sports Store in Midlothian, Virginia, loves guns. Over at the handgun counter he slips out a jet black 9mm Glock 19 - the kind that Cho Seung-hui used to slay 32 of his fellow students and then himself on Monday - and hands it to me. It's heavy, and doubtless feels all the heavier for its immediate associations. Hancock shows me how to reload the magazine. Then pulls the trigger and watches me flinch.

On December 5, 1955, Martin Luther King Jr. took to the pulpit at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and thanked the Lord for Rosa Parks. “And, since it had to happen, I’m happy it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks,” he said. “For nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character, nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion to the teachings of Jesus.”

There is a strange kind of liberation that comes with knowing that your days in office are literally numbered. Journalists spend a decade trying to finish you off and then, just when it looks as if they might be successful, they feed you to the historians.

So, Imus has been dropped and the only real issue now seems to be how far he might fall. But there is a larger question at play here, one that touches on such far-ranging issues as the war, slavery, Ron Atkinson, Mike Tyson, George Allen and British hostages in Iran, to name but a few. Namely: what is the purpose and power of an apology? Why do some work and others not?

Remember the "clash of civilisations" that took place just over a year ago when Muslims called for an apology over the printing of those cartoons of Muhammed in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten? Remember the high-minded talk of freedom of speech against those who hate western values; the last rites read for multiculturalism?

It turns out that the man Life magazine once described as "America's number one intellectual fascist" was, in fact, a light-skinned African American, born in the segregated South - although he "passed" for white among the greatest race hatemongers known to mankind.