Ed Kilgore:
I don’t have anything terribly original to offer this King Day about my hero’s historical significance. He held up a mirror to America and asked us all to live up to our own professed civic and religious values. For that he was feared and despised in the most “patriotic” and “Christian” part of the country—or at least among a majority of the white citizens of his home region—and was probably the most inevitable martyr of the twentieth century.
King matters today because so many Americans still want to deny the existence of injustice and inequality, and make the poor and the powerless offenders against the pride and self-satisfaction of the privileged. That these same people sometimes perversely pretend to be King’s disciples, suggesting he would today be in a rapture of color-blindness that would keep him from seeing anything other than a blessed land of opportunity, is all the more reason we need a day set aside each year to remembering what he actually represented. And it wasn’t some abstract, negative idea of “freedom” or “equality” that accepted mass unemployment or low wages as the product of a divinely instituted marketplace.
Read the rest of it.
I always keep this diary bookmarked:
Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
Just watched The Butler this weekend. A painful reminder.
Tell your colleague Ed Kilgore that “He done good.”
His theme has some resonance this year. There are numerous references to King’s speech contrasting a society of things and a society of people, a speech that hits the same points as does Kilgore.
Here is one mash-up of that speech:
Nordic Giant + – Together
Yes, even employing much stricter standards than the Tea Party uses, Dr. King can accurately be described as a socialist.
Which puts him in a rich American tradition, actually, so that’s cool. I don’t know if Martin Luther King called himself a socialist, but I do know that This Land is Your Land was written by a socialist, and that Alabama, of all states, put a socialist on its state quarter. And of course Thomas Jefferson advocated progressive taxation for the declared purpose of redistributing wealth, and Theodore Roosevelt nationalized the railroads (if that’s what you want to call laws regulating the rates they could charge).
Meanwhile, where does the patriotic Right’s vision for our economy come from? Two Austrians and a Russian.
Check out Page 18 – “Part II Current NSA Operations” (1976 draft of Pike commission report) in Charlie’s Dr. King and Surveillance.
But NSA never ever snooped on any of those American communications. And never ever missed any really big and important international developments such as the Iranian revolution, the collapse of the USSR, and 9/11.