The Tattlesnake is old enough to remember when Dr. Martin Luther King was alive and the attitudes towards King of the mainstream ‘Establishment’ press and most major-party politicians in that era. Consider this: If anyone of the popularity of Martin Luther King were around today eloquently speaking against Bush’s wars and social inequality, and for voting rights and uniting people to demand their fair share of the pie from the moneyed elite, you can bet the latter-day J. Edgar Hoover’s and Jesse Helms’ on the right would be castigating him as a ‘commie troublemaker’ or ‘outside agitator,’ or, these days, a hate-America ‘friend of the terrorists,’ just as they did back in 1967. Ann Coulter would no doubt sarcastically suggest he be lynched in effigy; Rush Limbaugh would thunder for him to step down from the pulpit and be investigated for fraud, since he wasn’t teaching the corporate-approved Republican Jesus to his flock. The Big Media would breathlessly connect him to fomenting unrest among the young and poor, and wonder why he wasn’t being jailed for inciting riots.
Even the centrist Dems would consider him a nuisance and label him an ‘extremist’ who was setting back the cause of civil rights with his marches and sit-ins, just as they did back in the day. He pushed both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to the point where they had to do something about segregation and poverty before they were ready, and politicians never like to be pushed.
Now that King’s safely dead and gone, and his legacy of quiet anger diffused through media mythmaking and movie-of-the-week sentimentality, the same law-and-order oafs who would have turned a fire hose on him and slapped him in jail, had they been in power back in Selma or Birmingham, now sing his praises with flowery rhetoric and do nothing to bring about the world he dreamed of forty years ago. Worse, they secretly try to disenfranchise black voters with caging lists and other sleazy tricks, and appeal in code words to racial bigotry in an attempt to turn the country back to the segregation of the 1950s. Any changes in America have happened in spite of this offal, not because of it.
It’s a given that MLK would have been pleasantly surprised that a black man and a white woman have a serious shot at the presidency less than fifty years after his famous 1967 speech at the Riverside Chapel in New York, and that the descendants of slavery now hold high positions in the US government, media and business, even though their likes unfortunately include Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas and Armstrong Williams. But the saddest part of watching the parade of hypocrites paying respect to King on Monday is that it’s also likely, were he around in the current media atmosphere, that he’d simply be dismissed and ignored rather than celebrated as the conscience of progress and voice of our dreams for a better future.
The Tattlesnake – Martin Luther King Jr. Day Edition
The Tattlesnake is old enough to remember when Dr. Martin Luther King was alive and the attitudes towards King of the mainstream ‘Establishment’ press and most major-party politicians in that era. Consider this: If anyone of the popularity of Martin Luther King were around today eloquently speaking against Bush’s wars and social inequality, and for voting rights and uniting people to demand their fair share of the pie from the moneyed elite, you can bet the latter-day J. Edgar Hoover’s and Jesse Helms’ on the right would be castigating him as a ‘commie troublemaker’ or ‘outside agitator,’ or, these days, a hate-America ‘friend of the terrorists,’ just as they did back in 1967. Ann Coulter would no doubt sarcastically suggest he be lynched in effigy; Rush Limbaugh would thunder for him to step down from the pulpit and be investigated for fraud, since he wasn’t teaching the corporate-approved Republican Jesus to his flock. The Big Media would breathlessly connect him to fomenting unrest among the young and poor, and wonder why he wasn’t being jailed for inciting riots.
Even the centrist Dems would consider him a nuisance and label him an ‘extremist’ who was setting back the cause of civil rights with his marches and sit-ins, just as they did back in the day. He pushed both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to the point where they had to do something about segregation and poverty before they were ready, and politicians never like to be pushed.
Now that King’s safely dead and gone, and his legacy of quiet anger diffused through media mythmaking and movie-of-the-week sentimentality, the same law-and-order oafs who would have turned a fire hose on him and slapped him in jail, had they been in power back in Selma or Birmingham, now sing his praises with flowery rhetoric and do nothing to bring about the world he dreamed of forty years ago. Worse, they secretly try to disenfranchise black voters with caging lists and other sleazy tricks, and appeal in code words to racial bigotry in an attempt to turn the country back to the segregation of the 1950s. Any changes in America have happened in spite of this offal, not because of it.
It’s a given that MLK would have been pleasantly surprised that a black man and a white woman have a serious shot at the presidency less than fifty years after his famous 1967 speech at the Riverside Chapel in New York, and that the descendants of slavery now hold high positions in the US government, media and business, even though their likes unfortunately include Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas and Armstrong Williams. But the saddest part of watching the parade of hypocrites paying respect to King on Monday is that it’s also likely, were he around in the current media atmosphere, that he’d simply be dismissed and ignored rather than celebrated as the conscience of progress and voice of our dreams for a better future.