The March On Washington And Our National Pastime Of Historical Amnesia

I’m beginning to dread anniversaries. I’m particularly dreading 50 year anniversaries. They seem to be an excuse for hazy remembrance, unjustified back slapping and putting on extra-strength rose colored glasses. The pabulum being pushed out about the March On Washington in all is sanitized and homogenized glory is particularly irksome.

I do not know how much more of this nonsense I can tolerate. The worst part of this exercise it the continued mummification of one of the truly great figures of the late 20th Century, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Yes, he now, like Lincoln, belongs to the ages, however the enshrinement of the man has done a great disservice not only to the man but to the nation.

Look, when the usual gang of idiots on the right side of the political spectrum can cough up the a-hisorical fur ball that Dr. King was a Republican and not be called out on that whopper of a lie, the record must be set straight.

Reverend King was no cuddly teddy bare, he was no sainted martyr preaching peace, love and granola. He was a major thorn in the side of racist, complacent and self-satisfied America. He was a radical who used the tool of non-violent civil disobedience to effect change.

And because of this he was slandered, attacked, and abused; not only by the troglodytes of Dixie but by “reasonable” people in good standing. King was denounced by the good, righteous and practical. He got grilled to no end about being a good for nothing Commie or being at least a Pinko sympathizer. He got spied upon by the Kennedys via J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. He got major flack from the other Negro leaders of the time for going too far, too fast.

If you actually listen to or read that great speech King made half a century ago you can still hear a clarion call, not for mere brotherly love and tolerance, but for radical change. It was call not merely for integration but for transformation, for a more perfect union based on economic, cultural and political justice. It was heady stuff and well outside of the mainstream of status quo America then or now. The Right had a cow, the muddled middle was aghast, and those squishy liberals of the day could barely offer even the most tepid support to the program.

For all of his life Dr. King faced the strong headwinds of what was then called the Establishment. He was at best ignored, or told he was pushing too hard too fast. At worst he was vilified, his life put in real peril. And then there was the attempted blackmail by J Edgar, a black a day in the history of democratic governance as any. The powers that be wanted King gone, they wanted his movement dead and gone. Eventually they got their wish thanks to a racist nobody and scum of the earth whose name will not grace these pages.

So when you read some happy-clappy bit of drivel about The March On Washington, on how much “progress” we have made since then, go back and read the real history, not the mawkish, Disneyfied pseudohistory that has been spoon-fed to you by the usual suspects. Read about the real man and the real philosophy of that man. Read about the challenges he faced and the ever-present danger that was part and parcel not only of his life but every civil rights activist. And yes, read about the all too human foibles and failures of the man; how the high moral tone did not match the sexual appetite. Get the whole narrative, warts and all, because it is only in understanding the temper of the times and the challenges faced does one understand why the March On Washington deserves its iconic status.

It is only then too that we, as a nation, can reclaim our history, the true history, from the sanitized and homogenized fable that has been handed down to us. Real risks were run gentile reader, real danger lurked, real-- neigh ferocious-- opposition, internal as well as external, was faced down and overcome. People where beaten down, some out-right killed in protests similar to this pivotal moment. D.C., lest anyone forget, was very much part of the deep south as Mississippi or Georgia. The message being put out was scandalous, it was dangerous, it challenged the entirety of the status quo, not just Jim Crow. It was not just about little black boys playing with little white girls.The vision of racial, social, and economic justice was the the reason for the final coda of King’s speech. When final justice was achieved, only then could the people, all the people, finally sing “free at last” because only then would they be finally free of all oppression. Only then would they achieve full and meaningful liberation.

If there is anything you take away from this date in history is should be not how far we have gone but the work that still needs doing. Jim Crow, legalized segregation, is dead but his bastard son Jimmy Crow, is thriving:  in gerrymandered congressional districts, voter ID laws, safety net cuts, birtherism and in a thousand other bits of toxic sludge sloshing around the political landscape. Jimmy Crow is ever-present even on the airwaves, actually especially on the airwaves maned by Fox News and the other usual suspects of the WingNut right. The back-patting we are indulging in on this anniversary is way too premature. Time to remember the real call to action. Time to get busy again.

Fooled Twice; Shame on us.

What a difference a day makes. In twenty-four hours, we went through the Shirley Sherrod roller-coaster, and got turned inside out. What happened was fairly simple, and highly embarrassing: we got played for suckers. The really embarrassing bit is we have seen this movie before.

The ACORN flap is only six months or so in our rear view mirror, and the usual subjects followed that scam line-by-line with essentially the same result. As much as we would love to pour invective on Mr. Breitbart he , dear reader, is not the issue here. The M.O. of Breitbart, and his enablers at Fox News, is not exactly a thing of deep mystery.

We saw how it worked with ACORN. First was the set up. Some young ‘journalists” produce a video that is flogged on Breitbart’s web sight. That video is then flogged for all its worth(lessness) by Fox twenty-four seven. A brain dead corporate media then swallows the Fox talking points whole. No analysis is done, no research is done, no fact checking is done, no consideration of the source is done. The core job of “mainstream media” is abandoned. True journalism is abandoned on the alter of “balance.”

With the big boys being hijacked by the partisans of Fox, the feckless and cowardly “mainstream” Democrats do what they do best : fold like origami. It has been fifty five years since Ted Sorenson ghost-wrote Profiles In Courage for JFK, and the Democrats have gotten no closer to the examples offered by by Sorenson and JFK. Being brutally honest, JFK fell far short of the mark of his supposed book. His response to the moral challenge of Civil Rights was mostly show. Kennedy showed much more resolve with the Soviets then he ever did with Segregationists.  From that admittedly stumbling beginning, Democrats have fled from demonstrating any kind of moral courage at all.

In Keith Olbermann’s scathing Special Comment , the craven cowardice of the Democratic Leadership was brought into harsh relief. Keith rightly pointed out not only the whole scale cowardly abandonment of principle at the White House, but the pride in the speed of that abandonment. No facts please, we got to feed this woman to the wolves of Fox News post haste. It was appalling, this rush to judgement. It was sickening  this crass political calculation. Change we can believe in? Not hardly, not by approximately a million miles.



But again, the blame sits squarely on our heads. We bought into the toxic sludge peddled by Mr. Breitbart like some late-stage Alzheimer patient; forgetting the radioactive sluge he sold us about ACORN. We took the hyper-edited video he produced at face value. God, that was one toxic video was’t it? We saw this character of a black woman; a wondrous racist, misogynist construct that was designed to directly appeal to our reptile brains. That stuff totally bypassed our logic board, ignored the blood-brain barrier, and fed itself, via the usual hard-wired paths, right into the dark, troglodyte recesses of our lower brain stem. We mainline that toxic sludge right into our carotid artery without even bothering to look at the label of the rat-poison we dumped into our blood stream. We forgot the first rule of media consumption; if it comes from Fox, its absolutely toxic to rational discussion.

We shot first and asked questions later. We allowed despicable people play to our racial fears once again. And by we, I do mean depigmented Americans, Caucasians, Whites. As Rachel Maddow pointed out, this is a very old tactic of reactionaries and Republicans. It is playing to the idea that politics, especially racial politics is a zero-sum game. It is the bogus talking point that gains  by minorities, specifically blacks, means losses by white people. We got played but the oldest bait-and-switch in the book : racial politics.

Racial Politics is an old and deep well. It goes way back, at least to the time of Reconstruction, if not before. Bourbon Democrats were experts in playing this game to divide and conquer the working class in the South. They set poor blacks and poor whites against each other and then reaped the economic rewards. The only thing that has changed is the Party affiliation of these race-baiters : they now sport the Republican brand. The actual strategy and tactic, as pointed out by Maddow, is evergreen. Did you think that the choice of Mr. Breitbart in swift-boating this particular woman was an accident?  Not a chance gentle reader; Mr. Breitbart knows exactly which dog-whistles will give him the results he wanted.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And how we all howled, how we yammered, how we bellowed; the noise was deafening. The White House had to hear the chorus as if the very hounds of hell were at their door.  They reacted true to form; they ran for the nearest hills. Only later did Obama and company find out what they thought was a lupine hoard, out for blood, turn out to be nothing more than the yipping of a mangey chihuahua, pumped though the amplifier of the Right-Wing noise machine.

There are several lesson that need learning; none of them very pleasant. First and foremost, the election of the first mix-race president is not the end of racism in the USA. We are not, in any way, shape, or form, a post-racial society. Race-baiting, racial politics and flat-out racism is not only alive and well, it is still thriving in many areas of our  nation.

The second lesson is even harsher for the progressives who supported Barack Obama. Forget this president, forget this man, he is not, nor will he ever be,  a fighter for anything;   period. The man does not do conflict. In this regard Keith Olbermann was incorrect; in the Sherrod incident, Obama was very much being Obama. He needed little, to no, prompting from his political team to deliver the stiletto to Ms. Sherrod’s back-side. There is no evil Rham, there is no clueless political operators misleading Barrack Hussain Obama. What you see is what you got: a crass political operator with no political, nor moral center whatsoever. Obama sin may have been of commission or omission, but the sin was there, and it was a Mortal Sin.

If you are a Progressive, stop supporting this man, Barack Hussain Obama. He is not worth the time, he is not worth the effort. He not one of us, never has been, never will be. He is a dyed-in-the-wool corporatist. He is the bluest of Blue Dog Democrats. He is an amoral political compromiser who only cares for the “win;” principles be damned. Note to Obamaphiles; the man chose this insider staff for a reason. He went with every stinking D.C. insider for a reason. He is at best a NeoLiberal, a tinkerer at the edges. He is not an agent of real change. If he were, the oligarchy that actually controls the government, the establishment of D.C., would have never let him put a toe in the door.  You got sold a bill of goods people: deal with it.

The final lesson we need to learn is to stop being consumers of news and information. We need, and this includes your faithful correspondent, to be much more skeptical of what the media funnels into our grey matter. The woman on the Breitbart video was an idiot, she was mouthy black woman who wore her ignorance on her sleeve. She was too good ( or too evil ) to be true. The real woman was a person who confronted her own bigotry, and found a way to overcome it. The real woman was the exact opposite of the mangled, bogus image presented by Breitbart. But we, and by this I mean yours truly, bought into the lie: hook, line and sinker.

As a recovering Edwards supporter, ( we have our own special twelve step program) you  would think your faithful correspondent might of learned something about the distance between appearance and reality. Guess again. So, yes; mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The only small consolation is that I have a lot of company in my misery.

The Subtex Of McCain's Anger

Posted on September 27, 2008 by nojojojo

The talk today in the blogosphere is all about last night’s debate — who won, who lost, who discreetly scratched his ass, whatever. There’s a good bit of discussion going about already on the issue of McCain’s factual gaffes and his infuriating appropriation of the Jewish Holocaust. I didn’t notice anything pounce-worthy in Obama’s comments, though he did make some headscratchy connections and rambled in some of his answers. But hey, I’m sure FOX will find something to nitpick about him.

What I did keep noticing was McCain’s body language. He wouldn’t look at Obama. He wouldn’t address Obama directly, even when the debate moderator explicitly urged him to do so. He didn’t even turn in Obama’s direction, as far as I saw. He seemed doggedly determined to act as if his opponent didn’t exist, and the debate was strictly a one-on-one conversation between him and Jim Lehrer.

Others have noted this body language, and chalked it up to McCain’s general frustration with his opponent. I saw something else.

Not so long ago in this country — within McCain’s adult lifetime, though not Obama’s — white men did not look at black men, except to order them around or warn them off white women. They did not address black men directly if they could help it — and if they had to, it was never done in a way that might suggest respect. Black men did not look at white men either, because that was the shortest path to death; a black man who dared to look a white man in the eye was “uppity”. Didn’t know his place. Needed to have a lesson taught him, usually with a bullet or a length of rope. Even today there’s a certain kind of white man — usually older ones from the South or from wealthy backgrounds — who still won’t accord a man of color the simple courtesy of looking him in the eye. They’ll look everywhere else, address “the air” rather than the person, and get progressively more irritated if that person doesn’t back off and go away.

This irritation is what I saw in McCain’s body language: affront that a black man dared to challenge him or speak to him as an equal.

I don’t think I would’ve seen that if McCain hadn’t shown this kind of contempt in other contexts: his behavior towards his wives, for example. That certain kind of white man isn’t all that fond of uppity women either. And yeah, some of it might simply be McCain’s infamous temper; he’s had equal-opportunity hissyfits, pretty much at anyone who disagrees with him. The man simply needs anger-management training. But at least those white men merit his direct address and his vocalized contempt. This “I-dismiss-you-from-my-attention” treatment? That’s something else.

Now, McCain isn’t stupid, and I don’t think his campaign managers are either. I don’t think McCain’s body language was accidental or unplanned. They knew full well how this would look, and I think they’re counting on it. The silent language of McCain’s posture and eye contact is practically a shout-out to white Middle America, sending a very clear message: “Can you believe this boy? Can you believe he’s actually talking to me?” And in the unspoken fury telegraphed by McCain’s surgically-constructed cheeks, and the constant flexing of his jaw muscles as he ground his teeth tried to smile graciously, I heard, “Y’know, back in the day, we would’ve known just what to do with a fella like you.”

McCain’s post-GOP-convention surge has faltered. Sarah Palin, who initially seemed to be energizing the evangelicals, is starting to look more and more like a mistake. Poor and middle-class Americans, which includes a whole lot of Republicans who are suddenly beginning to realize that the current economic crisis is their own damn fault for voting in a bunch of rich thieves, are up in arms. McCain’s only hope at this stage is a blatant appeal to something that will unite Republicans regardless of class, faith, and issues. Well, the Southern Strategy hasn’t failed yet.

Hmm… given that, I’m not sure I should call this subtext. Is it still subtext when it’s right there in your face?

H/T To Angry Black Woman