Misrepresenting King and watering down his message to an extent that approaches meaninglessness

So here we are, observing Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. It seems that much of the mainstream press is discussing it in a context related to the shootings in Arizona last week, as though they are related in any way. The Associated Press published the following headline - "Ariz. rampage looms as King remembered in church." The Week offers this palliative - "Arizona shootings: How Martin Luther King's message can help America heal." Over at the Huffington Post, we hear this - "Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2011: Nation Ponders King In Wake Of Arizona Shootings." Finally, the Associated Press also tells us "Martin Luther King's Peace Legacy Praised After Arizona Shootings."

Now, I'm sure that many of these people mean well, but I can't help but feel that anyone who would talk about Dr. King like this doesn't get him. To be sure, there is a lot to get, and he was a complicated man, who like most of us, changed over time in profound ways. Still, I know that he has been one of the country's favorite sanitization targets. No one talks about his antiwar speeches, he is rarely remembered in public for developing beliefs openly critical of U.S. foreign policy and we don't hear about his evolution into someone who was fighting for economic as well as what we commonly understand as civil rights.

The difference between economic and traditional civil rights is huge. When we discuss the civil rights movement, which isn't very often, we tend to remember it as something based around access to lunch counters, buses, department stores and schools, and maybe true access to the voting booth. That makes for a simple moral decision - yes, it is wrong to prohibit anyone from eating, traveling, shopping or learning somewhere based on her or his skin color; or, no, there is no problem with such practices. There's not too much nebulous space here. No one advocated allowing some black people to do these things, or having a quota of how many could do so. These are basic civil rights - equal access to facilities. Once economic rights - principally equality in employment and housing - come into the picture, it becomes a fundamentally different discussion. These issues are no more resolved than they were when King was alive. Affirmative action is frowned upon and white people still ardently fight it to the highest courts they can. Housing in this country is deeply segregated today, especially in the North. These matters make for very ugly debate, especially when we live in these "post-racial" times. After all, black people had their civil rights movement, got some laws and court decisions, and there is even a black president now. And what about Oprah? See?

Anyway, yeah, the fact is that King was pursuing an agenda that advocated for poor people's economic rights - jobs and housing. He did this in the North and the South. This is not popular among anyone but poor people and some progressives. It was easy for people throughout the country to support integrated buses, but they didn't want anyone taking a Greyhound into Cleveland and moving in next door. Largely, they still don't.

As for King's message, it was more sophisticated than shooting people is wrong. Most people already thought that then, and it hasn't changed. No one needs a sermon on that topic. There is no divide in the country splitting those for and against random mass murder.

To bring King into what happened in Arizona last week does the man a disservice. It reduces his life to a general message of peace, which is essentially meaningless, and cheapens his death. The man was cut down for a very specific reason - he advocated too strongly for freedom. Whether you believe James Earl Ray killed him or not, his assassin was not a crazed maniac. He was murdered to silence him. Dr. King had survived numerous assassination attempts. One such event touched off the Birmingham Riot in May 1963, when Klansmen bombed the motel where Dr. King had been staying and his brother's house. The FBI, with John F. Kennedy's knowledge and approval, conducted a long campaign to discredit him, which included a letter encouraging him to commit suicide.

He knew he was a marked man:

I doubt he thought he would live as long as he did. That's the price you pay when you dedicate your life to freedom. Real freedom. Not this American military George Bush patriot Tea Party crap. You put your life up for grabs.

What happened in Arizona, tragic as it may be, had nothing to do with a freedom struggle. Dr. King was not the victim of a crazed killer shooting everyone in sight. No, a coward took him from afar and fled. That man knew just what he was doing and had planned well in advance.

We do Dr. King and ourselves an incredible disservice if we conflate his death with the killings in Arizona. They bear no similarity, whatsoever, aside from the most obvious fact that a gun was involved. He deserves to be remembered for who he was, what he fought for, what he accomplished and what he believed. And for our own good, we need to remember him and what he stood for. We need to reckon with that, in a serious way. To talk about him as a man of peace is fucking pointless. Everyone's a man of peace. That's nothing new and means nothing to anyone. We don't learn anything if that's all we take away.

Leadership

Here is Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona and the country's leading anti-immigration politician, giving a public address on television as to why people should reelect her:




Yup.

I guess her groomers/coaches tell her to never stop smiling, no matter what.

The only people who have justification to act like this are the senile and the very high.

Murder - the logical end of anti-immigrant xenophobia

Some kids not too far from here beat a forty-seven-year-old man to death, preserving it for their children via cell phone video, strictly and solely because Abelino Mazaniego, father of four, was not born in the United States. There was no provocation. There was no conflict other than the one the kids made. There was no history of bad blood. He was a stranger to them. They saw him sitting on a bench after he got off work and decided to have fun, because they learned that American lesson that immigrants from south of the border are not people - they are problems, they are criminals, they are welfare-sappers, parasites and at best, landscapers. Racist demagogue politicians and talk radio garbage love to ride that crap to power. See the "Tea Party Movement," Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or the most recent Arizona Hispanic/Latina/o racial profiling legislation for current reference points.

He's fucking dead. Some kids beat him for kicks. Now he's gone, and his family is left with no father, no husband, and no source of income. He was their sole provider.

The kids who killed him weren't even interested in robbery, as a nurse at the hospital did that:

But it apparently wasn't an attempt to get the $640 in cash that Mazaniego was carrying.

Police found the victim after the beating and took him to the hospital, where, officials say, nurse Stephan Randolph, 39, of Flemington, took the money out of the unconscious victim's wallet.

Family members noticed the missing money and told authorities, who charged Randolph with third-degree theft Monday, six days after Mazaniego died.

Pure fun, they wanted. And they got it.

The racial aspects of this are pretty interesting. At least two of the teenagers who killed him are African-American. It took prosecutors about a week to upgrade the charges against them from manslaughter to murder. If they were white, I think it would still be manslaughter, at the most. If Abelino were white, they would all be up on the highest murder charge possible. The fact that prosecutors didn't put them up on murder right away reinforces the idea that Abelino and people like him are not people. Their office had to get pressured to act.

Fuck this place.

Arrested, facing serious charges for beating down Nazis

This is so fucked up and backwards, but expected: pigs defending white power. Some people involved with a San Francisco protest against Arizona's new anti-immigration legislation got into a fight with Nazis who call themselves the Bay Area Nationalist Anarchists. "Nationalist anarchist" makes no sense, seeing as the fundamental tenet of anarchism opposes nation states. Anyway, they're Nazis. They talk some bullshit about "self determination" and their "tribes," describing themselves as "white separatists." Fucking Nazis. Unfortunately, two of the people who attacked them are up on felony charges. Even more unfortunately, the Nazis weren't hurt very badly.

Nazis have no rights. They surrendered them when they embraced an ideology of extermination and wanton violence. Their very existence is predicated on intimidation of anyone not like them. There should be no confusion about the fact that anyone involved with white power, however they try to rename it, favors the annihilation of all people of color, homosexuals and any other "deviants." See the Holocaust for reference.

Fuck them. And not just in principle. These people need to be kicked off the streets wherever and whenever they appear. They can use their "free speech" as much as they want, but the minute their speech turns to intimidating and wiping out people for being born, anyone threatened by such speech (which is always linked to action) has the right to respond in any way she or he sees fit. I do not give a fuck about what people say is in the Constitution or what the Supreme Court rules - NO ONE has a protected right to build movements that threaten the livelihood, well-being or existence of any ethnic, religious, sexual or racial group based purely on the fact that the people are of that ethnic, religious, sexual or racial group.

Their ideology has nothing to do with defense. In fact, it is extremely on the offensive - can anyone really deny that all people of color have always been oppressed here and that white people have ALWAYS been in charge in this country? Fucking idiots, the government has already done this work for you. YOU ARE THE MAN, WHITE MAN. But it's not enough for a lot of them. Assholes don't even realize there could not be an America without racial minorities. Black people were the fundamental labor force for centuries - they built the country, with their hands and labor. And now, "illegal" immigrants do all the dirty work so you can have cheap shit food at Olive Garden and get your lawn cut. Finally, and most important to people of this persuasion - THE ONLY REASON YOU HAVE THE BENEFITS OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE WHITE IS BECAUSE FOR FIVE HUNDRED YEARS, EUROPEANS AND EUROPEAN AMERICANS HAVE DILIGENTLY CONSTRUCTED AN OPPOSITIONAL, UNDESIRABLE DEFINITION OF BLACK. Fucking shit.

So anyway, yes, fuck these people, each and every one. Mace, tire irons, ice picks, shovels, knives, guns, pitchforks, letter openers, spoons, axes, rocks, whatever it takes.

As Aus Rotten so elegantly put it, "Don't sympathize with something that has no sympathy. Fuck Nazi sympathy."

More border war crap

Some pig got shot in Arizona when he played hero and confronted what the government/media says were five men smuggling "bales" of marijuana all by himself. Big surprise. Hope it was worth it, chief. Getting shot over weed.

Anyway, Arizona immigration shit aside, you can throw all the laws and deputies and whatever else at the border, but you will never stop drug smuggling. What the hell is the point of keep marijuana illegal? It causes so much stupid shit like this and helps to keep gangs thriving. I know it's a tired mantra, but the war on drugs really just is not working.

Also, for you people who take drugs, you support and make this shit, as well as twenty times worse in Mexico and Colombia and wherever else. Your pathetic habits kill people. Fact.

Providing a larger amount of failed efforts will not create a successful one

THIS

IS

WHERE

A

REFERENCE

TO

1984

WOULD

GO

BUT

THAT

SHIT

IS

PLAYED

OUT.

YOU

GET

WHAT

I

MEAN

THOUGH.

Immigration reform. Try economic reform, of the international variety, the kind that doesn't impoverish people to the extreme and make them so desperate that they walk through the desert for days to reach a very tenuous better place.

Here's what the Democrats have to offer:

Broadly, the proposal includes:

1. More Border Patrol officers
2. More Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, worksite inspectors, document fraud investigators and drug-war agents
3. The "installation of high-tech ground sensors throughout the southern border and for equipping all border patrol officers with the technological capability to respond to activation of the ground sensors in the area they are patrolling."
4. More prosecution of drug smuggling, human trafficking and unauthorized border crossing
5. "[I]ncreases in the number of sport utility vehicles, helicopters, power boats, river boats, portable computers to track illegal immigrants and drug smugglers while inside of a border patrol vehicle, night vision equipment, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), Remote Video Surveillance Systems (RVSS), scope trucks, and Mobile Surveillance Systems (MSS)."
6. All prisoners will be checked for immigration status and deported if found to lack documentation.
7. DHS will "identify, investigate, and initiate removal proceedings" against folks who came here legally but didn't leave.
8. The bill would create "a broad-based registration program that requires all illegal immigrants living in the U.S. to come forward to register, be screened, and, if eligible, complete other requirements to earn legal status, including paying taxes."

Every step is brilliant. It basically comes down to more enforcement, a bigger wall. That's some Iron Curtain shit right there.

The icing on the urinal cake is right here:

The crackdown on employers relies on the creation of national identity cards. "These cards will be fraud-resistant, tamper-resistant, wear resistant, and machine-readable social security cards containing a photograph and an electronically coded micro-processing chip which possesses a unique biometric identifier for the authorized card-bearer," reads the bill summary.

Yes, that's right, a national identification card. Wonderful. They placate us by saying that pigs can't touch it, among many others:

The bill would make it illegal for anyone other than an employer to ask to see the enhanced social security card: "Possession of a fraud-proof social security card will only serve as evidence of lawful work-authorization but will in no way be permitted to serve--or shall be required to be shown--as proof of citizenship or lawful immigration status. It will be unlawful for any person, corporation; organization local, state, or federal law enforcement officer; local or state government; or any other entity to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes. No personal information will be stored on the electronic chip contained within the social security card other than the individual's name, date of birth, social security number, and unique biometric identifier."

In a variety of ways, laws don't matter. People ignore them. That's why they make new laws. All the time. Congress sits up on that hill and makes law after law, despite the fact that we already have quite a few. The other main point to this is that LAWS ARE NOT PERMANENT. Then can be changed at any time. This has happened many, many times over the course of American history. It happens all the time. Laws are never set in stone. They are overturned, they are augmented, they are rewritten.

Their assurances regarding the card's purpose do, and should the bill pass, would, mean nothing to me. I know that pigs don't give a FUCK about a law and do what they want. And anyway, these politicians will just write a law to get it through and then change it down the line.

Fuck every asshole who sits around and talks about stolen jobs. Yeah, I'm real fucking sad I can't be a dishwasher or landscaper. That's what I dreamt about my whole life, and now they've ruined my future. I may as well kill myself.

And welfare? Please. Try looking at all the millions the government gives to Archer Daniels Midland to grow GMO pesticide-laden soybeans to feed to miserable, confined cattle that are then turned into hamburgers for your fat, unhealthy ass, clogging your arteries but never soon enough.

You fucking stupid piece of shit. You are just a pawn of politicians who are way smarter than you and whip you up into some bullshit frenzy to distract you from real issues, like how much your job sucks and the fact that you are busting your ass to get by while your boss gets rich and you blow all your money on a piece of shit American truck and beer to try to silence the parts of your mind that somehow still know better.

Public Enemy - By the Time I Get to Arizona

I never knew they made a video for this song. In fact, it never occurred to me that they could. Somehow (things were surely different in 1991), they produced this video, while on Def Jam/Columbia, while at the height of their popularity, and MTV played it, at least once, given the icon in the corner.

This song is incredible, the record from which it comes is fantastic, and you can download the whole thing, Apocalypse 91...The Enemy Strikes Black here. Public Enemy was really on it at this point. So many excellent songs on the record. "1 Million Bottlebags," fuck:

Then I ask a question

"Yo brother, what the hell is you drinkin?"

He don't know but it flow

Out the bottle in a cup

He call it gettin' fucked up

Like we ain't fucked up already

See the man they call Crazy Eddie

Liquor man with the bottle in his hand

He give the liquor man ten to begin

Wit' no change and he run

To get his brains rearranged

Serve it to the homies and they're able

To do without a table

Beside what's inside ain't on the label

They drink it thinkin' it's good

But they don't sell the shit in the white neighborhood

Exposin' the plan, they get mad at me I understand

They're slaves to the liquor man

Fuck. This video captures so much emotion. So much rage. So much desperation for a recognition of dignity. It's so moving. What a fantastic video. No one would do this anymore. Especially not in their position. People are so fucking scared to offend, to jeopardize their place on the fame ladder. As though it's permanent.

Back then, the governor of Arizona, along with some (lots of?) other people in the state government refused to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday as a holiday. Flat out.

That's what a real video is. It communicates something very real and elevates the song into something so much more than it was.

Here is an article from the Washington Post about the subject matter of the video, and what had been going on for a few years by that point:

NEW GOVERNOR RESCINDS KING HOLIDAY - ARIZONA'S MECHAM IGNITES PROTESTS BY FULFILLING CAMPAIGN PLEDGE

Washington Post - Wednesday, January 14, 1987

Author: Paul Taylor, Washington Post Staff Writer

Of the 21 new governors being sworn in this month, none is off to a shakier start or shorter honeymoon than Arizona's Evan Mecham (R), a political outsider who won office on his fifth try.

Mecham, 62, has drawn fire for making good this week on a campaign pledge to rescind what he termed an illegal executive order by his predecesssor, Democrat Bruce Babbitt, to establish a state holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The move, expected since Election Day, has triggered accusations of racism and spurred civil rights demonstrations around the state. A large one is planned here for Jan. 19, the federal observance of King's birthday.

Mecham, in turn, has accused his critics of either misunderstanding or misrepresenting his motives. A soft-spoken man, both admired and disliked here for his deep conservative political convictions, Mecham has said the issue is strictly legal and technical, and on Monday he proposed that it be settled by the electorate in a referendum. He has also argued, however, that King is not a figure comparable in historical importance to Washington or Lincoln, and therefore is unworthy of a holiday.

"He says the issue is technical, but the longer he talks, the more he makes it clear his problems are philosophical," said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, in the state to address student and church groups. Jackson wound up meeting privately with the governor yesterday aboard the state airplane.

"He said he felt that Babbitt had pandered to the blacks," Jackson said. "The reality is that Dr. King embodied the quest for equal protection for everybody. If the world can recognize him with a Nobel Peace Prize, if the federal government can recognize him with a holiday, then surely Arizona will not be able to turn the clock back."

Last year the state Senate passed a bill to make Arizona one of 40 states that observe the King holiday, but the measure was defeated 30 to 29 in the state House. A spokesman for the Martin Luther King Federal Holiday Commission in Washington said he believed it was the only state legislature to vote down such a bill since King's birthday became a federal holiday last year.

Babbitt then proclaimed the holiday on his own -- a move that state Attorney General Bob Corbin, a Republican, subsequently declared illegal. "I'll see you on the courthouse steps," responded Babbitt, who was preparing to leave office and run for the presidency.

There the matter stood until the fall gubernatorial campaign, when Mecham, in response to a newspaper questionnaire, said he would rescind the order. The issue was never prominent in the campaign -- which Mecham won when two Democrats, one running as an independent, divided 60 percent of the vote.

The day after the election, he reiterated his intention to rescind the order, and has been under fire since. A recall petition is being circulated, but it is not taken seriously here. The Rev. Warren Stewart Sr., pastor of the First Institutional Baptist Church and a leader of a civil rights group trying to restore the holiday, has accused Mecham of having a "racist mentality." Martin Luther King III came to Arizona and said Mecham's actions were motivated by racism. Entertainer Stevie Wonder, who was a leader of the movement to make King's birthday a national holiday, has refused to schedule concerts here.

Some here have speculated that Mecham was motivated by his religious beliefs as a Mormon; until 1978, Mormon Church doctrine gave blacks an inferior status. Jackson said he raised the question with Mecham, and "he assured me that was not the case."

The governor declined to be interviewed, but his spokesman, Ron Bellus, said the issue is due process. "Let's get serious," he said. "Babbitt saw a chance to use the memory of Dr. King for political purpose, and he did an illegal thing . . . . I find that despicable."

Babbitt said in an interview that he considers Mecham's action an "insult, not just to blacks, but all Americans," and plans to participate in protest marches here next week. He denied he was motivated by politics.

The issue, meanwhile, is also back in the legislature, which convened Monday for its 1987 session. Three bills are in the hopper: one would establish the King holiday; the second would establish the holiday and combine the Washington and Lincoln holidays so as not to incur the estimated $2.5 million cost of a new state holiday; and the third would establish the holiday as a Sunday observance, but not make it official unless voters approved it in a referendum next year.

Mecham has not said whether he would veto the first two bills; he supports the third. Holiday backers oppose the Sunday-observance proposal, but doubt they have the votes to block it.

"If you've got the votes, you vote; if you don't, you talk, and right now I am doing a lot of talking," said House Minority Leader Art Hamilton (D), who sponsored the holiday bill that failed last year.

Arizona is a conservative state with a black population of less than 3 percent, and many are unsure whether the symbolic Sunday holiday would survive a referendum. "When I voted for the holiday last year, my mail came in 50-to-1 against me," said Rep. Jim Green, a Republican from Tucson, who is sponsoring the referendum measure.

This Time article provides a quick history of the King holiday, including how piece of shit John McCain opposed it until it wasn't cool to do so anymore and then came out in support of it. Please note that even Reagan was pleading with Arizona governor Evan Mecham to drop his opposition to the King holiday.

Fuck yes, Public Enemy.

Lol @ "Elderly Pro-life Activist Attacked, Injured in Flagstaff"

Fuck Johnny Wallace. Didn't get shot, but I'm glad he caught a beatdown, and DELIGHTED that it was from two women. Fucking awesome.

As usual, he's not "pro-life", he's anti choice. Here is a motherfucker standing around trying just as hard as can be to also be a Christ Warrior and prohibit women from controlling their bodies, their futures and their lives. Progress through intimidation, right Johnny? Ok, so that's offensive enough. He deserves a kicking just for that.

BUT, here's the best part. As Operation Rescue tells it, Johnny simply "held two non-graphic, text-only signs protesting abortion..." One of them was some standard shit about dead babies, while the other read “Abortion kills more black Americans in four days than the Klan killed in 150 years." HOLY SHIT. Again, WOW. Johnny would have caught a lot more than a beatdown in a lot of places. He's lucky he was in Flagstaff. Incredible, thinking it's reasonable to compare the Klan and abortion. It's not really a comparison though; what he's saying is the black women are worse than the Klan. Black women kill more black people than the Klan.

On one hand, we have a terrorist organization (actual terrorists, as in maintaining power and accomplishing goals through extreme violence and, you know, terror) fighting to keep hatred alive and black people scared, impoverished and "in their places." They have maintained a reign of terror since shortly after the Civil War. They are alive and well today. Lynchings, beatings, shootings, burnings (of people), arson, bombings, stabbings, and whatever other kinds of physical violence of which one can conceive. If you can think of it, they've done it. And they still will do it. Black people in this situation are, unfortunately, subjects. When you are being beaten by a gang of men based on your skin, you have lost virtually all power to act effectively.

Abortion - a woman deciding she does not want to have a child at this time. No terror, no hatred, no one being dragged to death by horse. Black women are actors here. They are exercising agency. They are making decisions over their lives.

Holy shit. After writing that out, clearly, they are very similar, if not indiscernible from one another. I just realized how very wrong I am. I used to think abortions should be mandatory for all pregnant women everywhere, back last minute when I was pro abortion, but Jimmy's sign showed me that no one should ever have an abortion anywhere ever cause God.

Dear gay people,

We hate you.


Sincerely,

America.

+++++++++

Who's moving forward again? Where's the unity? If there was a ballot initiative against gay people yesterday, it passed. Arizona - gay marriage banned. Arkansas - gay couples banned from adopting children. California - gay marriage banned. Florida - gay marriage banned.

Arizona and Arkansas collectively voted for John McCain. California and Florida collectively voted for Barack Obama. All four voted to enshrine anti-gay sentiments in their constitutions. Obama decidedly won in California, barely won in Florida, and McCain dominated him in Arkansas and Arizona.

Just as many people voted for a president in California as voted one way or the other on the gay marriage ban. Obama won California 61% to McCain's 37%, but the gay marriage ban passed by 52% to 48%. Yes to a black president, no to gay people enjoying their lives and having the same rights as others? What the fuck?

On grammar...

I fully support these men in their efforts to correct some of the most long-standing and oft-viewed public grammatical errors. It is not hard for me to imagine myself in the same position. However, I am fairly certain I would not write about it on the internet, and definitely not with my identity in the open. Nonetheless, these two men are warriors for a cause in which I wholly believe (it seems that people are becoming more reckless with apostrophes by the day) and I applaud them.