[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Glenn Beck vs. Dr. King?

[C. G. Estabrook]

  [Here's a serious critique of the Beck and King rallies.]

    Thank You, Glenn Beck!
    By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

This weekend brings us the August 28 anniversary of the March on Washington back 
in 1963. It was when Martin Luther King delivered his famous  “I have a dream” 
speech from the Lincoln Memorial. At least 250,000 people, 75-80 per cent black, 
rallied in the Mall. Each year the anniversary rolls around, you’ll hear plenty 
of high-flown strophes from prominent progressives, black and white, evoking Dr. 
King’s dream of racial justice and equality. Barack Obama’s speechwriters are, 
no doubt, polishing just such a commentary by their boss.

In terms of political energy, the event is as inert as Labor Day, itself just 
around the corner at the start of September.

But this year brings welcome relief from such pietism. The premier anniversary 
celebration of the March has been hijacked by the right-wing commentator, Glenn 
Beck. The prime speaker will be Sarah Palin, the Tea Party’s pinup girl and as 
unlikely as any woman in Alaska ever to have had a pinup of MLK on her dorm 
wall. To have the March on Washington honored by Beck and Palin is as shocking 
to liberal America as installing Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern 
slave states in the Civil War, next to Lincoln in the Memorial – an insertion 
which will no doubt be approved by Congress, and endorsed by Obama in the 
interests of bipartisanship, just as soon as the 14th Amendment is repealed.

Beck admits that when he scheduled a rally in Washington on August 28 to boost 
his new book, The Plan, and strut his stuff to the Tea Party masses, he had no 
idea it was the anniversary of the March. But he swiftly turned ignorance into 
opportunity. He’s now saying that’s he is working “to finish the job” that was 
at the heart of the 1963 March on Washington and King’s vision.

Beck claims the ideas of Dr. King have been corrupted and that he will resurrect 
the true King. As part of this mission, Beck is trying to separate Dr. King from 
social justice and limit King to advocacy of individual Christian salvation. 
According to Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, 
writing on this site last week, D.C., “Beck has even reached out to distant 
relatives of Dr. King, like Dr. King’s niece. After questioning her several 
times he gets her to say that King was not about social justice or government 
redistribution of the wealth.”

 From the left comes the angry response that King was, indeed, committed to the 
need to redistribute wealth in order to advance a juster nation and was 
assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, in the course of a visit to black 
city workers on strike.

If Beck’s hijacking provokes some honesty among the left in general about King 
and about black leadership today, then Beck will have performed a useful 
service. Too late now to organize the obvious, a huge counter demonstration to 
call Beck to accounts and run him and Palin off. The left is too weak for that, 
having now given up gluten which has given us leavened bread for 5,000 years.

The March of 1963 was actually called the March on Washington for Jobs and 
Freedom. It wasn’t King’s idea, but that of A. Philip Randolph who had planned a 
similar march in 1941. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was only 
one of five main sponsoring groups. Some of these saw the march’s purpose as not 
high-flown talk about dreams but as harsh reproof of President John Kennedy. 
They accused him dragging his feet on giving legislative heft to the civil 
rights movement that has moved into high gear three years earlier. Julian Bond’s 
speech denouncing Kennedy’s weakness was famously censored by the March’s 
organizers.

King’s political career was heading into crisis. Three years later, in 1967, he 
was booed by blacks at a rally in Chicago. He recalled later what he thought 
that night: ”I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about 
the not-too-distant day when they would have freedom ‘all, here and now.’ I had 
urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had 
soared. They were now booing because they had felt we were unable to deliver on 
our promises…. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they 
had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.”

It was one thing to force a chain restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina, to 
allow blacks sit at a previously Whites Only counter; it was quite another to 
attack the racism embedded in the American system so savagely excoriated by the 
greatest American black revolutionary of the 1960s, Malcolm X, who was 
assassinated in 1965.

Beck, to a certain extent, has it right. In 1963 King was on the same tack as 
another man professing confidence in the American system to engender justice out 
of an innate, individually virtuous  moral tropism to do the right thing -- 
Barack Obama in 2008. King was wrong then, just like Obama is two generations 
later.  It’s a matter of class war, not individual character traits.

King moved to the left in the mid-60s.  He had to. In Riverside Church in New 
York, a year before his death he gave a far more powerful speech than 1963’s “I 
have a dream” address. He called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of 
violence in the world today… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily 
on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. …[T]rue compassion is more than 
flinging a coin to a beggar... it comes to see that an edifice which produces 
beggars needs restructuring.”

This was a far cry from what White Power wanted from King, which was the soft 
rhetorical pillow on which all Dreamers could lay their heads: MLK’s 1963 dream 
that “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a 
beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

On August 28, 2010, forty-seven years after the March for Jobs and Freedom, 
America has plunged into the vortex of long-term mass unemployment. No jobs, 
particularly for young blacks.

So much for jobs. What about freedom?

Thirty years ago, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails in 
the United States. Today, the number of prisoners in the United States exceeds 
2,000,000. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a 
black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32 per cent, or 1 in three. Black 
boys are five times as likely as white boys to go to jail. Former prisoners are 
permanently relocated on society’s margins, these days some 5 million of them, 
denied the right to vote in most states. Professor Michelle Alexander, in her 
book The New Jim Crow argues convincingly that we have a purposeful system of 
mass incarceration, with blacks as the prime victims.

Today, in this fearful crisis there is no effective black leadership, starting 
with President Obama who has marvelously has fulfilled his function as political 
sedater of black aspirations, starting with the promotion of his own success 
story. “Yes, we can.” Oh, no they can’t. It’s not in the Master Plan.  Black 
politicians are well aware that most of their black constituents will stay with 
Obama till the end, whatever he does. So most of them remain quiet – and yield 
the stage to an opportunist like Beck, flanked by Ms. Palin. Malcom X, who 
called the 1963 March on Washington “a picnic” and “a circus,” would have had a 
good laugh about that.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08272010.html