Category: General

“The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV”

Great article from 1995, even more relevant today than it was then:

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV:

It’s become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King’s birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King’s life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV.

Why?

It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

Highway crash spills 20 tons of meat – Latest News – The Grand Rapids Press – MLive.com

Highway crash spills 20 tons of meat – Latest News – The Grand Rapids Press – MLive.com:

HOLLAND — Police shut down eastbound Int. 196 south of town after three semi-trucks collided, spilling 40,000 pounds of meat on the road. The crash occurred around 6:40 a.m. near 60th Street. The highway is closed indefinitely, according to Allegan County Central Dispatch.

“We Should Have Bombed It”

I have read recently — I don’t remember where — that a key element in the thinking of an American hawk is that intention is more important than effect — that doing hurtful things with a good intention is virtuous. This is what differentiates us from “terrorists,” the thinking goes — we may kill many more innocent people than they did, but we don’t want to kill any innocent people. It’s all incidental, collateral damage; not our purpose. And that means what we are doing is good. It’s better, the thinking goes, to be killed or maimed by an American with virtuous intent than a Bad Guy with evil intent.

I was reminded of that reading the following story:

President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel‘s Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial’s chairman said…

Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev.

“Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes,” Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort, a decision that became the subject of intense controversy years later.

Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed at the camp.

“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.

Bombing makes everything all better, if you do it because you’re a good person fighting evil.

I mean, seriously, it’s conceivable that bombing a camp could have resulted, in the end, in less suffering in total, assuming the Germans didn’t just build new camps or take to shooting Jews instead of working them to death or gassing them. It’s not utterly irrational. It was considered at the time as a possible strategy.

But I do find it scary that the President’s response to a one of the world’s great horrors is to think “we should have bombed it.”

When all the President’s got is a hammer… he can even look at Auschwitz and see a nail.

Ron Paul’s Past: Yeah, It’s That Bad, But It Won’t Matter

There had been concern about Ron Paul’s ideological past among the more suspicious liberal netnerds for some time. Inbetween terms in Congress, he published a newsletter which mostly circulated amongst violent far-right white supremacist militia types. The only copy of that which had been made available to the public — one of the subscribers had posted it on Usenet years back — was conspicuously racist. But hey, it’s just a usenet posting, and maybe it was a hoax or maybe, as Ron Paul’s own people said, it was not actually written by Paul, but by somebody else who was writing for him at that time. A fluke. Somebody was at the wheel who shouldn’t have been and made Paul look bad in that one instance.

Well it ain’t a fluke. A reporter from the New Republic finally tracked down a large cache of Ron Paul Newsletters, and they were all in that vein. Blatantly racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, supportive of violent uprisings against the government, nostalgic for the Confederacy and agitating for a new secession. Year after year after year. If, as RP still claims, he never saw this stuff and doesn’t agree at all with it, it is strange indeed that for years and years he allowed it to be distributed under his name. Strange indeed.

Will this sink his popularity with libertarian computer nerds?

I don’t believe it will for a minute. If you read the news sites frequented by libertarian computer nerds, you’ll find that a lot of them are quietly bigoted themselves. You know how last year James Watson got drunk and started babbling racist pseudoscience to reporters? They ate that right up. Loved it. The violent stuff? They’re cool with that. They’re cast in the mold of Eric S. Raymond, gun nerd and twitchy threat-maker extraordinaire. The homophobia? I don’t know that they’re specifically homophobic but they’re often rampantly sexist (another matter which affect the selection of articles on their news sites) — they tend to be obsessed with the “discrimination” suffered by straight white males, and resentful of the Political Correctness which makes it impolite to express open bigotry.

In short, I don’t think that this will cost Ron Paul much of his audience at all. I don’t think most of them will find this side of him objectionable. In fact, the only revelation about Ron Paul that has consistently shocked many of them is that he is a creationist, and they’re largely atheists and seethe with contempt for any religious person except Ron Paul, most especially creationists. Racist, anti-Semite, homophobe? Whatever, just keep it quiet. Creationist? Eew, that makes them squeamish! But only a little squeamish.

Tthe evidence dug up by TNR is damning. There is no way he could consistently allow that stuff to be published in his name over a decade or more, whether or not he wrote it himself, unless he approved of it. That is just unbelieveable. Ron Paul has a history of approving of blatant racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and right-wing militia violence. That is undeniable.

Will the Ron Paul nerds care?

No. I predict they will not care one bit. He will remain their hero — and perhaps become a bit more of a hero, for daring to say what you can’t say (except quiety. to your Aryan militia friends).

UPDATE: Michael thinks that my pessimism about libertarian nerds is unwarranted; possibly my opinions have been skewed by hanging around reddit too much, where the worst of the worst rule.  That’s cool.  It’s great when pessimistic predictions turn out to be wrong.