Prometheus 6

Just joined this blog--what a wonderful place you've got here! Dr. King's legacy has been so heavily redacted that most folks, black or white, don't "remember" that it was this speech that got him killed. I mean, it's one thing to cross some fat-bellied cracker of an Alabama sheriif who called himself "Bull," but it's quite another to draw attention to the real deal that the man's been dealing in ever since the fancy rhetoric of "all men are created equal" was etched into easy-to-ignore stone. Dr. King went way too deep into the manure pile right next to the wood pile of the American experience--he actually described the economics of discrimination, the system that keeps us in servitude as it "sets us free."

MLK was not alone in this, however. The others were just more quietly censored, like Zora Neale Hurston. I'm going to leave you with a quote and a link, both from Wade Frazier, private citizen, brainy, more or less self-educated guy who has a website called A Healed Planet, where you'll find gems like this:

Many black Americans were decidedly unimpressed with America's rationale for World War II. Zora Neale Hurston wrote:

"All around me, bitter tears are being shed over the fate of Holland, Belgium, France and England. I must confess to being a little dry around the eyes. I hear people shaking with shudders at the thought of Germany collecting taxes in Holland. I have not heard a word against Holland collecting one-twelfth of poor people's wages in Asia. Hitler's crime is that he is actually doing a thing like that to its own kind…

"As I see it, the doctrines of democracy deal with the aspirations of men's souls, but the applications deal with things. One hand in somebody else's pocket and one on your gun, and you are highly civilized…desire enough for your own use only, and you are a heathen. Civilized people have things to show their neighbors."[217]

That passage was from Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road. Just before it was published, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Hurston's publisher removed those words from her book, which did not reappear until a 1984 edition of her book.

For more of the same and a picture so broad the frame can longer contain and sustain the American myth, check out Wade's More Big Lies: History page or even the whole darn thing. It really is that good. And thank you so much for bringing Dr. King's Vietnam speech to the public consciousness again, since there's no way we can understand the current swindle unless we see where we were deceived in the past.

iridescent cuttlefish

Quoting Zora and props for me?

I'm going to like having you around. Welcome.

The More Big Lies link isn't really there, though.

Hey!

Sorry about that link to Wade's world--I guess I'm not quite used to this rich text field thing you've got going on here. That link was supposed to be More Big Lies: History, which seems to be working in the preview now. Very briefly about me: I write a good deal in friendly blogs and occasionally venture out into the hostile ground of the reactionary trenches, but they tend to delete my comments instead of talking about the issues, so I don't do it much anymore. It is frustrating, though. I mean, the promise of the internet is the promise of unfiltered, untrammeled communication--why are folks so insecure about their beliefs that that can't entertain other views?

To answer my own question, I think it has a lot to do with our training, programming, whatever you want to call it. Whenever the people are divided, the owners rest easy. Hence this so-called political rift in this country. Ditto for the taboo question of race, which is really the biggest psychosis in our collective consciousness. Starting with the largest (and ugliest) question then, here's my take, in the proverbial nutshell. No one wants to look at painful, embarrassing things anywhere, but most especially not in any mirror. The simple truth is that we're all fine with talking about what a monster Hitler was, but the minute you tell someone that those concentration camps were modeled on the American Indian reservations, or that most of the eugenicists in the 1930s were respected academics in the US and England, a bullet-proof window rolls up and the "conversation" is over. My buddy Wade tells it from a historical perspective--the business of racism--but for me it's much more personal.

My family came to a certain "progressive" Northern state after the Socialist Revolution failed in Germany in 1848. They were hounded politically and felt persecuted on account of their religion, which the Prussians sent in to stop the brotherly love outlawed, along with anything else that didn't have a place in their starched minds. So they come to the Midwest, which at that time was still kind of a frontier, and they find ghetto-ized indigenous folk and a handful of runaway slaves and they were kind of shocked. When they realized that they had a certain amount of political freedom (they were white, after all), they very quickly got involved with the growing Abolitionist and German Socialist movements, and they thought they could work to make their new country a better place. I've got letters from two cousins, one of them the brother of my great-great grandfather, and it's just so eerie to read them because they're full of the same idealism that the Civil Rights volunteers had over a century later when they went down South to work on voter registration drives & that whole thing.

Both of these guys decide to put their pacifism to the side when 1861 rolls around so they can volunteer to be trained as assassins, figuring that if they could put a bullet in Jefferson Davis it'll save lives and souls. One died in Andersonville and the other came back without an arm. My grandma used to sit on the lap of the one-armed old man when she was little, but he never spoke. About anything. Whatever happened on his quest broke his mind, or at least his spirit. So now I'm living in a city not far from where that disillusioned idealist lived, and guess what? It is probably the most segregated city in this whole stupid country. Nobody remembers the great movements that were born and died here, the only big city in America with Socialist mayors (3 of 'em!), the first state to send a Socialist to Congress (even though they wouldn't let him take his seat and ended up sending him to Fort Leavenworth on a 20-year sentence for proposing that war profits be banned...Well, that was after he got out of the bum rap the first time and fought for things like old age pensions, worker protections, child labor laws--you know, un-American stuff like that.)

No, what we're famous for here is Sen. Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society. I always used to dream about time travel when I was a boy, but I'd be awfully embarrassed if my ancestors showed up in my town one day. Having taught in the public schools here and worked in the factories (where I was reprimanded for teaching black dudes how to program machines instead of just running them, something they could actually make some money at), I would have some explaining to do and I'm not sure I would even know where to start. The weirdest part of the whole deal is that my friends who bear the brunt of that racism every day are more resigned to it than I am. Me it still makes angry, while to them it's just how this shit is.

I do believe this whole thing can be opened up, but it's going to take something very high-profile, like that Lieberman/Cheney/Katrina story to do it. Not to mention a lot more honesty than folks are used to.

Peace, for now.  

iridescent cuttlefish