Posted on 01/17/2005 11:03:12 AM PST by mrustow
It's back. The most important day of the year. More important than the deposed Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays, respectively. More important than Columbus Day. More important than Thanksgiving. More important than Christmas.
I know what you're saying. How can MLK Day be more important than Christmas? Easy. MLK was the most important person ever to live. Anywhere. Just ask his widow and children.
Let's look at the man's accomplishments. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in competition with Jack Kennedy and Wilt Chamberlain for the title of world's greatest womanizer. His favorite male company consisted largely of communists. He began his last day on Earth by beating the hell out of his mistress of the moment. He was a compulsive plagiarist who not only got his doctorate through fraud, but stole other men's words, and then copyrighted and re-sold the purloined pearls. And as the pre-eminent leader of the civil rights movement, he supported racial quotas, reparations, and racist law. What's not to like?
(As Theodore Pappas showed, in Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Other Prominent Americans, one-third of King's Boston University doctoral dissertation consisted of copying directly without attribution from the dissertation of his classmate, Jack Stewart Boozer, in addition to thefts from famous theologians.
And even if King hadn't gotten his doctorate through massive plagiarism, I wouldn't call him "Dr." What is it about the same black folks who show contempt towards whites with legitimate titles, that has them obsessively refer to "Dr. King"? Max Weber (1864-1920) was one of the greatest social scientists of all time, and he had a real doctorate, but no one today refers to him as "Dr. Weber." Unless you're Austrian or something, it's not normal to refer to dead people as "Dr." Heck, while teaching college, I stopped referring to the living as "Dr." or "Professor," unless the person in question was my boss or a medical doctor. If you're my colleague, I'm not referring to you by any title, Pal. And nowadays, outside of the real sciences, most of the doctorates being issued aren't worth the paper they're written on.)
Lest I forget, one is nowadays compelled to note that King displayed great physical courage on behalf of his convictions. But having the courage of one's convictions is a dependent variable -- the independent variable is the righteousness of one's convictions. Over 100,000 men and women currently in uniform in Iraq also display great physical courage every day, and the vast majority of them seek to defend, not to destroy America. And yet, to my knowledge, none of them has had a national holy day enacted by Congress in his honor.
About 16 years ago, when I watched the PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize for the first time, I loved the first half - the Martin years. But following King's assassination, the second half celebrated the Black Power movement as a seamless continuation of the civil rights movement whose dominant figure the martyred King was. "How dare you sully King's name!" I shouted at the TV screen, or words to that effect.
Eyes on the Prize celebrated black supremacists such as the "community control" activists (Rhody McCoy, Milton Galamison, the Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, et al.) who terrorized white teachers in the experimental, Ford Foundation-funded Brooklyn school district called "Ocean Hill-Brownsville." (Ocean Hill and Brownsville were and are two adjacent, poor, black-dominated parts of Brooklyn.)
For many years, I considered MLK one of America's greatest heroes. I once even published an encomium to him. Then I started to study the man. Big mistake.
For several years now, neoconservatives have presented King as a ... neoconservative, on race, at least. (And race is all they talk about, regarding King.) That means that he opposed affirmative action. They cite his "content of character" line:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!"
That line is from King's most famous speech, "I Have a Dream," which he gave on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial. That's the only time he used such language. (Variations on the phrase "I have a dream" were then common in the American vernacular. In the 1959 Jules Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical, Gypsy, for instance, Mama Rose sings, "I had a dream ...")
In the next passage, King uses a powerful image to promote integration.
"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!"
"I Have a Dream" is the speech, whose high points ("Let freedom ring!") King stole from a speech the Rev. Archibald Carey gave, of all places, at the 1952 Republican National Convention. King then copyrighted the stolen words as his own. Since his assassination, his family has compounded the plagiarism by shaking down individuals (including scholars, which no one had ever done before) and organizations for millions of dollars for the privilege of quoting a mishmash of Archibald Carey's stolen words and King's own words. That the copyright is fraudulent is, thanks to my old editor Ted Pappas and a few other writers by now well-known, but no one has so far had the gumption to take on the sanctimonious, self-righteous bunco artists who comprise the King family.
MLK didn't believe in any hooey about "the content of one's character." He was a race man! And taking his fine talk about black and white children playing together and holding hands seriously, requires a belief in race mixing that he also did not have. As journalist George S. Schuyler (1895-1977) understood, integration means, above all, blacks and whites making babies together.
Meanwhile, on MLK Day every year, black leftists insist on King's radicalism. That's the man they want celebrated. And they are right. King was a radical. The neoconservatives notwithstandsing, King supported affirmative action and reparations, and he got both. When the programs of the War on Poverty were initiated, it was understood that they were racial reparations programs. Thirty-odd years and a few trillion dollars later, contemporary civil rights hustlers developed amnesia, and demanded new reparations to blacks, but this time to the tune of as much as $1 million per black (an additional app. $37 trillion).
The proper meaning of "civil rights" is the rights due to citizens. In changing "civil rights" from something due all Americans to something due to some, based on the color of their skin, and not others, King committed the most egregious act of linguistic legerdemain since FDR turned the term "liberal" upside down, from the belief that government should interfere as little as possible in a citizen's life, to the notion that the government may meddle in all of a citizen's formerly private affairs without limit.
Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest orator I have ever heard. But that too is a cautionary tale: Beware of silver-tongued serpents.
The real meaning of MLK Day is "Black Day." It is a federal holy day celebrating blackness. But if we are going to eliminate all holy days celebrating white men and instead have a holiday celebrating a black, why not at least celebrate someone worthy? Pre-civil rights America had many black heroes worthy of celebration. Off the top of my head, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and my choice, Booker T. Washington, come to mind. Even A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the first successful black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, would be preferable to King, in spite of Randolph's socialism. Those five were real giants, rather than the products of propaganda.
As always, when discussing King, I leave the last word to George S. Schuyler, who, had he had the tuition money, could have buried King's fraudulent Ph.D. dissertation in a pile of real dissertations.
In 1964, when King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Schuyler wrote "King: No Help to Peace":
"Neither directly nor indirectly has Dr. King made any contribution to world (or even domestic) peace. Methinks the Lenin Prize would have been more appropriate, since it is no mean feat for one so young to acquire 60 communist front citations.... Dr. King's principle contribution to world peace has been to roam the country like some sable Typhoid Mary, infecting the mentally disturbed with perversions of Christian doctrine, and grabbing fat lecture fees from the shallow-pated."
You criticized MLK on his b-day? You racist, archie bunker, former grand wizard, uh.. uh.. nazi sympathizer, homophobic, abortion lover, crusader, pro-Franco, conferderate flag waving angry white male!!! sarcasm
Isn't the author of this piece a member of Motley Crew?
That's precisely why I celebrate Ben Franklin's birthday on Jan 17th, instead of the King fraud. He's as phony as Kwanzaa is.
I feel for the author of this piece. Aren't facts hate speech? /s
tacky
Poor Richard B-day BUMP!!!!! 8^)
I've heard that he was born as Michael King. He never formally changed it to MLK, Jr. That person never existed. So we have a bogus holiday to someone who never was. Go figure.
By the same token, you could hardly find a scholar at Harvard whose works weren't plagiarized to some degree. Why is Mr. King to be singled out and pilloried?
There's something about a man with great physical courage and thus great integrity that inspires the enmity of lesser men: the green-eyed monster, I suppose. Mr. Stix doesn't have as much courage in his entire body as MLK had in one fingertip.
A Christian doesn't cast the first stone. Jesus said, there is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for a friend. Until you have MLK's courage, you haven't the right to criticize his petty failings.
But not as important as Barack Obama Day is going to be 50 years from now.
The "memory" (grand delusion) of MLK dishonors them all. - Then again, the "Dream" is the result of an infinite capacity for self-deception.
The "memory" (grand delusion) of MLK dishonors them all. - Then again, the "Dream" is the result of an infinite capacity for self-deception.
Well, for Alabama and Mississippi, it's also Robert E. Lee's birthday. Talk about "confederate flag waving!"
I feel much the same way about Columbus Day (at my house, it's just referred to as mass murderer day). Of course, the blacks seem to feel the same way about President's Day celebrating slave owners like George Washington.
There are always multiple views of any issue. I am not in favor of a day devoted to one person who had a loud voice in a turbulent time - and if the beating of his mistress, etc. is true, I'd equate him with an eloquent version of Mike Tyson. Perhaps the day should have been coined as a celebration of integration?
Thanks for the very interesting, thought-provoking post!
Happy Holidays and seasons greatings. Sorry, political correctness does not allow mentioning the name of a man of the cloth. You know, separation of church and state. :)
A racist is someone who sees everything through the perspectice of race. Several contemporary examples come to mind: Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
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