by
Norman Solomon
Published on Thursday, February 2, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Hours after
Coretta Scott King died, President Bush led off the State of the Union
address by praising her as “a beloved, graceful, courageous woman who
called America to its founding ideals and carried on a noble dream.”
For good measure, at the end of his speech, Bush reverently invoked the
name of her martyred husband, Martin Luther King Jr.
The
president is one of countless politicians who zealously oppose most of
what King struggled for — at the same time that they laud his name
with syrupy words. It wouldn’t be shrewd to openly acknowledge the
basic disagreements. Instead, Bush and his allies offer up platitudes
while pretending that King’s work ended with the fight against racial
segregation.
Now
that Dr. King’s widow is no longer alive, the smarmy process will be
even easier: Just praise him as a beloved civil rights leader, as
though the last few years of his life — filled with struggles for
economic justice and peace — didn’t exist. Ignore King’s profound
challenge to the kind of budget priorities and militarism holding sway
today.
On
Tuesday night, the president was eager to seem like a fervent admirer
of Martin Luther King. But the next day, in the same House chamber
where Bush spoke, his administration pushed through a vicious budget
measure that will slash $39 billion in spending
— mostly for student loans and Medicaid for the poor — over the next
five years.
Nearly
38 years ago, Dr. King was killed in Memphis while leading the Poor
People’s Campaign for an economic bill of rights. He’d been accusing
Congress of “hostility to the poor.” The federal government, King
pointed out, was appropriating “military funds with alacrity and
generosity” — but “poverty funds with miserliness.”
Today,
a slick rhetorical formula enables current generations of such miserly
politicians to keep praising the legacy of Martin Luther King while
sticking knives into it.
Such
duplicity is facilitated by a baseline of media coverage that
automatically recycles the truncated versions of history promoted by
the politicians who dominate Washington. At least dimly, those
political hacks understand a key axiom described by George Orwell: “Who
controls the past controls the future; who controls the present
controls the past.”
Don’t
want to deal with calls for progressive change in the nation’s economic
power structures? Then don’t mention Martin Luther King’s statement,
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to
see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
Don’t
want to acknowledge King’s assessment of global class war? Then just
keep referring to his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech while carefully
bypassing his later oratory about “capitalists of the West investing
huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the
profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the
countries.”
Want
to keep King boxed as scarcely more than a Jim Crow foe? Then ignore
his fierce opposition to the Vietnam War and his broader denunciations
of what he called “the madness of militarism.”
President
Bush has no tactical interest in criticizing the positions that were
central to Dr. King’s final years. Instead, aided by media eagerness to
sanitize King’s political evolution, Bush and his right-wing
compatriots pose as admirers of King while they desecrate his spirit
every chance they get.
After
Coretta Scott King died, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and
Education Fund said: “I’m concerned that people don’t take her passing
as an opportunity to further antique the causes that she and her
husband and others stood for.” Theodore Shaw added, “Anybody who thinks
that work is over is either terribly ignorant or willfully blind.”
Whatever
his blend of ignorance and intentional evasion, President Bush is a
leader of forces striving to roll back the King legacy of activism for
social justice and peace. Sadly, the news media continue to be part of
that retrograde political process — whitewashing instead of informing.
Norman Solomon’s latest book is “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com