Bring out the clowns
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
Last Saturday, Glenn Beck, the right-wing radio demagogue and Fox News fixture, held an event at the Lincoln Memorial. The gathering, at which Sarah Palin and other “Tea Party” favorites spoke, was billed as an effort to “restore honor” to the country and to “reclaim the civil rights movement.”
It just so happened that the event took place at the same place and on the same date that, forty-seven years ago, Martin Luther King gave his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech. Beck has claimed that place and date were all pure coincidence, perhaps aided by “divine providence.”
Beck’s pretension to claim any connection to the civil rights movement, much less to reclaim it, is a travesty. It is offensive, ridiculous, farcical. In 1963, Martin Luther King was in the midst of leading a historic movement to ensure dignity to millions of Americans too long segregated, subjugated, and oppressed. In the process, King began the process of ridding this country of its most shameful legacy — the legacy of slavery and American-style apartheid.
But Martin Luther King’s vision was not just that of an America free of racial discrimination. He longed for a society where social and economic justice reigned. It is no coincidence that at the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis to support a strike by a garbage workers’ union. By that point, King also had become a fierce critic of the Vietnam War and U.S. interventionism in the Third World.
The dream of Glenn Beck — a comical figure were he not so dangerous — could not be further from that of King. The man who would hijack the civil rights movement is the same who has called Barack Obama — of all people — a racist who has a hatred for white people and the white culture. Beck has derided the very concepts of economic and social justice that were central to MLK’s goals.
Who says the civil rights movement needs reclaiming anyway? And if it did, it could never be by a man whose supporters are made up almost exclusively of older, better off, ultra-conservative white people.
The dream of Glenn Beck and his acolytes is “to take our country back.” Take it back from whom? Take it back to when? It is not by chance that Beck and his ilk feel a crying need to seize back the country just when, for the first time in history, a black man, a relatively progressive one, sits in the White House.
Beck’s dream, and that of many who follow him, is to turn the clock back and restore an America where white Anglo-Saxons reigned supreme and unchallenged. For the Beck crowd, 2010 America, a country in which a man named Barack Hussein Obama lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in which not a single Protestant sits on the Supreme Court, but three women (one of them Latina) do, and in which Latinos make up an ever-growing proportion of the population and the electorate, must be a scary land indeed.
In this context of majority-group anxiety, the election of a black president was bound to be seen as a watershed event, a point of almost no return. The resultant backlash had to be ferocious and bitter, as it has been. Consider that there are elements of the Republican Party — the current GOP Senatorial candidate from Kentucky Rand Paul among them — who are not yet reconciled to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, especially its ban against denying people access to public accommodations, such as restaurants, on the basis of race!
Yet, while the crowd gathered by Glenn Beck at the Lincoln Memorial represents the shock troops of a new reactionary movement (with very old roots), it would be a mistake to imagine that this latest manifestation of organized resentment and rage has arisen from a process of spontaneous combustion. This is no grass roots movement in search of the country’s allegedly lost honor. (Funny that none of these folks were worried about the lost honor of the United States when the Bush administration was starting an illegal war and perpetrating such atrocities as those that took place at Abu Ghraib.) The “Tea Party” and its fellow travelers has been financed and organized, at every step along the way, by moneyed interests whose real desire is the return to power of the Republican Party and, with it, a plutocratic agenda that would make Martin Luther King turn over in his grave.
