January 21, 2019: A Movement Without A Cause, No Agenda, Protesting With Platitudes

Today marks the second anniversary of the 'Women's March', sparked by and immediately on the heels of the 'election' of our Caesar Disgustus. Like my daughter, I took part in that march, she in joining the throngs in Washington D.C., while I marched with a large, albeit more modest gathering in Grand Rapids Michigan. (1)

We gathered at the Fountain Street Church and marched to Campau Square, gathering at the Rosa Parks Circle. I was interviewed, so some unfathomable reason, by WOOD-TV, the local NBC television outlet for it's evening coverage of the local news while we gathered at the church and, after the march and the protests at Rosa Park Circle I made my way back to the church once again encountering the reporter who had put me before the cameras. We spoke about the gathering and its possible significance and I commented that if the movement is to succeed, it will have to articulate an agenda.

This weekend, they gathered again, in fewer numbers, about the country. The movement is said to be fractured; riven by rival factions one of whom has embraced the Nation of Islam leader and black nationalist Louis Farrakhan,(2) an association repugnant to others in the movement.

For this reason, it is held by many, the movement has faltered.

I'm not convinced.

Addressing this issue in The New York Times, David Leonhardt observes: “When I've spoken to people from other countries over the past couple of weeks, they have been shocked that Americans have not begun protesting the shutdown in large numbers. About 800,000 federal workers have now gone almost a month without getting paid. Some are struggling to pay their rent or buy medications. Some have gone to pawn shops to get cash. Major functions of government—airline security, food safety, mortgage processing, farm assistance and so on—have been impaired.

“If this were happening in Europe, as Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago told me, people would be pouring into the streets. And yet in the United States, there has been nothing but a few small scattered rallies.

“Instead of lining up to protest, hundreds of federal workers in Washington lined up last week to eat at makeshift soup kitchens, the photos of them doing so were a study in powerlessness” (3)

Imagine, wrote Leonhardt, a progressive movement large enough to bring pressure upon our Caesar and force capitulation? Indeed, imagine a progressive movement.

What we are witnessing here isn't simply the mendacity of a cabal hell-bent on inflicting pain. We are witnessing pain inflicted upon a segment of the population long reviled by the idiot wrong. One has only to hearken back to that old racist George Wallace to find the roots of this crisis. One of the standard bromides of every Wallace stump speech was to rail against those faceless “briefcase totin' bureaucrats who somehow stood between the great unwashed and their American Dream. This bit of buffoonery happily coincides with the Capitalist's drive to strip the agencies of their regulatory power. So we find the happy marriage of Donald tRUMP with the Koch Brothers and other billionaires, just as Wallace, when he wasn't busting unions at home, would fly about the country in planes provided by Colonel Sanders, all the while posturing as the tribune of the underclass.

But I digress. Public employees have long been the whipping boy of the conservative movement because they are the last bastions of organized labor. If we can get the rubes to revile them by pointing out their job security while they increasingly have none, and remind them, not so subtlely of the evils of affirmative action, then the face of public employment is no longer the face that White America sees in its mirror. Once again the race card is played and the last bastion of the middle class becomes ever more vulnerable.

Leonardt quite rightly suggests a series of one day strikes. National strikes are a staple of European politics and can be very effective. But our masters have, it should be obvious, long mastered the arts of divide and rule.

But the question begs itself: to what end? End the shutdown? Perhaps, but then what? The reason, I suspect, that people are not taking to the streets is that like the “Occupy Wall Street” and the “99 Per Cent” movements, the “Resistance” has no agenda.

Yes it has inspired many women to get into the political arena, and this is an accomplishment that deserves its recognition. But it is not enough.

Today the nation gathered once again to honor Martin Luther King. As we mark the half-century of his passing it is worth noting how the power structure has transformed King and what this day now represents.

King comes down to us now as an apostle of peace, adherent of non-violence, who quietly pressured the establishment to let his people go. A kind of Moses, a nearly universally revered figure who led his people and the nation out of the darkness and into the promised land. In this way King has been, in the hands of the dominate white culture, transformed into that knighted state in which he represents not the struggle of the underclass but the eternally transcendent America. In the hands of Corporate America, King has undergone a metamorphosis with a face as white as the marble statue that graces the Washington Mall. A non-threatening Martin. A Martin who spoke in moral platitudes about some distant goal, like Jesus about the Kingdom Come.

But that wasn't King at all, and that wasn't the essence of the movement. It was about the urgency of now, real goals in real time. It was more like Moses speaking about the promised land and taking the people there.

The essence of the movement was not justice in service of morality; but morality in service of justice; and by that he meant economic justice. King understood that in order to exploit a human being one has to degrade him. Slavery was, after all, first and foremost an economic system. Accordingly, he drew deeply upon the religious and political tenets of our culture to justify a movement that demanded justice—foremost economic justice.

It was the bus boycott in Montgomery where it began, and the demonstrations on behalf of the sanitary workers in Memphis where it ended. And when it ended, King was already deep in planning a March On Washington with full intention of building a tent city on the Mall of the poor and dispossessed of ALL RACES from around the country in an effort to force the issue of the maldistribution of wealth into the national consciousness.

To achieve these ends, King would not only demonstrate but would do so in an effort to bring attention to and demand remedy for specific issues whether it be voting rights, school integration, public housing, jobs, or the ending of real estate practices that segregated neighborhoods.

And he would break the law in order to achieve these ends, because justice demands a higher service, a higher morality than currently codified in the law. It was ugly. He called upon the nation to face itself, to live up to its promises, to be what it pretends to be. In so doing he was, and had to be, intentionally confrontational, and the confrontations provoked often violent eruptions. The racism that pervades this country was put on television for the nation and all the world to see.

These are radical ideas and strategies. Indeed, they are revolutionary. So confrontational that violence was King's—and the movement's—constant companion.

For his efforts, King was hated and reviled. It was after he was safely dead that his image was scrubbed white.

Progressives need to learn from the entire history of the Civil Rights movement, as well as the Progressive, Anti-slavery, Suffragette, and Labor movements. Nothing is gained without struggle; nothing is gained without putting your body on the line; nothing is gained without cost. Foremost, nothing is gained without an agenda. You cannot win protesting platitude. You must make demands.

Our ancestors understood this. The Progressives sang “We will have our eight hours” and organized unions and took to the streets to get it. Likewise the suffragette in the streets to get the vote. But it was to get the vote—not simply to draw attention to the evil. One must organize around specific remedy.

The fear among the progressives is that if we take a stand on specifics the movement will splinter and die. This is not the lesson of Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement, or any effort to achieve justice. To not put forward a list of demands will ensure the withering of the movement for there will be nothing about which to rally.

Just ask Martin Luther King or, for that matter, Martin Luther.

Impeach and Imprison.

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1. See. February 26, 2017: Support and Rememberance, To The Ramparts, Seeking Ablution
2. see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Farrakhan
3. Leonhardt, David. “Where Have You Gone, Resistance?” The New York Times. Monday, January 21, 2019. Page A19

April 4, 2018: Long Journey Into Night, A Flame Extinguished, Eternal Vigilance

“Early morning, April 4
shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at Last, they took your life
They could not take your pride” ----U2 “In the Name of Love”

On this day, fifty years ago , a voice of hope calling for America to fulfill its promise; a voice for justice in a country where justice has been long denied, was silenced. Today marks the beginning of that long journey into night, the years of darkness into which we have now been wandering for now half a century. The violence that was 1968 abruptly extinguished the greatest hopes of a generation to unite black and white in an effort to address the pressing problems of racial and economic injustice in the United States. The ensuing backlash shifted the country markedly to the ‘right’, making possible a return to power of conservative America. In time, the heirs of Hoover and Eisenhower and Taft would give way to the acolytes of Goldwater, who would destroy the national consensus that was the New Deal and wage relentless war on those left behind as well upon the middle class itself.

From this perspective, we cannot underestimate the loss of Martin Luther King, Jr.

King is now handed down to us as a venerated icon, a sanitized version of history forgetting that in his lifetime he was vilified, hated, jailed and subject to relentless surveillance. He is presented to our young as “The Good Negro”, almost as a fawning “Uncle Tom” caricature, as if he made his reasonable requests and the country simply acquiesced. This history is a lie for it overlooks the church bombings, the freedom rides, the killings of civil rights workers, and the hate-filled streets as King took his movement north to Cicero, Illinois and other places demonstrating to America that racism was indeed, as it is now, not a Southern but a national problem. During his lifetime King, along with Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael were the most hated figures on the national stage.

They were hated because they presented the country not merely inconvenient truth, but because they laid bare the convenient lie that was the American promise. In King's words, an uncashed promissory note written into not only the Declaration of Independence, and British Common Law but into the very fabric of our Judaeo-Christian tradition. A note long overdue, now come due. “How Long?” he intoned in a call-and-response refrain “Not long!” he would answer.

At the time of his death, King was planning a "Poor People’s" march on Washington in which his critique of America would expand from civil rights to include the disproportionate burden the poor were carrying in fighting the war in Vietnam, and shifting greater emphasis in his definition of social injustice to economics. His plan was to pressure America to address the inequality of incomes and employment, taking to heart the criticism of Malcolm X that it didn’t cost anything to integrate lunch counters, the real challenge was to get the greater society to share the fruits of labor and the wealth that labor alone produces. It was precisely this cause that led him to Memphis in support of garbage workers, all of whom were terribly underpaid and two of whom had been crushed in the back of a poorly maintained garbage truck.  Advised not go to Memphis and take up the cause, King couldn't refuse.  This was precisely what the upcoming "Poor People's" march was meant to address.   It was at this juncture — at the very point where the movement would share goals with a larger society and demand that justice be served by creating a more expansive and more inclusive middle class - that the flame that was Martin Luther King, Jr. was extinguished. After his death, there were marches in Memphis and elsewhere, and there was a big march on Washington later in the summer in which the poor took up residence in makeshift housing on the Capitol Mall, naming it “Resurrection City”, but the movement failed in its efforts to broaden itself, in large part because the voice that had given so much life was no more.

We miss you, Martin. You taught us that what happens to the least of us threatens all of us and that we are each others keeper. Oh, how you would have stood up to Nixon and Reagan. How you would have castigated ‘Ol Two-Cows, and now Caesar Disgustus and ridiculed with a moral voice that only you could have brought to the arena, the oxymoron that is “Compassionate Conservatism.” You would have celebrated with us the election of Obama, but you would have had no illusions about a dawning new age. You would have reminded us to maintain our eternal vigilance and to keep our eyes on the prize. We were blessed to have known you and for a half-century now we have wandered in the wilderness still seeking the promised land.

“How Long?...Not Long!”

It has been a half-century now and greed, gluttony and avarice run riot in the land.

“An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”.

Impeach and Imprison

________________

(1) Copyright 2004-2008http://www.MetroLyrics.com/in-the-name-of-love-lyrics-u2.html

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Note: This is another re-write of a post on this date 10 years ago, commentaries on that election year that changed America.