To the barricades again

In my opinion there is no more ironically named country than United States.  People who anguish over Have we ever been more divided? and Is there a Democrat who can bring us together? ignore the extent to which we have always been staring across an abyss, held together with baling wire and duct tape and a series of grim compromises.  Our very Constitution, with its fatuous talk of "a more perfect union," incorporated such ugly injustice that it's a miracle civil war took eighty years to break out.  Its conclusion terminated chattel slavery but maintained a system of white against non-white, male against female, immigrant against native-born, rich against poor that we are still struggling to resolve.  Only war -- us against the world -- has temporarily papered over the resentments and divisions, and then mostly by demonizing non-white enemies.  In many instances, the demonization  has been the principal reason for the war.

We even fight over holidays.  As the wounded straggle home from the War on Christmas, which started in the squalid brain of someone annoyed by a cashier who failed to mention Baby Jesus Meek and Mild, they have to cross the newest front in the Forever Culture Wars.  I refer to the War on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.  It was dragged into existence with more opposition than any declaration of war (back when they were declared), first observed in 1986 and only recognized in all the states fourteen years later.   And that was just the beginning.

Over the past twenty years it has become customary for racists and conservatives (but I repeat myself) to hijack this day and use it to display their contempt for everything King stood for.  They usually start by lying about King himself.  In his lifetime, it was common for everyone from George Wallace to J. Edgar Hoover to brand him a communist, the usual term of abuse for anyone who opposed the status quo.   Now their ideological spawn claim him as a fellow traveler, a secret Republican and even a libertarian if not exactly a segregationist.  J.D. Rucker at The Federalist wants us to believe King "worked with his closest political allies, Republicans, who overwhelmingly pushed for civil rights with him" though he doesn't mention any names or quote King's characterization of Barry Goldwater as a racist.  The highest praise he can come up with is "He was also a Christian and fervent supporter of Israel."  

(Let's clear the air on Republicans.  For fifteen years they were gangbusters, electing the genius Lincoln, winning the civil war, passing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.  In 1875 they abandoned Reconstruction and began their long, slow slide into the shit.  By the turn of the century they championed imperial wars against Mexico, Spain, and anyone who opposed American capital -- read Smedley Butler.  In the 1920s they embraced the exclusion of immigrants and cheered the heedlessly overheated economy.  In the 1930s they opposed every attempt by the Democrats to clean up their mess.  By the 1940s they were the party of isolationism, if not cheerleaders for European fascism.  In the 1950s they gave us McCarthyism.  In the 1960s, scenting a new constituency among the rabid racists, they promoted Goldwater and courted Thurmond and other Dixiecrats.  Then came Nixon (and Kissinger), the "secret plan" to end the war, Watergate, Reagan and another secret plan to free the hostages, Iran-contra -- can anyone here spell t-r-e-a-s-o-n? -- Poppy Doc and Willie Horton, Baby Doc and the "war on terror," a party hollowed out of all decency and morality before the loathsome Trump came along.  So fuck the Republicans with a rusty chainsaw.)

In this stage of the war, the enemy doesn't always talk about King; they just use his holiday to foul everything he stood for and the truth in general.  Thus Geraldo Rivera ("I'm not a journalist but I get paid to play one on TV") chose yesterday to inform the Three Murdoch Stooges that Trump is "a civil rights leader" because why not?  He's the Chosen One, too, and possibly the Lindbergh baby.  Thus Kellyanne Conway consulted her Ouija board and rushed out to inform us that King would never have wanted Trump impeached.  Thus a mob of self-styled militiamen suited up in pretend-uniforms and took their guns out for an airing at the Virginia capitol, where old-timers still consider this a day to celebrate the sedition of Stonewall and Bobby Lee.  And in the days preceding the holiday the Supreme Court of Florida ruled that the state can bring back the poll tax no matter what the 24th Amendment says.

On the last night of his life (and please don't tell me James Earl Ray was a Democrat), King said he didn't expect to get to the Promised Land.  At this rate, none of us will.  I don't think it exists.