Mind your own f'ing funerals, please

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Mind your own f'ing funerals, please

Postby JerkyLeBoeuf » Sun Feb 12, 2006 11:39 pm

Here's an inconvenient truth that seems to have eluded all the tongue-clucking manners nannies complaining about Preznit Dubya having to endure an earful of truth during Coretta Scott King's funeral last week: conservatives of the 1950's and 60's HATED Martin Luther King Jr and everything for which he stood. In fact, the Right's hatred for King was so intense, they used each and every mechanism to which they had institutional (if not always legitimate) access to try and bring him down, to stop his work.<br><br>For peacefully protesting and calling for an equal measure of human justice, conservatives of the day harassed, jailed, and attacked him with clubs, water cannons, dogs, bullets and some of the vilest propaganda ever penned. As Jimmy Carter rightly pointed out during his eulogy, reactionary elements within the United States government subjected King to surreptitious surveillance, tried to destroy his marriage, and even attempted to blackmail him into committing suicide. In the end, they very well may have been involved in the assassination of the man they called "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country".<br><br>Today, the thin-skinned torch-bearers of Bull Connor and J. Edgar Hoover's ideology are venting on FOX News and vomiting forth endless column inches of cut-and-paste mock fury that the funeral for one of the most political women in American history could get so… political. Basically, it's the Wellstone backlash all over again, and it's just as bogus: "How DARE they?! Have they no shame?! This is an OUTRAGE!!!"<br><br>One particularly loathsome theme that keeps popping up like a stiff turd in the flood of raw sewage spewing from the Right on this topic is the novel idea that "liberals don't know how to act at funerals". If there's anything more perverted than the sight and sounds of Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh and Kate O'Bierne presuming to tell black people how to grieve, yer old pal Jerky doesn't want to know about it. <br><br>There is something distinctly paradoxical about the conservative reaction to the eulogies for Coretta Scott King. After all, many of those complaining make their living trying to convince Americans that liberals and "activists judges" have been dead wrong about everything since (and including) FDR's New Deal. The civil rights advances of the 60's, which MLK did so much to enable, fall squarely within their hypothetical Zone of Liberal Error. Why should conservatives be upset that a handful of people had negative things to say about conservatism during the funeral for one of the heroes in the struggle against the conservative movement?<br><br>In yer old pal Jerky's opinion, there are two reasons for their anger. <br><br>First and foremost, being cast in opposition to MLK has the potential to hurt them, politically. These days, it isn't political correctness that prevents conservatives from speaking their true minds about issues of race and class; it's political expediency. Whether conservatives like it or not, MLK's legacy of success in activism against their twisted ideology is now an established part of the American mainstream. At a bare minimum, any political movement expecting mass support must pay lip service to MLK as an icon, even if it didn't -- and, in some cases, still doesn't -- support his life's work.<br><br>Secondly, and more esoterically, is the psychological element. The lower orders of American conservatives -- those who, being especially susceptible to propaganda due to their cult-like mentality, call themselves conservatives without fully understanding what this designation entails -- tend to react poorly to any experience of exclusion. For them, seeing the paragon of their worldview openly mocked at a culturally important event stirs up visceral feelings of rage and foiled entitlement. "Martin Luther King was part of my America, too! His legacy belongs to me, too!"<br><br>It's understandable that, for some, it's too painful to face up to the sad truth that he wasn't, and it doesn't.<br> <p></p><i></i>
JerkyLeBoeuf
 
Posts: 146
Joined: Fri Jan 27, 2006 6:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Return to Bush Family

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests