Thoughts On Beckapalooza

As Glenn Beck helpfully reminds everyone today that the civil rights movement was really all about white people and what they contributed to help black folk ride buses (the same buses that 47 years later we should shut down for being tax-consuming parasites apparently) and drink from water fountains in parks (which 47 years later should also be shut down for being tax-consuming parasites) I can't help but think that maybe there's something that Glennsanity is overlooking just a bit.

Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald puts it brilliantly.

We're in an odd moment. Having opposed the freedom movement of the 20th century, some social conservatives seek, now that that movement stands vindicated and venerated, to arrogate unto themselves its language and heroes, to remake it in their image.

Thus, you get claims that "racism" is now what Shirley Sherrod said in a speech to the NAACP. And people calling Sarah Palin the new face of feminism. And conservatives touting the likelihood that King voted Republican — as if the party in 1957 bore any resemblance to the party now.

But even by those standards, Glenn Beck's effrontery is monumental. Even by those standards, he goes too far. Beck was part of the "we" who founded the civil rights movement!? "No." Here's who "we" is.

"We" is Emmett Till, tied to a cotton gin fan in the murky waters of the Tallahatchie River. "We" is Rosa Parks telling the bus driver no. "We" is Diane Nash on a sleepless night waiting for missing Freedom Riders to check in. "We" is Charles Sherrod, husband of Shirley, gingerly testing desegregation compliance in an Albany, Ga., bus station. "We" is a sharecropper making his X on a form held by a white college student from the North. "We" is celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Pernell Roberts of "Bonanza," lending their names, their wealth and their labor to the cause of freedom.

"We" is Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, Cynthia Wesley, Andrew Goodman, Denise McNair, James Chaney, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson, shot, beaten and blown to death for that cause.

"We" is Lyndon Johnson, building a legislative coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats to defeat intransigent Southern Democratic conservatives and enshrine that cause into law.
And "we" is Martin Luther King, giving voice and moral clarity to the cause — and paying for it with his life.

The we to which Glenn Beck belongs is the we that said no, the we that cried "socialism!" "communism!" "tyranny!" whenever black people and their allies cried, freedom.

I'll boil it down to "screw you, Glenn Beck."   The man is trying to rewrite history to benefit himself.  He should be ashamed, but I don't think he's capable of it.  Up until now I thought Beck was a dangerously egomaniacal demagogue, but now the guy is borderline evil.

He opposes everything Dr. King stood for and died for, most of all social justice.

What kind of man would do something like this to the African-American community and sill be able to sleep at night, untroubled by the ghosts of people who died so he could exploit them?

Jesus really would have wept.