I confess that I don't always pay attention to federal holidays and the people or historical events they usually honor. I don't stop much and look much at statues either. There's a Paul Revere statue in the North End of Boston, depicting the hero with a lantern on horseback. I used to pass it on the way to the Michelangelo School, which I attended around 1968, when I was residing with my mother and brother at Chardon Street Home, a family shelter. I didn't think much about the statue or about Paul Revere, the Founding Father and newspaper publisher, or of the lanterns as beacons lit to proclaim America's resistance to the tyranny of taxation without representation. I was just an Anglo-Irish kid, learning Italian for a while ("Dov'è la biblioteca?" I still remember after 57 years), and was more concerned with poverty and homelessness than Liberty.
Many decades later, I connect Revere in my mind with the depiction of him in the Marx Brothers Movie, Duck Soup, wherein he is seen sleeping with his horse, while Revere's wife sleeps in the same room in an adjacent single bed. Also, Revere's lanterns are associated in my mind with the ancient philosopher Diogenes, who would walk through town in broad daylight carrying a lantern, sarcastically looking for an honest man. In some representations of his reality, he is seen living out of a barrel with attractive women lined up to chat him up. That seemed to me an enviable life for a while. Until feminism hit me like a freight train and I reformed. And treated the rest of my life like a 12-step program. Unfortunately, this approach often meant I hooked up with 12-step women. Ouch.
MLK was murdered in April 1968. By whom is still in dispute to this day. Given what I've seen and read, I'd go with: The FBI did it or allowed it. They followed him everywhere. Everywhere he went you could see eyes peering out from behind curtains that seemed to belong to Leonardo DiCaprio; it was like some kind of dream world whipped up by David Lynch. The FBI back then wasn't exactly that one depicted on TV by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., after all, which I watched religiously at the shelter. They were protecting America from career recidivists; today the corporations would qualify.
1968. MLK can get lost in the remembrance of that tumultuous year of violence. RFK Jr.'s dad, Robert, was murdered in June after winning the California primary, giving him high prospects for success in the November election. 1968 saw the disruptions in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, with riots and police beatings leading the beleaguered Walter Cronkite, who had practically sobbed on air five years earlier when announcing JFK's death, to now announce Chicago had fallen into "a police state." The riots, which featured the Yippies running a pig named Pigasus for president, led to the Chicago 7 trial (it had been the Chicago 8, until they moved the bound and gagged Bobby Seale to a separate, but equal trial). Abbie Hoffman and the others went on trial for what he presciently called "thought crimes." And 1968 featured the Vietnam war and the growing population of counterculture resistance to it and the draft which swept up late teens, who had no right to vote but would have to die if picked to fight in the jungle against "communism."
MLK was a peacenik. Non-violent, the kind the fascists hate most. These days when the US war machine can't send boots to the ground somewhere they settle for making economies scream. Gloves off stuff. (See Iraq.) Many corporate types and deep staters wanted to see MLK's dream scream. That dream seemed to support or accommodate socialist thinking. And MLK calling for the elimination of skin color as a determining factor in our collective value system roiled many whiteys. And when MLK spoke out against the war, he became a target of the UnAmerican element. It is worth citing at length what he said to a captive audience at Riverside Church in 1964
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Is this not the talk of a do-gooder communist? Lower case. He believed in community.
MLK had enemies, real in-need-of enema types -- like the one DiCaprio played in J. Edgar. In 1968 the FBI was trailing the Dreamer everywhere. Hoover set up COINTELPRO, which targeted dissidents and disruptors and counterculturalists and feminists and Communists and Black Panthers. And even the KKK, which was established by southern Democrats. ("If you know your history / Then you would know where you're coming from / Then you wouldn't have to ask me / Who the heck do I think I am" - Bob Marley). Hoover set up his agents "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these movements and especially their leaders. The gagging and roping of Bobby Seale was a poster for the secret war on the Black American Man (BAM). The FBI had been after MLK to commit suicide. Threatening to expose his sexual dalliances. And this coming from J. Edgar, whose peccadilloes included cross-dressing and some say the Watergate whistleblower's nickname -- Deep Throat -- was a reference to Hoover. Apparently, the stuff about Hoover was most likely mythology at work, but f*ck him for ruining so many lives with similar reputation demolitions.
There was a time, even as recent as 30 years ago, when I might have thought of MLK and wept to the tunes expressing the grief and frustration of peaceful humans captured in such songs as Kris Kristofferrson's "They Killed Him," and U2's "(Pride) In the Name of Love." But I haven't felt that way in a long time; I still well up some, but the rage against the machine feeling seems gone or suppressed. There seems to be no one to point to as a point of reference for the skulduggeries and thuggeries of the world, except, of course, the invisible and unaccountable Deep State that gets up to things so ugly and criminal behind our backs and scrutiny that we can only cringe. In 1968, we had Richard Nixon to point to, rightfully so. Daniel Ellsberg reveals in his memoir, The Doomsday Machine, that he was terrified that Nixon and Kissinger would have him rubbed out because of what he knew about Tricky Dick's secret plans to nuke North Vietnam into submission. Ellsberg writes,
PRESIDENT: I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?
HENRY KISSINGER: About two hundred thousand people.
PRESIDENT [reflective, matter-of-fact]: No, no, no " I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?
KISSINGER [like the president, low-key]: That, I think would just be too much.
PRESIDENT [in a tone of surprise]: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.
Your president is not a crook, Nixon said, defending Watergate's cover-up. No, instead, he was a mass murderer-in-waiting.
Ed Snowden not only talked about such deep dark system machinations in his revelation of XKEYSCORE, which allows an intel agent instant access to a target by phone or email, and which he vividly brings to life in LOVE INT, one chapter of his must-read memoir, Permanent Record, where he talks about how he and his Deep State buddies sat around spying on the private doings of love interests they had. One can only guess how the IC and FBI would have spied on MLK today with the newfangled gizmos available, like Israel'sPegasus, a commercial variation of XKEYSCORE.
These newfangled, highly sophisticated tools of surveillance had their roots in the doings of the FBI and CIA and other IC agencies throughout the Sixties, with their infiltrations of dissident populations in the US. Hoover pretended he was rooting out Communists, which is to say, anti-Capitalists, that is, those who would redistribute the wealth. It's what MLK referred to in the speech above as "experiments" in token socialism. That's essentially what all the goody-two-shoes we've murdered in the US have been after, tweaking the economics to make life a little more bearable for those without the means or equal protections to succeed or thrive in nourishment. The Cold War became largely an economic war, where the US reversed the Domino Effect and ended pushing global neoliberalism enforced by neo-conservatist bullying tactics, like making the economies of other nations scream.
In 1975, Idaho Senator Frank Church's Committee revealed to the American population that what Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned us about in his final address to the nation as president in 1960 -- the rise of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) -- had achieved fruition and was now a fleur de mal in the rosy garden of liberty with pricks abounding. Specifically, his Committee revealed that an illicit confederation existed between the NSA, FBI, CIA, and the Mafia, especially in relation to the Kennedy Administration. Church revealed that the security state had attained such a reach that all human communication across the planet were subject to being intercepted and that we were approaching a bridge over an abyss which once crossed could seal the doom of democracy. That was 50 years ago that he worried -- before the Internet came and sealed the deal. MLK and Malcolm X were bound to create dissent and resistance to a system that already presaged an inevitable governance by oligarchic forces.
Today, when I think of MLK and his legacy, I think of his propositions that included not only non-violence and a redistribution of wealth (a bit) but of a world that still seemed salvageable for humans. He came out of a zeitgeist that still largely believed that Love was all you need ed to get by -- a slogan that was the golden rule at heart. Such sentiment lasted, more and less, even until Leonard Cohen sang of love as the only engine of survival in his song "The Future" (1992). MLK would be absorbed into The Blob today. Just another brand. He died with his influence and integrity intact. Today, the trick seems to be not so much to love others as to avoid being cancelled by them. That's a dystopian turn away from the communitarian approach MLK favored and a definitive indication that we have crossed the bridge over the abyss and have descended into the Land of Nod, the homestead of Cain and his devils.
Today, Inauguration Day, Jan 20 2024, is MLK Day, and that will be forgotten, and it feels like that lumps in the throat queasy you get at the end of the film, Omen III. It's not that DJ is the Antichrist himself, but that he is the boffo mask worn by the Deep State now in control and ready to bring us fire and rain. And I don't mean, James Taylor.
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