AMERICA:Tea Party idols such as Sarah Palin will portray themselves as heirs to Martin Luther King's legacy at a rally today, writes LARA MARLOWE
FORTY-SEVEN years ago today, Dr Martin Luther King jnr delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It had been a terrible summer, marked by race riots. President John F Kennedy ordered federal marshals to accompany black students at the Universities of Alabama and Mississippi. “Bull” Connor, the head of the Birmingham police, used fire hoses and dogs against demonstrators. A black civil rights worker was assassinated on his front porch in Mississippi.
The 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” was held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. “One hundred years later, the Negro is still not free,” Dr King intoned in his stentorian voice. “One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”
Dr King’s speech was “monumental . . . a watershed”, says Peniel Joseph, professor of history at Tufts University. “A quarter of a million people came to the Lincoln Memorial to hear it. It was the first complete speech that JFK heard Dr King deliver. There was no violence at the march. Afterwards, the civil rights leaders, including King, met with Kennedy at the White House.”
Today, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the idols of the grass-roots, right-wing, year-and-a-half-old Tea Party, say they will “reclaim” the civil rights movement at a mass rally in the very place where Dr King uttered his immortal words. “Whites don’t own Abraham Lincoln,” Beck said in a recent interview broadcast on Fox News. “Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King.”
The black community are upset by what they see as the Tea Party’s attempt to hijack their heritage. “They [the Tea Party] have tried to obliterate the very meaning of civil rights,” Dr Joseph explains. “It’s colour-blind racism, this notion that we’re all equal by proclamation, when statistics and social economic indicators don’t bear that out. For 30 years, the right has led assaults on the economic justice project that King was the chief spokesman for.”
Last winter, Beck, a reformed alcoholic who recently converted to Mormonism, outraged Christian leaders by urging parishioners to leave their churches if they heard preaching about social or economic justice, which he said were code words for communism and Nazism. “I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church website,” Beck said on March 2nd. “If you find it, run as fast as you can . . . Am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”
Beck and Palin both oppose the plan to build an Islamic community centre two blocks from the site of the September 11th, 2001, atrocities. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which employs them both, has led the crusade against the so-called “ground zero mosque”. But as pointed out by Frank Rich of the New York Times, News Corp’s second-largest shareholder after Murdoch is a member of the Saudi royal family.
Beck earns more than $20 million a year from his broadcasts and best-selling books with titles such as Glenn Beck’s Common Sense and Arguing with Idiots. He famously accused President Barack Obama of harbouring “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture”. When asked by Katie Couric of CBS what he meant by “white culture”, Beck replied: “I’m not going to get into your sound-bite gotcha game.”
Beck pushes the fear-mongering and provocation a step further than Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, other right-wing media stars.
Like Palin, he claimed the healthcare reform Bill would create government-run “death panels”. He’s told his gullible, three million-strong audience that the disaster relief agency FEMA runs “concentration camps”; that Obama intended to establish a “civilian national security force” comparable to Hitler’s SS or Saddam’s Republican Guard; of alleged government proposals for forced abortions and sterilization through drinking water.
Marxist, communist and socialist are Beck’s favourite invectives. A Gallup poll last winter found him to be more popular than the pope, Billy Graham, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton or George HW Bush.
Washington Post columnists have denounced him as “the first true demagogue of the information age” and an “egomaniacal talk-show host who profits handsomely from stoking fear, resentment and anger”.
Beck will probably be on best behaviour as he fraudulently attempts to don Dr King’s mantle today. He and Palin have asked supporters not to carry placards. (At their first Washington rally in September 2009, the Tea Party received negative coverage for slogans which, for example, denounced “Obama’s Nazi Youth Militia”.)
Today’s rally has been titled “Restoring Honour” and is allegedly apolitical. It will pay tribute to US servicemen. But above all, it will be a show of force by the American far right, in a week when Palin and the Tea Party appear to have toppled Lisa Murkowski, the powerful Republican senator from Alaska.
The final count’s not in yet. And we won’t know until November whether the rapid rise of the Tea Party will strengthen the right or fragment it.