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Ripped from the Headlines

A Farewell Salute ... From This Modern World, another pertinent cartoon by Tom Tomorrow:

Dreams and Things and Persons Too

There is a presumption among Americans that the wonderful juxtaposition of MLK Day and Barack Obama's ascension to the presidential throne will usher in a new era of racial understanding. No longer will the noose of slavery leave us hanging on the rafters of American optimism. No more will the battle for equality be fought between shirts and skins. At last we have reached a plateau that effectively balances our hatred for the other person with an indomitable love for ourselves as good, decent Americans.

We need to leave Dr. King alone. Or if we're going to continue to pull him from the grave and parade his cold dead body around in parade floats, propping his head up as the marching bands twirl and dance by, before the speeches and the hot air which will not bring him back to life, if we want to cart him around rudely, not unlike the dead Bernie Lomax, well, we can better honor him by ceasing to cast his entire memory in his "I Have a Dream" speech.

As a Christian, what he wanted in the end to racism was not merely equality for all Americans, but equality for all people of color. He saw in corporate exploitation the seeds of this inequality, which was not exclusive to the African-American. War, at least the form stamped Made in America, is the bastard child of the ugly nuptial union of the large corporation and government. King knew this, and it's what stands in the background of his 1967 speech "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam," especially in these words:

The real challenge for President Obama, after all the expensive ceremonies and the happy speeches and the over-the-top optimism and the warnings about the steep road before us, will be to get King's real dream realized—by dismantling our largest corporations, revoking their charters if necessary; by making them agents of the public good, instead of self-interested profit centers; by returning to our country a real political democracy through radical electoral reforms that limit corporations' access to government decision-making; by rethinking the wide, global reach of neoliberalism, thereby giving to the developing countries a wider voice in their economic futures. A person-oriented society will vanquish much more than things.