I Have a Nightmare

Fox pundit Glenn Beck has said that President Obama is a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred of white people or the white culture.” He characterized health care reform as “reparations.”

Tomorrow, on the 47th anniversary of the delivery of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech”—King’s dream having certainly found at least partial fulfillment in the election of a black American President—Fox pundit Glenn Beck will be gathering his people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the “Restoring Honor” rally. Beck characterizes the event as a “non-political” tribute to American soldiers, this in spite of the fact that the majority of attendees are likely to be outspoken members of the Tea Party, and politically charged figures such as Sarah Palin and Beck himself will be speaking about matters of national import.

It is possible that Palin and Beck will refrain from employing the divisive rhetoric that is otherwise their stock in trade. It is possible that the Tea Partiers will observe the solemnity of the occasion by refraining from holding up signs with insulting and abusive epithets on them or booing any mention of President Obama, which is otherwise their stock in trade. It is possible that the event will, indeed, be as “non-political” as any gathering of otherwise highly political people meeting at a highly political location can be.

It is also possible that monkeys will fly out of my dick. Rather profoundly unlikely, but possible.

Fox pundit Glenn Beck has said that he did not originally intend to meet at the selfsame place on the selfsame day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his speech. He has called the coincidence “divine providence.” Out of deference to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beck will be standing “two flights lower” on the steps of the memorial than where King himself stood. Beck has said “I am not Dr. King.”

And yet, inspired by this “providence,” Beck has gone on to say that “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the Civil Rights movement…We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, dammit, we will reclaim the Civil Rights moment. We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.”

We were the people that did it in the first place? We meaning the affluent white people who comprise the lion’s share of the Tea Party? Affluent white people were the people who did the Civil Rights movement?

Wow.

I hope that the notion of the kind of affluent, conservative, Caucasian Tea partisans “reclaiming the Civil Rights Movement” turns your stomach as much as it does mine, gentle reader. I have a very hard time seeing Beck and his people as being in the same situation as American Negroes in the 1960s. To the best of my knowledge, nobody is opening up on Tea Parties with firehoses. Nobody is unleashing attack dogs on Tea Partiers. While Tea Partiers might live in fear of a fantastical socialist takeover of America, they don’t live in actual fear of being lynched by their detractors. Nobody is liable to threaten a Tea Partier with beating or death because that Tea Partier might opt to date outside of the Tea Party, and I believe most states will recognize a marriage between a Tea Partier and a non-Tea Partier. Tea Partiers are not compelled to use inferior facilities or required by law to stay among their own kind or categorically excluded from places of business. Tea Partiers are not, to the best of my knowledge, systematically excluded from institutions of education, denied the right to vote, or the recipients of endemic generational economic discrimination. Glenn Beck ‘s expressions of disobedience are vetted and vouchsafed by the government, and have never landed him in jail.

Tea Partiers are, apparently, compelled to pay more taxes than they would like to pay in exchange for government services that they do not want.

Government services like assistance for the poor, which is a thing that Dr. King expressly did want. I’m willing to bet he would’ve wanted universal health care, too.

In my estimation, Tea Partiers have it pretty fucking good compared to African Americans in the middle part of the 20th Century. Pretty fucking good, indeed. Which doesn’t stop the Tea Partiers from portraying themselves as an oppressed minority victimized by a brutal and unjust state.

I extrapolate out and imagine the Tea Partiers “reclaiming” the Civil Rights movement which they “started” as merely the beginning of a trend. Soon, all oppressive groups will “reclaim” the victimization of their victims, and so gain self-pity and self-righteousness on top of privilege that comes at the expense of others. Meat-eaters will reclaim animal rights from PeTA: “Animals have the right to be carnivores!” Child molestors will reclaim molestation from children: “That six-year-old forced herself upon me with her sex-crazed ways!” Neo-Nazis will reclaim the Shoah from the Jews—“Our ancestors were oppressed because they had to shove your ancestors into the ovens. Do you realize how heavy a body, even a body starved down to bones, can be?”

And, in the coup de grace of inappropriate appropriation, Glenn Beck will reclaim the Civil Rights movement from black people. Because God knows we can’t leave something so important as the struggle against oppression in the hands of actual oppressed people.