J. Edgar Hoover And FBI Spied On Martin Luther King; Now Spies On You
Today is the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and, of course, it's a time to remember one of his most famous speeches of all time, the one in which "I have a dream" threads throughout.
It also reminds me, tangentially, of another time and place that, sadly, has returned to the American culture. Specifically, I refer to what we know since King's assassination about how the government, especially then FBI chief honchosexual J. Edgar ("Just spank me on my girdled butt and call me Mary 'cos I enjoy being a girl!") Hoover, monitored every movement, word and action of this man. King was targeted because he was a man of color, one who helped mobilize other persons of color to stand up for rights laid out not only by the Constitutional and Bill of Right but "obscure tomes like the Bible.
In April 1968, there were race riots going on in major cities, like Newark. Yet many whites sadly needed no excuse for their fears of anyone different from them; fear, after all, often walks hand-in-hand with ignorance. They wore fear and hatred on their sleeves (and foreheads, and wallets, and anywhere else they could scribble it) and often did not hesitate to insist King was responsible for the scary things going on in the U.S., just heinous events like blacks being admitted into some of the most prestigious and white colleges and universities as well as Ivy League prep schools, more and more African Americans becoming doctors and lawyers and professors and performers and top managers, men and women sometimes looking beyond the color of their skin to fall in love and create families.
The media then often helped foster such hatred and lack of of reason by "scaring" whites with tales of how some black women had 18 kids or more - and the pundits always insisted such women were on Welfare - with the supposed "express" purpose of creating enough people of color that Anglo-Saxon whites would soon become the minority. [Ed. note: apparently those commentators got it wrong since we are fast approaching a time when the Dick Cheneys, the George Bushes, and yes, the Katharine Chases will have minority status as Hispanics often have larger families than Caucasians. Elsewhere, the tide is turning toward Muslims, who may soon comprise nearly 20% of the world's population.] [Note to Mr. Bush: That's a heluva lot of people to have pissed off at the U.S. because of your disastrous polices!]
But let's get back to the point I'm trying to make: how King was monitored almost every moment of every day because the "powers that be" so desperately wanted to place him under their thumb. Such people were sure the way to do it was to have embarrassing information about him they could use to blackmail him. Even today, you hear some of the fat white massahs still chuckling derisively about King's supposed infidelities and how he was "corrupt" based on illegally obtained recordings of his phone calls and from bugs in his hotel rooms, although I'm not sure they have any proof whatsoever to back up such claims.
Today, the Bushies aren't content to watch just a Rev. King or a Barack Obama or a Malcolm X. No, they must monitor us all at the same ironic time they insist their own privacy is sacred and, even where law requires them to disclose information as part of the American system of checks and balances and oversight, they won't tell us anything. See some of my previous posts overnight (such as here and here) about disclosures about domestic surveillance conducted by the military and other organizations made in The New York Times over the weekend and hardly denied by Darth Machiavelli himself, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Just as it was wrong for LBJ and Hoover, et al, to spy on King, it is wrong for them to be able to spy upon us without a molecule of justifiable cause. Don't fall for the Bushian-Far Right line that if you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about from such surveillance.
Remember the case of the Oregon attorney and Muslim convert whom the Bushies decided to monitor and then, when the time was right, literally manufacture a case for his complicity in the Madrid train bombing out of whole cloth. That lawyer was doing nothing wrong either even though the Bushies decided he was a threat merely because of his choice of religion. And just as they did with him, the government can use this non-stop surveillance on your life and livelihood and family to concoct evidence.
On this MLK day, don't merely celebrate a "freebie" holiday off from work. Instead, consider what they tried to do to King, what they almost did to the American Muslim lawyer, and what they now demand they had every right to do to you regardless of the laws that preclude them from doing so.
I have a dream, too: a dream that I can live in a true democracy, where a corrupt administration can't do whatever it feels like doing to me on a whim and "selling" that right by making you and your loved ones and your bosses and your community leaders afraid every moment of every day and night.
If we give this half the attention some give to American Idol or Desperate Housewives, who knows? One day we may be able to say again, as King once did, yet for slightly rearranged reasons:
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