Martin Luther King

So, I'm not sure what started it all, but I recall seeing something like "amusement park owner" as a game. While I always liked the old simcity (despite the not-so-subtle reagonomics promoted), these new "own something so you can design it" games never really impressed me. Then there was lemonade stand owner, mall owner, and it got further and further from anything I could sympathize with people wanting to play. Well, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. day, I want to point out that I just read the following sentence: "Private prisons have become the new growth industry." No, Critical Resistance doesn't have a new report up. No, there is a new game that promises "From Chaos Comes Order" and the front of the package is a guard in the watchtower with a pumpaction shotgun overlooking a yard full of prisoners. Yes, there is a game called Prisoner Tycoon and it promises to turn my stomach each time I think of it: "You will construct and run an efficient rehabilitation facility with nothing but money on your mind."

In other news, the repackaging of King continues unabated for another year. King's political analysis, especially towards the end, never gets proper credit. Even a lot of "radical" activists have bought into the lopping of one of King's central tenets. As Bruce Hare pointed out years ago, the mainstream press refers to King's nonviolence and loses the rest of the phrase: "Nonviolent direct action." (As if nonvilence can truly be a philosophy in and of itself. Was King nonviolently cooking? Did he nonviolently check his mail? No, he nonviolently challenged the white supremecist state and extralegal terror apparatus). Any good school library should carry a copy of King's collected papers. Go spend a day looking at the last volume or two. It would be mindboggling to comprehend Reagan, a scumbag's scumbag, signing King's birthday into a holiday if we hadn't been present for the steady repackaging.
This year, in San Antonio, there will be a military flyover during the King parade. The chairman of the MLK commission's response to the furor this has sparked is ""It all depends on how you look at it. They say the planes represent war and bombs and death, but at the same time those planes can also represent our freedom and peace."
This next quote hammers it home:

City Councilwoman Sheila McNeil, whose district includes the march route, contented the flyover is exactly what King would have wanted.
"I think that the military plays too significant of a role in our community for us to ignore them and not include them in this march," she said. "They are the reason why we have peace, and this is MLK's peace march."

It is important to note that activists condemning the flyover responded that soldiers are welcome, but that military jets are arms. Now I'm less sympathetic to the argument that King's primary issue would be weapons being at the parade. I think King would have thrown in something about them being weapons of imperialism, though, articulate at he was, he would probably have said it a little better.
Either way, King's memory shouldn't be left to the elites to refine and recast. He is a hero, he should be celebrated, and he should be recognized for who he was: a regular man trying to do right. I'll end this post with two quotes by this man:

You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.

Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life's final common denominator - that something we call death. We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my own death, and I think about my own funeral. And I don't think of it in a morbid sense. Every now and then I ask myself, "What is it that I would want said?" And I leave the word to you this morning.
If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don't want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize, that isn't important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards, that's not important. Tell him not to mention where I went to school.
I'd like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day, that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day, that I did try, in my life, to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say, on that day, that I did try, in my life, to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness.