Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King died last month and virtually every famous African American and many dignitaries from around the world are attending the enormous funeral today, with four living presidents it will be far larger than MLK Jr.'s own funeral in 1968. It's hard to tell whether they're deeply moved or just hounds for the spotlight. In any case as the Russians say, it is easy to love the deceased.

It's hard to think of Mrs. King as a proper celebrity, as her only accomplishment was to keep her husband's flame alive for these last forty years. But her passing marks the end of that chapter of the civil rights movement as MLK's stature has grown over time and nobody has stepped into his shoes.

Oprah Winfrey is now the voice of mainstream Black America, and although she is a good and honest broker she's generally apolitical and is mostly dedicated to her light-entertainment empire, thinking mostly in terms of personal improvement and empowerment.

It's amusing to see Bush speaking at this occasion, as MLK would have properly designated him as the adversary to be demonstrated against. But Bush as president is the center of every event he attends and he is completely shameless. Everyone has to be polite and defferential despite disagreements that go down to every fiber of their being. That's what living in an organized society requires.

Of course Bush would claim King's friendship and call them fellow-travellers, but his version of Freedom is 100% Freedom-of-Association, which translates roughly to Freedom from being pestered by people like MLK, the freedom to exclude and ignore.

So a few of the other speakers gave Bush a very harsh reception, sermonizing against him for many hours as he sat in the audience right behind the podium, unable to escape. The right wing blogosphere was irate that their golden boy had been trapped outside of his usual protective bubble of psycophants and that everyone was so impolite, but they should have known better.

It was a political decision for Bush to attend. He was playing statesman and working in a subtle way to claim the MLK legacy for the GOP, and MLK's family and friends were duly able to set the tone for this event and were not going to let their loved one's memory and life's work be coopted and diffused by people who they knew to their enemies in every occasion except for the most shallow level of smalltalk and polite genialities.

The premise that a funeral is not a political event is a sham in any case. Bush played up Reagan's funeral in 2004 to the hilt for electoral advantage (and to my annoyance, as even as I disagreed with Reagan he was vastly better than Bush has turned out to be, and W's attempt to jump on his large old coat-tails was kind of tacky.) If one's life's work and deeply held beliefs cannot be celebrated and spelled out clearly at the funeral, when can it be? MLK's legacy was as a proud Left-Wing agitator on many issues. Bush wasn't welcome. He should have sent his wife and stayed at the Whitehouse.

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In other news, huge riots have been going on for days in Lebanon and Tehran and other countries as the radical nutcases are furious over some recent political cartoons which represent Muhammad, a religious verboten. Poor Denmark.. Several embassies have been torched, which is incredible as these cartoons appear pretty innocuous and tepid.

But this was an intentional provocation done in very poor taste. Denmark has a far-right regime in power. They're a lilly-white country with a 3% Muslim minority which feels isolated and under seige. There are always the permenantly furious factions, waiting and hoping for a spark in the powderroom, such that this falls into the gray area where the Danish government should have gently asked the newspaper to excersize restraint.

But Denmark refused to even meet with the Muslim nations united group of 12 ambassadors.. Such arrogance reaps the whirlwind. They had it coming. Anyway, it has escaped no one that brutish violence is their answer to being depicted as brutally violent. A catch-22 if ever there was one.

Since then they've played a sharp and risky game by refusing to talk to certain Danish Imams who incited this madness and have played both sides of the game by supporting a Danish embargo to the Arab foreign press and then telling a different story back at home. The Danes are basically saying that these people are the problem. Which is true.. but they might need these clerical nutcases to talk to their nutcase-followers. Time will tell.

It's now come out that the three worst cartoons of the group were never even published by the Danish paper. They were included later by the Imams during their middle-East tour to provoke uproar. This shows the true nature of this group of leaders - they're a bunch of race-bating jerks. People died in those riots.. They're following the Cheney model of leadership - if you put forward a strong lie, your adversary starts from a defensive position. That's the world we live in. 1984 isn't that far away.

Update:
Two new cartoon contests have sprung up in responst to this kerfuffle.
1) The Iranian newspaper is having a make-fun-of-the-holocaust cartoon contest.
These guys really know how to take the high road.

2) In response to the Iranians, Dimona Comix, an Isreali publishing company, has started it's own anti-Semitic cartoon contest.. showing exactly how these things should be viewed - i.e. with a thick skin and a sense of the ridiculous. A curious development.. But one man's humor is another's overt racism. Only an African American can call himself a nigger (with apologies.)