We begin today, the 94th birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with Hajar Yazdiha writing for The Conversation about conservative revisionism of Dr. King’s words and life work.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a sanitized version of King was part of a conservative political strategy for swaying white moderates to support President Ronald Reagan’s reelection by making King’s birthday a national holiday.
Even after Reagan finally signed the King holiday into law in 1983, he would write letters of assurance to angry political allies that only a selective version of King would be commemorated.
That version was free of not only the racial politics that shaped the civil rights movement but also of the vision of systemic change that King envisioned. In addition, Reagan’s version left out the views that King held against the Vietnam War.
Instead, the GOP’s sanitized version only comprises King’s vision of a colorblind society – at the expense of the deep, systemic change that King believed was needed to achieve a society in which character was more important than race.
After reading those links embedded in the excerpt...fu*k Ronald Reagan.
Matthew Connelly writes for The New York Times that not only is the system for protecting national security secrets is obsolete but also that the classification system is used to conceal anything that the executive branch wants to hide from the public.
Secrecy has a power all its own. It enables executive branch officials to classify and thereby conceal not just dangerous information that could threaten national security but also many things they simply prefer to hide from the public — that could include elite cynicism, managerial incompetence or military insubordination. This national secrecy complex would best be described as a dark state — much of it hidden from us, even decades after the fact, and used to cover up too many shameful things in our history, including illegal surveillance, radioactive experimentation on children and the elderly, and a whole series of undeclared wars.
Even Richard Nixon agreed on the need to “lift the veil of secrecy which now enshrouds altogether too many papers written by employees of the federal establishment.” But the executive order he issued was really intended to consolidate control of this apparatus within the White House, by reducing the number of people allowed to create new secrets, limiting the number classified at the highest levels and “automatically” declassifying the secrets produced by previous administrations. But Mr. Nixon all but gave up on trying to control runaway inflation in official secrecy and struggled to come up with some new term to distinguish the president’s own secrets. “Don’t use ‘top secret’ for me ever again,” he told John Ehrlichman. “I never want to see ‘top secret’ in this [expletive] office.”
Even the presidents credited with truly trying to reform the system — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — presided over tremendous growth in the number of new secrets created each year. Seeking a new way to categorize the most sensitive information, like Mr. Nixon before him, Mr. Carter tried a new designation: “royal.”
Mark Kreidler writes for Capitol & Main that a sizable number of Black Californians report of unfair medical treatment by their healthcare provider and some even avoid getting proper medical treatment altogether.
An ambitious survey by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) found that nearly one third of Black Californians say they’ve been treated unfairly by a health care provider because of their race or ethnicity. More than 25% of the respondents have avoided care due to concerns about how they’ll be treated.
For those who do use their health systems, two-thirds say they research their condition before speaking with their physician. More than a third report tailoring their speech or their behavior to make their care provider feel more at ease.
That is all done in an effort to avoid a negative experience with their health systems, says Katherine Haynes, a senior program officer on CHCF’s People Centered Care team. And it’s all backward.
“People are taking actions to minimize their race by changing their language, how they speak, how they dress,” Haynes told Capital & Main. “They may not ask questions, or they may ask fewer questions, so as not to be thought of as ‘difficult Black people’ – which is not their job, right?”
Helen Braswell of STATnews wonders if we always need information on the latest Omicron subvariant of COVID-19.
It’s like clockwork now. Every few months, we’re warned that the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spawned yet another subvariant, this one even more transmissible than the ones it is fast overtaking.
The new entity is given a name, an unwieldy string of letters and numbers separated by periods. There’s discussion — some of it breathless — on Twitter and in the media about the threat the new subvariant poses. People who are still following Covid-19 news worry. People who are determined to ignore Covid pay no attention.
Rinse and repeat.
The cycle has some experts wondering about how useful these discussions are. We aren’t, after all, obsessing about which strain of H3N2 flu has been causing most of the illness that has cycled through the United States in this abnormally early flu season. That’s because new strains of existing flu viruses may make us more vulnerable to infection, but they don’t render us defenseless against influenza. The same is true with SARS-2 subvariants — but that sometimes gets lost in the back and forth.
Venezuelan journalist Moisés Naím writes for POLITICO that the U.S. culture and political wars are providing a template that other countries can and will follow.
With its toll in human lives and the direct threat it represented to a key constitutional process, for the United States, Jan. 6 was nothing if not a tragedy. But Brazil’s Jan. 8 — taking place after the peaceful handover of power and taking aim at a Congress that was not in session and a presidential palace where the new president wasn’t there — was farce. A pure expression of a far right divorced from any kind of political calculus, it was little more than vandalism aimed at the striking modernist seat of the Brazilian state.
Still, the similarities were too big to miss. The hero-worship that Brazil’s outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, reserved for Donald Trump made the parallels glaring. If anything, the parallels between Brazil’s Jan. 8 and the United States’ Jan. 6 are too obvious — so obvious that the risk is that we’ll miss the deeper root causes at play, and the dark patterns they portend for the future. It’s the latest sign of a global contagion of populism, polarization and post-truth politics, much of it energized and copied by events in the United States. But it is also a mistake to simply assume that this global wave of street protests is just an imitation of what is happening in the United States. [...]
...in one area, the United States has kept its lead: as an exporter of cultural and political anxieties. The world seems eager to engage in the kind of societal conflicts that nowadays divide the United States. From the #MeToo movement and greater sensitivity about the rights of LGBTQ people, to far-right conspiracy theories and the political parties that give them a home, we have repeatedly seen how rifts born in the U.S. soon spill over its borders and become parts of the political debates in other societies.
It might seem obvious that Japan and the United States should be preparing to fight a war in the Indo-Pacific region. After all, the allies face mounting challenges from three nuclear-armed adversaries: China, Russia, and North Korea. Over the last decade, the United States and Japan have responded by slowly but deliberately reinforcing military capabilities to deter conflict. But President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and General Secretary Xi Jinping’s growing pressure on Taiwan have reminded leaders in Tokyo and Washington that even carefully crafted deterrence efforts can fail, and the consequences can be dire. A more robust set of responses in the face of new uncertainty has become necessary.
Japan is in a unique position to deter regional conflict. Tokyo commands the world’s third-largest economy, has been gradually increasing defense spending in recent years, and took major steps to modernize its alliance with the United States under Abe’s leadership. Japan is also home to more U.S. troops than any other country in the world. And Japanese leaders have been stepping up their contributions on a wide range of issues, from penalizing Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and providing aid to Kyiv to cooperating on semiconductor supply chains and supporting the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
Experts have rightly noted that this is not a revolutionary rejection of pacifism but rather a more modest set of evolutionary changes in Japanese security policy. Indeed, major elements of Abe’s transformational agenda remained unaccomplished at the time of his assassination last year. But many of the limits introduced by Japan’s pacifist constitution and history are now being relaxed or adjusted. Japan’s increased defense spending and adoption of counterstrike capabilities are just two examples of the shift that is occurring under Kishida’s leadership.
Finally today, Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times gives us a little bit of an exegesis of Dr King’s Christmas Eve 1967 sermon “A Christmas Sermon on Peace.”
Our problems are global problems: a rising tide of chauvinism and authoritarianism; corruption that touches and distorts representative institutions around the world; and, of course, climate change. King’s observation that for any of us to do anything we must rely on the work and labor of someone halfway around the world — “You go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American” — is truer now than it was then, and demands that we recognize the fact, not for self-flagellation but for solidarity.
To connect to laborers around the world, to see that their struggles relate to ours and ours relate to theirs, is to begin to forge the “network of mutuality” that we will need to tackle our global problems as well as to confront the obstacles to our collective liberation from domination and hierarchy.
Most Americans do not think of Martin Luther King Jr. as a democratic theorist, but he is exactly that. And here, in this sermon, he makes clear that what a peaceful and equal society demands — that is, what a truly democratic society demands — is our mutual recognition of each other, here and everywhere.
You can listen to Dr. King’s “A Christmas Sermon On Peace” here.
Powerful. The fact that you can hear the weariness in his voice make it even more powerful, IMO.
Have a good day, everyone!