Friday, December 15
The real purpose behind the Flying Imam publicity blitz
"...is to help push through legislation to outlaw religious profiling in airports, so that no matter how suspiciously a Muslim is behaving, officials will be able to do nothing. Now Katherine Kersten, who is doing marvelous work on this case for the Star-Tribune, has more on this as the goal of the whole incident. None other than the slick Mahdi Bray tells the Iranian Qur'an News Agency that Muslims want 'new, broad-sweeping legislation that will extract even larger financial and civil penalties for any airline that participates in racial and religious profiling.'"
***
Now maybe some of you understand why some conservatives were worried about the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960s.
Yes, it is very brave and noble to refuse to give up your seat on the bus (an incident that was planned in advance, just like this one) or at the lunchcounter. Those people had real guts. I sympathize with their feelings and can't begin to imagine how humiliating and frustrating their lives must have been at the time.
But does anyone really have a Constitutional right to eat a cheese sandwich at Woolworth's, or even to this or that seat on a bus owned by a private company? We're not talking about public school desegregation or voting. Although someone clever-er than I could (and probably did) argue that the Montgomery bus company was the moral equivalent of a public utility, like electricity or water.
The trouble with all those Civil Rights publicity stunts -- and make no mistake, that's what they were; those black college students didn't suddenly need a Woolworth's milkshake, and the camera that recorded the action didn't just magically materialize; the first "Rosa Parks" got pregnant out of wedlock and the more respectable one we remember took her place -- is that they worked.
I don't mean that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake, although there is a conservative case for that, as I said above, regarding states' rights and private property rights and serious concerns about the proliferation of new, possibly unConstitutional "rights" that seemed oddly untethered to "responsibilities". In the wake of JFK's assassination, people just wanted a happy ending, so most politicians (with the exception of lifelong non-bigot Barry Goldwater) kept their philosophical concerns to themselves.
I mean it inevitably led to the degradation of non-violent protest until it became a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. What "Jazzercize" is to "jazz".
And the romanticization (and careful sanitization) of the Civil Rights Movement in popular culture led countless imitators to try and replicate its success. Mostly, they got even the most basic details wrong then wondered why they weren't one-tenth as successful: as I eventually tired of explaining to my 1980s peace movement colleagues, what impressed Mr. and Mrs. White America most about Civil Rights kids was how well dressed, calm and polite they all seemed -- these were the kids they imagined Sidney Poitier having; MLK insisted that action participants dress like they would to go to church on Sundays. (A black Pentacostal church in Montgomery in 1964, not that honky Church of Do What You Want you might shuffle into, late, today). You can imagine how that went over with my athiest comrades, whose wardrobes consisted mostly of black t-shirts with stylized yellow fists on the front.
Anyway: nobody wants to be on the wrong side of history. We have been brainwashed into thinking that any old gaggle of brownskinned people making a scene in a public place might just be the next Cheney-Goodman-Schwerner, and we don't want Rod Steiger playing us in the movie one day. (Look, you know what I mean: it's 6:00 in the morning.)
Right now I want to use the word "pyramid scheme" in a sentence but can't quite make it come out right and have to go to work anyway.
***
Now maybe some of you understand why some conservatives were worried about the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960s.
Yes, it is very brave and noble to refuse to give up your seat on the bus (an incident that was planned in advance, just like this one) or at the lunchcounter. Those people had real guts. I sympathize with their feelings and can't begin to imagine how humiliating and frustrating their lives must have been at the time.
But does anyone really have a Constitutional right to eat a cheese sandwich at Woolworth's, or even to this or that seat on a bus owned by a private company? We're not talking about public school desegregation or voting. Although someone clever-er than I could (and probably did) argue that the Montgomery bus company was the moral equivalent of a public utility, like electricity or water.
The trouble with all those Civil Rights publicity stunts -- and make no mistake, that's what they were; those black college students didn't suddenly need a Woolworth's milkshake, and the camera that recorded the action didn't just magically materialize; the first "Rosa Parks" got pregnant out of wedlock and the more respectable one we remember took her place -- is that they worked.
I don't mean that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake, although there is a conservative case for that, as I said above, regarding states' rights and private property rights and serious concerns about the proliferation of new, possibly unConstitutional "rights" that seemed oddly untethered to "responsibilities". In the wake of JFK's assassination, people just wanted a happy ending, so most politicians (with the exception of lifelong non-bigot Barry Goldwater) kept their philosophical concerns to themselves.
I mean it inevitably led to the degradation of non-violent protest until it became a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. What "Jazzercize" is to "jazz".
And the romanticization (and careful sanitization) of the Civil Rights Movement in popular culture led countless imitators to try and replicate its success. Mostly, they got even the most basic details wrong then wondered why they weren't one-tenth as successful: as I eventually tired of explaining to my 1980s peace movement colleagues, what impressed Mr. and Mrs. White America most about Civil Rights kids was how well dressed, calm and polite they all seemed -- these were the kids they imagined Sidney Poitier having; MLK insisted that action participants dress like they would to go to church on Sundays. (A black Pentacostal church in Montgomery in 1964, not that honky Church of Do What You Want you might shuffle into, late, today). You can imagine how that went over with my athiest comrades, whose wardrobes consisted mostly of black t-shirts with stylized yellow fists on the front.
Anyway: nobody wants to be on the wrong side of history. We have been brainwashed into thinking that any old gaggle of brownskinned people making a scene in a public place might just be the next Cheney-Goodman-Schwerner, and we don't want Rod Steiger playing us in the movie one day. (Look, you know what I mean: it's 6:00 in the morning.)
Right now I want to use the word "pyramid scheme" in a sentence but can't quite make it come out right and have to go to work anyway.
