Monday, January 21, 2013

Happy Inauguration Day, Happy Martin Luther King Day

Writing today will be a little light; because I want to watch the festivities.

I'm so glad that the president has been re-elected, and I'm amused that he is being sworn into office so many times.  That was not intentional, with the do-over of the oath of office to solidify the first time minor errors.  Both the president and the Supreme Court Chief Justice were new to the experience, but they redid it just to be on the safe side.  That the required oath of office this time takes place on a Sunday fell into the tradition of postponing the larger celebration which includes a repetition of the taking of the oath of office.

But that leaves four repetitions of the oath of office for a President who has had his legitimacy challenged by far right wing nuts, which makes the inauguration a bit like an underlining of the fact that he is the real, actual president in fact.  It's hard to ignore one oath of office swearing; but two for each makes that imprimatur of the SCOTUS on his legitimacy underlined.

Not that we can expect any greater reasonable contact with reality from the far right; they are obsessed with their conspiracy theories, their delusional replacement of ideology for reality.  The far right has gone so far round the bend and off the reality cliff as to have fractured and broken off from the rest of the country, including the few remaining moderates struggling.  The 2012 election cycle was a clear rejection of the far right, the tea party extremists, and the 2010 election cycle; they didn't govern well. The right has record high disapproval ratings and record low approvals consistently in polling.

Congratulations Mr. President.

And for the celebration of Martin Luther King Day, there is a new treasure trove of interviews with Dr. King that have been discovered, which you can read about here and listen to as well.

Previously Unreleased Interviews with The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

On November 22, 1961 a radio reporter named Eleanor Fischer* interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta.  She was producing a documentary series on Dr. King and that southern city for the CBC called Project 62.  She spoke to him again in late 1966 and early 1967. Fischer's raw interviews were given to the New York Public Radio Archives by her estate after she died in 2008 at the age of 73.  As far as we know, these unedited interviews have never been presented in their entirety until now.
In this first interview tape above, Dr. King talks about growing up in Atlanta and the reasons for his decision (after considering medicine) to join the ministry.  He recounts his first awareness of racism at the age of five and his mother's efforts to explain why things were this way without conveying a sense of inferiority or loss of dignity. King describes how he arrived in Montgomery, Alabama. He had long been concerned about racial injustice and wanted to be part of solving this problem in the South. He details his church's efforts to combat the clergy's prevailing political apathy by setting up political action committees, encouraging membership in the NAACP and other civil rights organizations, and trying to increase awareness of the "social gospel."  The 32-year-old civil rights leader tells Fischer how he came to embrace non-violent resistance, first through Jesus and then by reading about Gandhi.  He explains that it was with the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott in December, 1955 that he felt he could put the theory of non-violent resistance into practice. Dr. King views Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 as a legal and psychological turning point for the civil rights movement, which he considers a part of a worldwide struggle.

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