MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY: MONDAY
I’ve been focused on the upcoming (countdown 3 days) transfer of the USA from republic to oligarchy. What else will happen on Monday 20 Jan 2025 in the nation’s capital?
I was reminded by a news story that Monday is also Martin Luther King (MLK) Day. That is a remembrance of profound spiritual meaning, especially since the Rev. Dr. King was martyred on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
More info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
It has to be said that his political ally Robert F. Kennedy (RFK, the real one, not the creature allied with Trump) was assassinated in San Francisco almost exactly two months later on June 6, 1968. More info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy
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Three things actually stand out in my mind as I think about Washington, D.C. on Monday:
(1) The inauguration of (my opinion) the unelected, gerrymandered Resident Trump in a seizure of power by corporate oligarchs who have been maneuvering the country toward tyranny for generations, especially since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980;
(2) The nation is still officially mourning the passing of our exemplary President Jimmy Carter (a Southerner, one of many who have distinguished themselves as U.S. patriots). Flags are still supposed to fly at half staff; but this is taken as an affront by the sociopathic, malignantly narcissistic orange (deranged) Mullet, who demands that flags around his inauguration will fly at full staff (and his henchmen of course agree).
(3) And we will be observing Martin Luther King, Jr. Day at the same time. He remains a great U.S. icon of peaceful resistance, an admirer of India’s Mahatma Gandhi who also advocated peaceful protest amid violent, abhorrent racial and social oppression. MLK received a Nobel Prize in 1964, and has been canonized or otherwise venerated in several U.S. Protestant denominations. All of that must have really angered staunch racists and haters, not surprisingly therefore leading to assassinations like those of MLK and RFK. The 1960s were also a heyday of the Civil Rights movement across the USA, which was a strong influence in turning the South away from the Democratic Party (because they hated Abraham Lincoln so much); the oligarchs and their instrumentalities then had the ammunition to lead the South to become staunch, religiously zealous Republicans (party of Abraham Lincoln, right, maga-brains?) so that the oligarch tool Ronald Reagan won by a hefty margin over (Southerner) President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Mind you, Reagan had been governor of California, a state enshrined in Southern and maga-brain hatred for a long time (and still is today); which is why Donald Dump and his Dumpster regime have already been making smelly noises about denying Federal disaster aid to fire-ravaged Los Angeles--despite the fact that Californians pay more in taxes than the Federal benefits we receive, while many Southern states receive more benefits from the hated Federal gummint than those states pay in taxes…but who cares about facts when you have a strong opinion?
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I did some quick lookups to verify the news story about MLK Day on Monday, and came across the following not very surprising facts:
FACT A: can there be any coincidence between the fact that Dr. King was murdered within days of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson (a progressive, far-thinking Southern Democrat) on 11 April 1968? This law offered equal rights to minorities in the U.S., including African-Americans and Native Americans. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson
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FACT B: In at least two Southern states, the resistance to the establishment of MLK Day has been such that Alabama and Mississippi refused to honor MLK’s birthday as such. Instead, while required by law to observe the national holiday, they paired MLK Day with a commemoration of Confederate military leader Robert E. Lee’s birthday at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee_Day
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FACT C: I did a quick calculation and determined that the horrific lynching of 14 year old Emmet Till occurred just thirteen years before MLK’s murder, in an era filled with rancor and violence in the USA. The Civil Rights movement had many bloody and scary moments including political and racial murders. I’ll just mention the Emmet Till case here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till
In the 1960s, we have the continuing resonance of the Joseph McCarthy paranoia of the 1950s (McCarthy being a primary model for young Donald Trump, along with the utterly corrupt and dishonest lawyer Roy Cohen. See my Substack article of 28 November 2024:
https://johntcullen.substack.com/p/maximum-corruption-trump-wheres-my
The title is MAXIMUM CORRUPTION TRUMP: “WHERE’S MY COHN?” subtitled “Roy Cohn, a Mafia-connected lawyer in high echelons of crime and government from the 1950s, associated with Sen. Joe McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Rupert Murdoch, Fred Trump…and Donald Trump.”
We had race riots across the country in the 1960s, counter-pointed by the counter-culture (to which I felt drawn as a college student), and the deepening horror of our involvement in the Vietnam conflict (about which I’ll write an article some time soon).
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The United States is one of the world’s largest countries, with a turbulent and vibrant history now spanning officially (let’s call it) 249 years since our Declaration of Independence from mad King George III in 1776. That’s almost exactly a quarter millennium, and I have to ask if there is a sort of organic lifespan for democracies and republics when they reach a certain point where they are so detached from their roots and origins that they break free and float away into a dark cosmos of oblivion like a ship losing its anchor on a stormy and night floating out to see, where it disappears amid howling winds and crashing seething white foamy waves? We’ll see on Monday, and the days to follow…
Until then, adieu my friends, best wishes, and hope you find something happy to read.
John T. Cullen JTC Sheep Heil!
johntcullen.substack.com
https://www.johntcullen.com
https://www.galleycity.com
MARA Make America Real Again
MUSARAL Make USA Real At Last