Reading Through the Censorship:

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Excellent op ed by King biographer talyor Branch today

NOTE THIS ABOUT ST LOUIS GLOBE DEMOCRAT. BUT ALSO NOTE THE COMMENT BY EARL CALDWELL THAT HIS OWN EDITOR AT NYT IN 68 TOLD HIM TO GO DOWN AND GIT KING!

NOTE HOW THIS PRESERVES THE MYTH OF THE "liberal" media" by confining the comment to Pat Buchanan's old paper here in St. Louis rather than mentioning the Grey Lady herself. Wonder if the Branch may have been pruned a bit?!

(Here is the show recorded from 4-4-08

It starts a couple of minutes after the jabbering and the music.

http://archive.wbai.org/files/mp3/08...1caldwellc.MP3)

FROM BRANCH ARTICLE:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/opinion/06branch.html

When he showed up in Washington that Sunday morning, he was scarcely the toast of the United States. Headlines in Memphis called him, “Chicken à la King,” with accusations that he had run from his own fight. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat called Dr. King “one of the most menacing men in America today,” and published a wild-eyed minstrel cartoon of him aiming a huge pistol from a cloud of gun smoke, with the caption, “I’m Not Firing It — I’m Only Pulling the Trigger.”

ALSO PLEASE NOTE THESE TWO STUNNINGLY TRUE PARAGRAPHS

We have painted Dr. King’s era as a time of aimless, unbridled license, with hippies running amok.

The watchword of political discourse has degenerated from “movement” to “spin.” In Dr. King’s era, the word “movement” grew from a personal inspiration into leaps of faith, then from shared discovery and sacrifice into upward struggle, spawning kindred movements until great hosts from Selma to the Berlin Wall literally could feel the movement of history.

Now we have “spin” instead, suggesting that there is no real direction at stake from political debate, nor any consequence except for the players in a game. Such language embraces cynicism by reducing politics to entertainment.

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Edited April 6, 2008 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer