The Obligatory Glenn Beck 8/28 Rally Post

So, that just happened, and I guess there should be a post about it. And this post seems a fitting choice, given the title I already wrote out. So, what the hey.

On Saturday, a bunch of white people and a smattering of not-white people — 87,000 by conservative accounts, a million billion by teabagging accounts — converged on the Lincoln Memorial to honor a fictional version of Martin Luther King that Glenn Beck and the other speakers of the 8/28 Rally invented specifically for the occasion. This Martin Luther King, for example, was a total war hawk who preached against the evils of social justice, urged the institutional disenfranchisement of some minorities and beseeched Americans to be satisfied with what they've got. (Bizarro Martin Luther King is presumably chillin' with Bizarro Thomas Paine up in Tea Bag Heaven right now.)

Beck seems to think that this moment will live forever in the American psyche, and maybe he's right, but I've seen no evidence of that. To me, it just looked like a bunch of angry old people spewing a lot of unprovable platitudes about God and Country, trying to sound calm and reasonable but seething with anger and intolerance just below the surface, and growing increasingly agitated that people are listening to their rants. This'll probably get wiped over in the American psyche the next time the country is forced to go to another family BBQ. At least there'll probably be some good pie at that thing.

And that, more than anything that happened at this event, is something I'd imagine Martin Luther King could have gotten behind.

(Photo via Little Green Footballs)

Tags: 8/28 Rally, Civil Rights, Glenn Beck, Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Sarah Palin, Thomas Paine, Washington DC