Sharpton vs. Beck: Round 1

Credit: Kevin Wolf/AP (left); Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post (right)

So, should we reclaim the dream or restore honor?

As it turns out, it depends on who you talk to. Whichever ambiguous path you choose, it’s sure to curry favor with either the Rev. Al Sharpton, who led an event today to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic March on Washington in 1964, or Glenn Beck, and we all know his reputation. As it happens, Beck, the presiding FOX News lunatic who was holding his “Reclaim the Dream” rally in Washington on the same weekend, a gathering that he said was not, necessarily, planned, to coincide with King’s famous march and speech. Sure.

Here’s how The Washington Post has framed it:

On the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, steps away from where it was delivered, Sarah Palin and other speakers at Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally staked a claim to King’s legacy and to that of the Founding Fathers. They urged a crowd that stretched to the Washington Monument to concentrate on the nation’s accomplishments rather than on its psychological scars.

“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Beck said from the base of the Lincoln Memorial. “America today begins to turn back to God.”

The event was billed as “nonpolitical,” and Beck steered clear of the partisan commentary that has made him a hero to many conservatives and a nemesis to many on the left. But political overtones were unmistakable, and the rally drew a large crowd – including many who said they were new to activism – that was energized and motivated to act.

The effort by Beck and Palin to lay claim to the mantle of the civil rights movement drew protests from the Rev. Al Sharpton and others who marched in a separate and much smaller event, to the National Mall from Dunbar High School in Northwest Washington, to commemorate King’s speech 47 years ago.

“The ‘March on Washington’ changed America,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said at the Sharpton rally, referring to King’s speech. “Our country reached to overcome the low points of our racial history. Glenn Beck’s march will change nothing.” ((http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/28/AR2010082801106.html))

Not only will it not change anything, at least not for the good of the country, it will further splinter America. Beck, in all his civil rights fake-profundity, forgets that the tax cuts that he so trumpets nearly every day on his TV show will hurt many Americans who are the very people he claims to so embrace in the rally: low- to middle-income Americans.

Of course, there’s much over-excited banter from the other side as well. Here is Avis Jones DeWeever, executive director of the National Council of Negro Women:

Don’t let anyone tell you that they have the right to take their country back. It’s our country, too. We will reclaim the dream. It was ours from the beginning.

It is, indeed, black folks’ nation as well, but DeWeever, I think, misunderstands the point the Tea Party crowd, Beck, Palin and others have been attempting to make all along. They aren’t attempting to take the country back from black people or any race (That would be a perversion of the original intent), but from what they refer to as the liberal movement. Now, to me, the word “liberal” is a meaningless term. Even so, the point on Beck’s part is a political one, not a racial one.

And now, let me turn to numbers.

The Washington Post reported that thousands had descended on Washington for the Beck event, while Beck himself estimated that between 300,000-500,000 had attended the event. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), talking to a crowd after the Beck event had this to say:

We’re not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today – because we were witnesses.

I find her use of the words “We were witnesses,” interesting. The numbers at the conservative event balloon from 300,000 to 500,000 then to a million? And yes, because we were witnesses, a million turned out to Washington to rail against the government. And because “we” (the gospel writers) were witnesses to the event, Christ performed miracles, raised Lazarus from the dead, exorcised demons and appeared before the disciples after death, and hundreds or maybe thousands were “witnesses” to UFO sightings or abductions and others were “witnesses” to paranormal activity and myriad other happenings that transcend the laws of nature. To simply establish that a person was a witness to a certain event doesn’t make the said event true. It makes the claimant either trustworthy, misunderstood, deceitful or, most plainly, wrong.

As it happens, the actual March on Washington likely consisted of between 200,000-300,000 people without any gross, and in Bachmann’s case, terribly gross, number-fudging.

Here is King’s monumental speech on that monumental day: