It's odd how every story I've read about the Millions More March this weekend missed all kinds of neat stuff any ordinary American citizen could have spied from his own little hegemonate (if it receives
C-Span).
The speakers, of course, were uniformly the kind of mealy mouthed revolutionaries, self-aggrandizing separatists, crypto-marxist
power-fisters and stuttering seditionists who went so
strangely unobserved by the media at the D.C. anti-war protest last month.
And they missed them again. The
Washington Post's account, after mentioning that Louis Farrakhan had charged the federal government with "criminal neglect," focused on the crowd and said nothing about what speakers like Erykah Badu, who is absolutely
clueless, the racist
Malik Shabazz (there were any number of out-and-out racists who spoke, but no news outlet mentioned that, either), and of course Louis Farrakhan actually said in their speeches.
Newsday also focused on the crowd, emphasizing how many there were nostalgic for the Million Man March in 1995.
The AP--whose story
CNN,
Newsday, and
CBS ran, also mentioned the "criminal neglect" charge against the Bush administration for its response to Hurricane Katrina, but quoted only one other speaker, Jesse Jackson.
The
New York Times did a little better, mentioning Farrakhan's demand that America "acknowledge her wickedness to the indigenous people of this hemisphere; acknowledge the wickedness of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade; acknowledge what you did in robbing our fathers of their names, their language, their culture, their religion."
Fine, fine. And the
Times actually disclosed what Farrakhan thinks blacks should do to change things: "'We need to think about a new political party,' Mr. Farrakhan said. 'The Democrats have used us and abused us. They look at the black and the brown and the poor like this is a plantation, and our Democratic leaders are like the house Negro on the plantation of Democratic politics.'"
Gotta agree with Louie there. The
Times continued,
With scant hope of help from white America, Mr. Farrakhan said, blacks must help themselves by establishing their own ministries of health and human services, agriculture, education, defense, justice, art and culture, trade and commerce, information and science and technology.
That's what he said all right. But of course the Times, like everyone else, left out the possibly salient fact that Farrakhan also said that all these wonderful ministries would be run along strictly Stalinist lines. For the MSM this fact apparently wasn't relevant to the message the march was supposed to convey.
And it also wasn't relevant that when he got talking about his "ministry of art and culture" Farrakhan revealed who he really worships (it ain't Allah), telling of how
Mao Tse Tung . . . had a billion people whose lives he had to transform. Many of them were victims of opium, drugs, prostitution--like we are.
But what Mao Tse Tung did, what Mao Tse Tung did was, he went to the cultural community, and they [Farrakhan spreads his arms beneficently] accepted his idea.
And then through song, through dance, through poetry, through drama, through documentaries, through movies, through books that are written [as opposed to books that aren't written. Sorry.], the idea of Mao Tse Tung became the idea of a billion people, and China became a world power on the base of the culture and the arts community. If we had a ministry of art and culture in every city we'd create this movement [in the U.S.].
None of this is mentioned in any news account.
Oh, and one other thing that went unmentioned in all the post-march accounts (except this one): a prominent black gay activist was prevented from speaking, days after Farrakhan had reluctantly okayed it. Ah, the ever-conflicting values of multiculturalism.
Update: Farrakhan's first mention of Mao comes at 3:25:19 of part two of C-Span's coverage. Listen to it. The way he says the mad tyrant's name is absolutely chilling.
Update II: Other stuff the MSM ignored: Farrakhan's approving mentions of Castro (who he said offered to send 1500 English-speaking doctors for Katrina relief efforts and to give 500 scholarships for American blacks to study medicine in Cuba); his claim, apropos of nothing, that 70,000 children were being held in "sex slavery" in the U.S.; and finally his strange-even-for-him claim that the "All-African People's Revolutionary Party" had told him Native Americans were willing to "lease" millions of acres of land for blacks to homestead. Yeah, right.
Update III, things that didn't fit: Couldn't stand to watch the whole rally, but in the considerable portion I did watch there was not a single joke or piece of self-deprecating humor uttered by anyone. This is both typical and significant. Finally, because I couldn't weasel it in anywhere else, here's a Drunkablog reprise of Roger Clinton's North Korean "song."
