Nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line

Uh-oh. Guess which black minister, recently in the news, has come out in opposition to the war? An excerpt:

"And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, 'You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name.'"

Heavy stuff. I'm sure any conservative reading the bit above would come away with only one thing - that the Reverend is threatening America with the very wrath of God. And who the fuck does he think he is?

And what does Obama have to say about all this?

To be honest, I don't think anyone's asked him.

They haven't asked for his opinion, because the above words are not those of his former minister, Reverend Wright. I took them from a speech by Martin Luther King called "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam."

Yeah, yeah, happy April Fool's Day and all that. But I must give all props to Tavis Smiley for this post, as it was his appearance on Real Time this week that reminded me that MLK was reviled for his position on Vietnam not only by southern bigots and his usual political opponents, but also by mainstream America. Referring to another of King's speeches on this same topic, the Washington Post said "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people," and Time called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." Even King's own parishioners told him that they felt he was abandoning their cause. King, however, saw the larger picture, and proposed that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

President Johnson, who formerly relied upon the personal counsel of MLK, and who signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 with King looking over his shoulder, now barred him from the White House, as he would not truck with opponents of the war. King differentiated Johnson's personality from that of his predecessor, saying that "President Kennedy was a man who was big enough to admit when he was wrong-as he did after the Bay of Pigs incident." But, according to King, Johnson did not stop bombing Vietnam, although he could've easily have found the popular support to do so, because his administration was devoid of statesmanship, and "when creative statesmanship wanes, irrational militarism increases."

Ah. True dat.

So my point is not that Reverend Wright is a King in wolf's clothing, no, far from it. My point is simply that we might take the occasion of the upcoming 40^th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to reflect on how people are often viewed by history quite differently than they were in their own times.

Or, in other words, and as we are often reminded every April 1st, things are not always what they seem.