VHS Review: 'Our Friend, Martin' (1998)

Revisiting one of the most ubiquitous Black History Month video cassette staples in the annals of American public education (and yes, it does indeed play fast and loose with the historical accuracy, in case you were wonderin'.)

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I don't know how you folks spent your Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but if you ask me, there's only one proper way to get our collective Kangs on - and that, of course, is with a screening of the 1998 straight-to-video cartoon Our Friend, Martin.

What, you've never heard of Our Friend, Martin before? Well, if you grew up in elementary school America between the years 1999 and 2005, odds are your local public escuela/indoctrination factory made you watch it at least once a year (if not to commemorate MLK Day, than certainly as filler come Black History Month.) Now, I was in middle school and on the verge of entering high school when the straight-to-video offering was initially released, so I just missed out on this particular early aughties phenomena. But judging from the way the Millennials talk about this 'un on Reddit and 4chan and YouTube, I'd feel pretty comfortable labeling Our Friend, Martin as their generation's The ButterCream Gang - that weird piece of ubiquitous pop cultural ephemera that not only is inextricably tied to one's public education experience, but seems to only exist within the vacuum of elementary school nostalgia.

Even now I'm not sure exactly who bank rolled this thing, or what they're agenda was, or if they even suspected the damn tape would become a VCR staple in every primary school in America for at least half a decade. Whoever it was, though, they had to have had quite a bit of loose change to throw around, considering the staggering number of A-and-B-list celebrities lending their vocal talents to the production. Ed Asner, Angela Bassett, Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, Ashley Judd, Susan Sarandon, Jon Travolta, OPRAH - hell, they even got Urkel to show up for a day or two in the recording studio to voice a teenaged MLK. It's undoubtedly a star-studded production, and the fact that this thing never made it to TV (or even basic cable, to the best of my knowledge) makes its existence all the more perplexing. I mean, you'd think PBS, if nobody else, would've tried to wrap their mitts around this one, but no - apparently, Our Friend, Martin went straight to video and - for all intents and purposes - just stayed there until YouTube and DailyMotion came along.

And if you've never seen it before, well - consider this in-depth review/analysis either a late MLK, Jr. Day gift or a really early Black History Month present.

The film begins with a title screen for DIC Entertainment, who is best known for producing half of every cartoon made in the 1980s (Nelvana, obviously, did the either half.) Some organization called I.P.M. gets secondary billing, but I have no idea who or what they are. And no, a quick Google search turns up nothing of use, even when you use "Our Friend Martin" as a Boolean assistant. We get this really, really cheesy R&B song as the opening credits rolls, and even better it's called "When We Were Kings" because fuck, sometimes the universe just makes things TOO easy for us.

No, this is the film at its absolute subtlest.

The movie begins proper with these two black kids standing in front of rubble that magically transforms into a fully built house. Oh, and one of them transforms into Martin Luther King, Jr. after entering the Stargate, so there's that.

And because this shit isn't late 1990s enough, we have ourselves a secondary title theme performed by Salt N Pepa, which sounds more like something to bump uglies to than something befitting of a children's animated program. From there, we are introduced to our antagonist, Miles, a precocious black kid who idolizes Hank Aaron, has a nasty ass bedroom and calls his mama "a slave" because she actually wants to work overtime at the office. (Oh, and as an aside, we never see Miles' father in the cartoon. Yeah, that revelation shocked the shit out of me, too.) Then she tells him if he doesn't get his grades up, he won't be able to play baseball and become rich like Barry Bonds and will probably end up slangin' crack down at the Waffle House down by the I-285 interchange. By the way, this kid's house is NICE - we're talking two stories, stairs, a basement, an attic, the fuckin' works. As a matter of fact, one might even call Miles - dare I say it - privileged?

In the next scene Miles is accosted by this fat blond white boy in a purple belly shirt. Eventually the bully, named Kyle, grabs hold of Miles at the bus stop but the old white bus driver almost runs him over and Miles is just barely able to escape. "See you, wouldn't want to be you," Miles says, which, for the record, was an antediluvian phrase even by 1998 standards. So Kyle's dad - voiced by John Travolta of all people - has to drive him to school. Which, fittingly enough, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. From there, we're introduced to the rest of the cast. There's this skateboarding kid with a country accent (voiced by the little kid from Sling Blade, if you can believe it) and this stuck up Hispanic bitch who considers herself "Madame Curie" and the rest of her cohorts "The Three Stooges." Miles' teacher (whose race is a complete mystery - she could be Dominican or she could be Irish) then tells him she's worried about his slipping grades and he blames it on baseball season. Then he says the only way for a black person to make money in this day and age is through sports or entertainment, and then the teacher says something about Colin Powell and tells Miles that if he doesn't do a good job on his book report about Martin Luther King, he's going to be held back a grade. 

So anyway, the kids go on a field trip to MLK's birth home, and Whoopi Goldberg is the tour guide and the country skateboarder kid LITERALLY asks her if MLK had magical powers. Then Miles sees a photo of MLK as a kid playing baseball and Miles says "why the fuck NOT steal a revered civil rights leader'  baseball glove?" But as soon as Miles puts it on, Wish Kid-style, he and that country motherfucker are magically transported back to the 1930s. Sure as sugar, they run into 12-year-old MLK, whom Miles describes as "major magic time," which I have to admit, does roll off the tongue rather smoothly. Oddly enough, even though it's Atlanta in the Great Depression, black kids and white kids are playing baseball together, which, I don't know, seems like a bit of a stretch to me. But then a white woman calls Miles "an uppity colored" and tells the white skateboarder kid that if he doesn't clean up his act he'll get fucking lynched.

Miles slips on the glove again and this time around the kids wind up on a train with a teenage Martin Luther King, Jr. King explains how he spent the summer humbly picking tobacco in Connecticut to pay for college, which - to put it mildly - isn't exactly a 100 percent truthful interpretation of what King's ACTUAL youth was like. Then MLK talks about how "whites and coloreds" couldn't associate with one another in the South, while ominous music plays over stock footage of segregated water fountain signs. Then the kids eat dinner with the rest of the King family, and Daddy King is voiced by James Earl Jones, because of course he would. "Don't you think it's cool he's always doing nice things for everybody else?" Miles comments.

Hey, it was either that, or Wayne Williams Junior High.

The kids time-skip once more. Now they're in Montgomery, Ala. for the bus boycott in 1956. And now MLK is voiced by Levar Burton, and we get the NARRATIVE APPROVED Rosa Parks story (which, of course, never brings up the fact that Samuel B. Fuller was already in the process of BUYING the Montgomery bus system), and then we get stock footage of MLK's house getting firebombed. Then a character voiced by Samuel L. Jackson starts rallying the black community to use violence against the honkeys, but MLK tells them to be more like Gandhi instead ... which, uh, means he wants them to hate Africans and sleep with their naked nieces on top of them?

Well, before we can fully digest that peculiar visual, the kids time hop again, and now it's time to relive the Birmingham riots, complete with a montage contrasting cartoons and real people having Dobermans bite their ball sacks and getting hit in the face with fire hoses. The kids end up getting transported back to the modern day, and the next day they watch ANOTHER video about the sit-ins and "Bull" Connor, who is pretty much depicted here as a cross between Hitler and The Penguin. And that's our cue for even MORE footage of black people getting power washed, complete with the very, very debatable suggestion that MLK and JFK formed a partnership for racial justice.

After school, the kids go back to MLK's birth home and convince Whoopi Goldberg to let 'em go back inside and fuck around with the time-space continuum some more. The fat white kid and that know-it-all Hispanic bitch decide to trail 'em and what do you know, all four of them wind up getting sucked back in time to the March on Washington. Oh, and hilariously, the "I Have A Dream" speech is dubbed over, because the King estate actually TRADEMARKED it and make people pay to use it now. That said, you can still have a lot of fun with the scene subbing in your OWN music. Might I suggest "Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)" by W.A.S.P.? Anyhoo, the kids run into their future teacher at the rally, and she talks about MLK representing the "power of one" and "affecting change in everyone we touch" and a whole bunch of other hippie dippie bullshit. 

Then the kids hop forward in time and find newspaper clippings about King's death and act like it's the first time they ever heard he died before and decide to head back in time and STOP MLK FROM GETTING ASSASSINATED. "Sorry, that's way past my curfew," MLK tells the kids when they ask him to travel with them to 1999. But after name dropping Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall enough times, MLK finally decides to travel to Miles' time alongside the rest of the chirrens. Except when Miles and MLK get there, the King birth home is just rubble on the ground and the two white kids are best friends instead of being antagonistic towards each other and oh shit, black kids aren't allowed to ride the school bus anymore. Cue stock footage of KKK marches and "colored only" park benches and MLK starts asking Miles some serious questions about why he thinks *his* timeline is so great again. Now cue MORE stock footage of burning crosses and masses of black people weeping. And, then when the kids get to the middle school, all of a sudden it's been renamed "Robert E. Lee Middle" and the water fountains are segregated again and the principal keeps telling them to "git out" and chides the teachers for being "stupid women." And, oh, that Hispanic girl from earlier? Now she's a street urchin who doesn't know English and polishes floors for a living and Miles' mama is a MAID and he's all pissed that he don't have a Nintendo 64 no more.

So Miles and MLK have to sleep in bags on the floor and then MLK sees his daddy's ghost in the clouds and right then and there he decides he has to go back in time and DIE and keep the continuity loop a goin' as originally planned. And holy shit, they actually SHOW MLK getting shot in Memphis. Well, you have to give 'em some props for having the cojones to put THAT in a children's cartoon. From there we segue to footage from King's funeral, but again, since it originally used quips from the "I Have a Dream" speech, all we have here is just dead audio. Anyway, with everything corrected in the space-time continuum, Miles is able to come back to the modern day and yep, everything is back to normal. And after Miles gets an "A" on his assignment, the kids decide to go feed some homeless people and join Jimmy Carter's Habitats for Humanity and hug crippled black women in wheelchairs while a cover "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" plays in the background. And that, my multicultural brethren, is all there is to it.

Hooray for government-mandated inclusionary policymaking, which totally can't be subverted into civil liberties-eroding power grabs the same way government-mandated exclusionary policymaking was!

Well, I guess that is what it is, isn't it? I guess you don't need me to tell you the historical accuracy in this one was hit and miss, and you REALLY have to question the cartoon's rosy - if not downright messianic - depiction of the good Rev. Dr. King. I mean, it's not like they were ever going to show the alleged homosexual drunken orgies or bring up the fact that a lot of MLK's mentors were avowed communists or anything like that, but they could have at least tried to make the guy seem a little more relatable. After all, the REAL MLK smoked, packed heat, and boned at least one white woman, didn't he?

I suppose in hindsight one may consider Our Friend, Martin one of the great pioneering texts of the ongoing "white guilt" complex in American society - especially for Millennials. Remember, this was shit children were seeing every single year throughout elementary school and junior high, and let's face it - the big, central message the cartoon gets across (rather intentional or planned) is that a.) MLK was so great that everything he said most be taken as the literal social gospel and b.) left unchecked, white men will enslave you again and call your mama bad names. Even if that wasn't the filmmakers' desire, that's just the way hyper-literal children think, and when you have that pounded into your skull over and over for nine years, without a single adult explaining the movie's takeaways in a more nuanced form it can and will leave an indelible stamp on one's psyche - and no amount of factual evidence is likely to surmount the pure emotional pull one has felt since he or she was in kindergarten. The filmmakers may have thought the key idea children took away from the movie was that you shouldn't treat people unfairly because they're different, but instead the central theme they're walking away with is "holy shit, white people were EVIL as fuck back in the day, and if we don't do everything MLK tells us to they'll start treating minorities like doo doo again." Just read the comments on this YouTube upload - virtually none of the top comments are about racial reconciliation, but various shades of the old "boy howdy, the whites sure were MEAN towards blacks back then, and you know what, the probably still want to enslave us" chestnut. Planned, or unplanned, that's the major takeaway easily impressionable children got out of this movie - don't judge people by the color of their skin, except for the white ones, because goddamn, look at all the evil shit they did back in 1950s.

As a history lesson, it's pretty much just brazen hagiography for the ankle-biter set, leaving out all of M.L.K.'s more regrettable character traits and pretty much attributing the entirety of the Civil Rights Movement to his doing (that there isn't a companion video chronicling the animated exploits of Malcolm X is a rather telling example of omission by design.) As a morality play, it's pretty humdrum as well, but come on - it's pro-diversity propaganda intended for first graders. What did you expect? And taken only on its merits as animation, it's passable, but nothing extraordinary. The entire time I was watching the video I just felt like the character designs seemed hauntingly familiar, and sure enough, the IMDB validated my suspicions: it was co-directed by Vincenzo Trippetti, who as fate would have it, also served as a storyboard supervisor for The Real Ghostbusters, Jem and Mummies Alive! Needless to say, if there was ever a production in dire need of a sudden guest appearance by Apep the Snake God, surely it would be this woefully uninvolving cartoon.

As a piece of nostalgic ephemera, I suppose it has its merits. Shit, I didn't even watch the thing when I was a kid and I still smelled my old elementary school's cafeteria and gym mats while I was reviewing it. But more importantly, it stands as a testament to the power of the media - particularly animated programming - as a major social conditioning engineer. Our Friend, Martin is unquestionably a production with the chief goal of dictating morality to its young audience. It has little to do with entertaining them, or even giving them an educational history lesson. Rather, it's a coordinated effort to instill in young viewers the seeds of an adult ethos, one that neatly contours to a particular political ideology and its pre-established dogma.

Is the intent of Our Friend, Martin to encourage children to rebuke collectivist labels and see individuals as precisely that, individuals, or is it meant to goad children into believing a one-dimensional social policy creation myth that clearly paints one half of the U.S. social dyad as born losers and the other half as lapsed ethno-totalitarians?

And if you can't figure out which one, no worries - just show this flick to an eight-year-old and they'll be able to tell you which is which as soon as it's over.

Read More

10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About MLK

To commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we take a look at some tidbits rarely discussed regarding the life and legacy of the revered civil rights leader. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

The late, great, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is in rare company. In the history of the United States, only four people have ever been awarded a national holiday in their name, and King is the only one who has been alive over the course of the last 150 years. Indeed, the vaunted Rev. Dr. King is about as close as contemporary American culture gets to a patron saint; beyond being celebrated as a skillful, effective civil rights leader, he's basically become a deified figure, a super-man whose name is to be mentioned in only the most respectful and reverential of hushed tones. In today's cultural climate, to deny that he was anything short of a sacrosanct messiah is enough to get you labeled as a hatemonger, and saying you disagree or look unfavorably on anything King said or believed is pretty much considered a thought crime on par with declaring Hitler to be, and I quote, "fucking awesome." 

Alas, we here at The Internet Is In America know that anytime anyone is celebrated as a near-perfect God-Man, there's usually a lot of stuff the celebrants tend to overlook or simply forget about. You know, like the part about John Lennon being a remorseless woman beater and deadbeat dad, or that Gandhi was a crypto-racist warmonger who routinely compared his wife to livestock and engaged in activity that can be rightly labeled as paedo-incest. Nobody's perfect, and the ones everybody keeps telling you are the most perfect of all are usually the ones who have the gnarliest skeletons in their closet. And yes, Martin Luther King, Jr.- as celebrated and beloved he is - is not immune from The Great Man Myth, either. 

Of course, none of this is to say that MLK was, inherently, a bad person, or that all of the civil rights crusading he did back in the 1960s wasn't worthwhile and noble and heroic and courageous and inspiring and all of that jazz. Interestingly, it seems like most Americans, especially the younger crowd, have no idea who King was or what he did other than deliver the "I Have a Dream" speech and get assassinated, which, of course, is a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of half-truths, misconceptions and flat out lies to percolate as non-existent facts about his alleged life (including the easily refutable assertion that the government was found "guilty" of murdering him in a 1999 trial.)

Below, however, are a few pieces of trivia about MLK that are far from hearsay or conjecture or after-the-fact fabrications. As it turns out, there is an astounding amount of public information on his life that, despite being quite accessible, just hasn't entered the domain of everyday knowledge. On what would have been King's 87th birthday, let's take the time to reflect on who the American icon really was ... and who that is, most certainly, might just surprise you. 

Fact Number One:

His real name wasn't Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Let's start off with the most rudimentary misconception about MLK - that the "M" in said MLK stood for "Martin." When MLK was born Jan. 15, 1929, his birth certificate actually read Michael King, Jr. and it wasn't until the King family, whom, technically, are half Irish, attended a massive Baptist convention in Germany in 1934 that Daddy King decided to rechristen both him and his first born son after the famous Protestant reformer (who, ironically, really, really hated both the poor and the Jewish.) But, hey, how exactly did a black family in the Deep South in the midst of the Great Depression afford to visit Germany, you might be thinking? Well, that leads us to our second unheralded truth about MLK...

Fact Number Two:

He grew up in a family that, even by today's standards, would be considered wealthy.

If you've ever visited the King family home, you probably walked away  thinking "you know, for a house built before World War II, this place is nice." In fact, MLK's old digs on Auburn Avenue would probably be fetching $300,000, maybe even $400,000 in today's ever-gentrifying Atlanta housing market. Whereas Malcolm X grew up eating dandelion weeds, the King family was very, very well-off financially - indeed, they were certainly in far better economic shape than the average white family in Georgia at the time. A lot of that has to do with MLK's maternal grandfather, Adam Daniel Williams, who as head minister of the famed Ebeneezer Baptist Church - which, by 1903, already had 400 members - held a lot of social clout in Atlanta's black community. (Keep in mind, black churches in the wake of the Civil War - thanks in part to their tax-free status - became something of a de facto community war chest. Even in the late 1800s, the Department of Labor noted the economic significance of black places of worship - "the church collects and distributes considerable sums of money, and the whole social life of the town centers here," as one bulletin put it.) A founding member of the National Baptist Convention - which was basically the NAACP before the NAACP existed - Williams was able to land a position as president of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers Union and chairman of the General State Baptist Convention's executive board and finance committee. By 1918, he had risen to the rank of NAACP branch president in Atlanta, which quickly grew to more than 1,400 members. Three years before MLK was born, Daddy King married Williams' only child, Alberta King, and when her father died in 1931, MLK, Sr. inherited his "Sweet Auburn" empire. Despite the Great Depression, King's evangelical enterprise flourished, and he was oft-referred to as "the best paid negro minister in the city." 

Fact Number Three:

He attempted suicide at the age of 12 (and was almost killed by a deranged female stalker when he was 29.)

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was just a wee pre-teen, he came *this* close to offing himself. The day of his grandmother's death, he had snuck out against his parents' wishes to see a parade; so distraught over not being there during his nana's final hour that when he heard the news, he responded by taking a suicide dive out of the second story of his home. Believe it or not, that wasn't the closest King got to being killed before he was assassinated in 1968 - the revered civil rights leader almost died in 1958, when a paranoid schizophrenic black woman with an IQ of 70 stabbed him with a steel letter opener at a book signing in Harlem. Oh, and Junior isn't the only person in his family to succumb to the bullet; his mother was shot and killed in 1974 - and, in quite possibly the most horrifically ironic fashion imaginable - by a racist black radical.

Fact Number Four:

His dad told him he was "too good" to marry a poor white woman.

While attending the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Penn., King began a courtship with Betty Moatz, a young Caucasian cafeteria worker and the daughter of German immigrants. King was so besotted by Moatz that at one point he mulled marrying her. Alas, interracial marriages were still deemed taboo even north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and King's fellow seminarians eventually talked him out of going any further with the relationship. Interestingly enough, the biggest opponent of the would-be marriage was King's father, who was vehemently against his son "marrying down." As David Garrow penned in Bearing the Cross, Daddy King wasn't neccesarily a big fan of King marrying Coretta Scott, either - indeed, King Senior had more or less set up an arranged marriage between his eldest son and Mattiwilda Dobbs, who was the daughter of Atlanta Civic League founder John Wesley Dobbs, as a way to strengthen the family's already considerable political clout. 

Fact Number Five:

He was a confirmed plagiarist. 

The Internet Is In America readers who have attended college anytime over the last 10 years have probably used the Turnitin software - an online service schools pay for to check student submitted papers for plagiarism - at some point during their academic sojourns. Well, if MLK were to turn in his dissertation using said software, the damn thing would've had more red on it than a Coca Cola can. In the late 1980s, Stanford University got a hold of MLK's Boston University doctoral thesis, the ultra-academic-sounding A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. Upon closer examination, it appears that gigantic portions of the paper were lifted - sans attribution - from a paper submitted at the same university just three years earlier. As researchers at Stanford further investigated a treasure trove of King papers, they were shocked to find out that not only did the dude plagiarize the shit out of his school assignments, he even appeared to have copied and pasted a large number of his speeches and sermons. Civil Rights historian Ralph E. Luker described the impressive scope of King's intellectual thievery: "the farther King went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long-established practice." Oh, and regarding the "originality" of King's most iconic speech? Apparently, he had some dreams about the previously published works of Archibald Carey, Jr. and Mahalia Jackson, too...

Fact Number Six:

He packed heat, smoked cigarettes and cheated on his wife A LOT. 

With his name more or less synonymous with nonviolent resistance, it might surprise a few folks that MLK was a pretty staunch supporter of the Second Amendment. Fearing a hit by the Klan, King even applied for a concealed weapons carry permit once, but seeing as how he tried to obtain said license in ALABAMA, I reckon you can figure how well that went. Nonetheless, King owned guns out the wazoo, with former adviser Glenn Smiley once describing King's home as "an arsenal." Ironically, King's assassination would be one of the major catalysts of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which, among other things, prevents the sale or transfer of weapons and ammo to drug addicts, the mentally insane and illegal aliens. Rounding out the vice-a-rama, King was a lifelong smoker (in fact, he was taking a drag when he was popped by James Early Ray) and FBI surveillance - not to mention firsthand accounts from longtime compatriot Ralph David Abernathy - gives a lot of credence to allegations that he had affairs a' plenty behind his wife's back. 

Fact Number Seven:

Some of his top advisers were avowed communists. 

From the get-go, King's socialistic stance on economic policies had him pegged as a no-good Red by the John Birch Society-types of the late '50s and 1960s. Indeed, rumors about King's alleged connections to the Communist Party persist to this day, with some even hypothesizing that he was taking orders directly from the Kremlin (fun fact: horrible racists actually own the domain martinlutherking.org, if you didn't already know.) While there is no public evidence verifying MLK as a Commie, card-carrying or otherwise, quite a few of those in King's inner circles were indeed self-professed Communists. King's secretary and mentor Bayard Rustin - an openly homosexual man in the mega-conservative 1950s who would later serve executive positions with the AFL-CIO and the Socialist Party of America - spent the World War II years rallying troops for the Young Communist League. Another close King confident - speechwriter, public relations point person and financial adviser Stanley David Levison - held a high-ranking position in the Communist Party USA and is believed to have received payoffs from the Soviet Union. And two of King's top financiers - Jack O'Dell and A. Philip Randolph - were both, at one point in time, members of Marxism-espousing political outfits. Which brings us back to the topic of King's economic beliefs...

Fact Number Eight:

His politics leaned heavily towards socialism. 

While King is primarily remembered as a civil rights crusader, economic issues were just as big a part of his political platform as race relations; indeed, in 1958, he described "economic injustice" as the inseparable twin of racial injustice. Throughout his career, he rallied and advocated for a series of extremely progressive policy measures - i.e., the kind of stuff people who smoke a lot of weed and are always tweeting about Bernie Sanders are yammering on and on about today - including a guaranteed basic income and the creation of a sprawling government program ensuring a public job to all who want one (but, uh, not in the form of the military, of course.) So yes, MLK can rightly be considered a socialist, in the classical sense of the term - after all, he did say he promoted merging capitalism and communism into a "higher synthesis that combines the truths of both" socioeconomic models. He was also a pioneering proponent of reparations, telling Playboy that legislative equality wasn't enough to close the financial gap between whites and blacks and proposed the U.S. government dole out $50 billion in restitution to marginalized peoples of all varieties. Interestingly enough, this indeed came to pass, albeit as federal entitlement measures enacted by President Lyndon Johnson's so-called "War on Poverty," which created both the federal food stamp program (the Feds doled out $82 billion in SNAP benefits in 2013 alone, plus another $55 billion in earned income tax credits, PLUS another $50 billion in Supplemental Security Income) and Medicaid, which handed out about $475 billion in state grants in just the 2014 fiscal year. Which sort of begs the question ... why isn't LBJ celebrated as a deified figure in the black community as well?

Fact Number Nine:

He left his family destitute following his assassination. 

While King collected quite a bit of moolah from his ministry, speaking engagements, book royalties and miscellaneous humanitarian prizes, one place we know for sure he didn't sink the funds was in his own family's future. Despite being an obvious assassination target, not only did he never take out a life insurance policy, he never even drew up a will; as a result, when he was murdered in 1968, he left his wife and children with hardly any appreciable benefits. Following King's intestate funeral, a number of activists (among them, Harry Belafonte), took up the financial slack and crowdfunded the surviving King brood. To this day, legal battles abound regarding who has the rights to King's likeness, possessions and published works. Alas, MLK's kids have gotten some measure of financial benefit from their father's legacy, having started the for-profit organization King, Inc., which, among other shrewd business moves, charged the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation $2.7 million to construct the National Monument, forced Living Colour to change the lyrics of "Cult of Personality," and sold almost every known recording of King's voice to Steven Spielberg.

Fact Number Ten: 

We're going to learn a lot of things we didn't know about him in 2027.

Plan on living another 11 years? If so, you'll be privy to some newfound public info on MLK, whose full FBI record is set to be declassified in 2027. Now, as to what those files consist of is anybody's guess, with both hardcore King supporters and detractors throwing out their own hypothesi. On the pro-MLK side, the general narrative is that the files were ordered sealed for so long to prevent the public from finding out just how underhanded the FBI - in particular, alleged transvestite J. Edgar Hoover - were in their quest to undermine King's character. And considering their cockamamie COINTEL smearing campaigns that have been brought to light - including a notorious "anonymous" letter encouraging MLK to commit suicide - one has to imagine the stuff they didn't want publicized is WAY the hell out there. On the flip side, the denizens of Stormfront and other white nationalist sites are damn certain the collection of wiretaps will conclude once and for all that King was a bona-fide communist, or at the very least, will reveal some downright kinky extra-marital odysseys. Alas, all anybody can do is throw out conjecture at this point, but whatever those FBI files reveal? Make no mistake about it, they're going to change the way we view King - for better, or for worse. 

Read More

This Week in Social Justice Warrior-dom

A fond look back at all the things that had ultra-P.C. jihadists OUTRAGED ... before they forget all about them in just a few days. 

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Category-five P.C. poop-storms rock Missouri, Yale

Last weekend, members of the underperforming Missouri Tigers football team said "fudge the state taxpayers and the free education they are giving us" and decided they ain't playing no more until U of M System President Tom Wolfe resigned. It's not that Mr. Wolfe did anything wrong himself, per se, it's just that, in the eyes of the the Concerned Student 1950 organization, he didn't do enough to address a series of regrettable racial incidents on campus - most notably, this one time a drunk white boy yelled the "n" word and an astonishingly bizarre (if not a bit suspicious) episode involving a swastika being smeared on  a bathroom wall in doo doo. After their first attempt to garner media attention ... I mean, attempt to achieve true social justice ... failed, the coalition of outraged African-Americans and lame white people who deeply yearn to experience what oppression tastes like decided to hold campus sit-ins, with demands including the president publicly "acknowledge his white male privilege," increase the staff and faculty minority quota and increase funding for a gloriously nondescript "social justice center" which, by their description, only seems to entail "social justice" for Americans of a very precise pigmentation. One student even went on a well-publicized week-long hunger strike as a symbolic statement against oppression - strangely, mainstream media all but ignored the fact that the "persecuted" student actually hails from a family of millionaires. Well, on Tuesday, both Wolfe and Mizzou Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin capitulated and resigned from their positions (with Wolfe being replaced by a black dude who admits that the main reason he got the job was because of his skin hue). Alas, the demonstrations continued even after the ousters, leading to some hilariously ironic incidents in which a coalition of irked students and staffers - including a screeching SJW whose entire academic career is built upon a bedrock of Twilight-inspired, third-wave feminism claptrap - physically attacked reporters and denied them their guaranteed First Amendment rights because their feelings were more important than the goddamn Constitution. Things only got more Orwellian from there; the Missouri Student Association started reporting false appearances of the Klan on campus, with at least one student freaking out to the point of hysterics simply because a blue pick up truck drove by her. And then, the university police sent out a memo to students asking them to report things to them that aren't actually crimes, with an "anonymous" user on Yik Yak getting popped by the popo for making some boneheaded (albeit most likely empty) threats online (that Yik Yak not only had that kind of data on an "anonymous" platform AND were more than willing to turn them over to officials is actually a lot more frightening - and resounding - than just about any of the racial boogeyman fears being bandied about on campus, actually.) But just you wait! The exact same thing is happening over at Yale, too, because student residence admin Erika Christakis had the AUDACITY to write a well-informed, logic-based email decrying the university's absurdly strict Halloween dress code policies, which was enough to arouse some students to demand that not only she be shit-canned, but her husband - who literally had nothing to do with the memo - be fired too, just out of formal association. To be fair, he did lay the proverbial smackdown on the "oppressed" Yale Ivy Leaguers, whose intellectual rebuttal to his impassioned spiel about constitutional rights was drowned out by people LITERALLY screaming that the point of education was to "make them feel safe" and not enrich them cognitively. Well, that, and LITERAL examples of assault, as demonstrated by a young woman who yelled and cursed over and over again at Mr. Christakis after he decimated her cockamamie ideological views. Now, a growing movement has emerged at Ithaca College, where disgruntled students - a majority of whom are African-American -- want President Tom Rochon on the unemployment line because people he had no control over used the term "savage" to describe a black woman at a panel discussion. The ongoing war on microagressions has even inspired its own hashtag (trust me, you will be seeing A WHOLE LOT more of this one in the upcoming weeks) which hopeless Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has already appropriated into his social media Wehrmacht (in turn, leading to an absolutely hilarious rejoinder from one Ben Carson.) In the past, I have drawn numerous parallels between the new leftist hyper-P.C. and McCarthyism, but seeing so much entitled rage borne of incidents that seem, at best, isolated, and at worst, completely fabricated, is beginning to remind me more and more of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when overzealous Moral Majority members started unfounded rumors of ritual child abuse, which wound up putting countless innocent people in prison for crimes that not only did they NOT commit, but never even happened at all. With a nonexistent burden of evidence, so many lives were wrecked, all because some unscrupulous ideologists wanted to promote their own B.S. politics and had no problems concocting a phantom threat to instill irrational fear into the hearts of the gullible. Stay tuned, readers: your campus, and your livelihood, might just be next.

Yes, there are indeed some terrible, terrible mothers out there

With all the jibber-jabber going on these days about "structural" and "institutional" oppression, we have a tendency to overlook the simple fact that one's home life remains the single greatest developmental influence - and predictor of failure - any of us will ever experience. So when mothers leave their children to fend for themselves while they go out clubbing, maybe we shouldn't be all that surprised when eight years decide to up and murder an infant, just 'cause. Nor, I fear, should we be shocked one iota when a "grieving" mom uses the GoFundMe capital from her slain child's to buy herself a brand new car, I suppose. 

Kent State play draws ire because MLK portrayed by white actor

The late, great Martin Luther King, Jr. once said he wished future generations judged men by the content of their character as opposed to the color of their skin. That inspired Kent State University director Michael Oatman to cast a white actor to portray MLK in a couple of performances of The Mountaintop, a play chronicling the last few days of the revered civil rights icon's life (via completely fictionalized events, it is perhaps worth noting). Well, that didn't set well with the playwright, Katori Hall, who is now forcing those who license the production to cast a black actor to portray King or else. And if you're wondering what the reaction would be if a historical Caucasian character was conscientiously skin-swapped during a stage production, for the sake of some abstruse political rationale? Well ... nothing, evidently. 

Glamour names person with penis 'Woman of the Year'

Valiantly overlooking thousands upon thousands of female scientists, researchers, businesswomen, human rights crusaders, lawyers, health care specialists and engineers, Glamour decided to name transgender man-slaughterer Caitlyn "the artist formerly known as Bruce" Jenner "Woman of the Year" alongside Reese Witherspoon (who, if I am not mistaken, is the same person who fought for women's rights to education in a super-oppressive Islamic theocracy where young girls who show off their ankles in public have industrial toilet bowl cleaner poured on their faces. I think.) Not every XX-chromosome-carrier out there is too keen on the selection, though. "To laud a man for living as a woman is to insult and patronize women who have borne and overcome incredible odds and achieved great successes because of their uniquely womanly traits," wrote conservative-but-still-technically-feminist  columnist Nicole Russell in The Federalist. "Now women don't even get to decide for ourselves what marks the best and most impressive qualities of our own sex? That feels ideologically oppressive."

Phi Kappa Psi suing the dog shit out of Rolling Stone

Hey, remember back in the day, when Rolling Stone published that story about a whole bunch of rapin' going on at the University of Virginia, which turned out to be a whole heaping' helpin' of B.S.? Well, the fraternity that had its reputation slandered something wicked is firing back, hitting the (not at all) venerable publication with a $25 million lawsuit, which is buttressed by an additional suit from an associate dean who is demanding $7.5 million because she was inaccurately portrayed as insensate to the (non-existent) rash of sexual assaults (not) happening all over campus. As a result of the cooked-up story, members of the frat were threatened online and their facility was vandalized numerous times - at one point, it even had "UVA Center for Rape Studies" scrawled on it. "In the most scurrilous traditions of yellow tabloid journalism, Rolling Stone published a devastating story it knowingly failed to verify, in reckless disregard for truth or falsity, or the essential safety, dignity and welfare of the organization or of those lives it was willing to crush with its defamatory article," the fraternity states in the suit. Huh ... that seems to sum up the new-wave, leftist, advocacy-journalism war machine in general, dont't it? 

Hooray for Infantilization!

The same week Slate railed against Kids Bopz for sanitizing pop music (apparently, it's a bad thing that kids aren't being exposed to double entendres?), The Atlantic celebrated the emerging "adult coloring book trend." Of Crayola's new line of "Color Escapes" products, scribe Julie Beck states "coloring offers that relief and mindfulness without the paralysis that a blank page can cause ... it's easier in the way that ordering from a restaurant with a small menu is easier than deciding what you want at Denny's, where you could eat almost anything." I am reminded of the ever-ominous words of Benjamin Barber in his 2009 tome, Consumed: "These avatars of consumer capitalism are seeking to encourage adult regression, hoping to rekindle in grown-ups the tastes and habits of children so that they can sell globally the relatively useless cornucopia of games, gadgets and myriad consumer goods for which there is no discernible 'need market' other than the one created by capitalism's own frantic imperative to sell."   

Study verifies atheist superiority because religious kids are less likely to give out stickers

In a widely cited study published last week in the journal Current Biology, researchers examining more than 1,000 elementary schoolers across six countries determined that the tykes of atheists were more "altruistic" than the offspring of the religious, on average, agreeing to give four stickers to other children compared to the Christians and Muslims of the world, who only averaged three giveaway stickers in a "dictator game"-centered experiment. Unfortunately, the study is hampered by numerous problems, including some extraordinarily random metrics (for example, only using maternal education level is an SES proxy), the use of an extremely sketchy "justice sensitivity inventory" to gauge children's "empathy" and the complete and utter lack of a nationalized data set (meaning the researchers never actually tell us what the results were, broken down  by each country.) That last one is a pretty big one, seeing as how they used two schools in the overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey and another school in the almost exclusively non-theistic China as counterweights to the much more ethnically (and religiously) diverse schools in Jordan, the USA, Canada and South Africa. Of course, those inconveniences are of little concern to liberal-tinged publications like The Daily Beast and The Guardian, who used the suspect findings of the study to flat out declare religious children "jerks" and "meaner" than their peers.

Retailers under fire for selling 'offensive' holiday apparel

Some folks aren't too happy with Target's decision to sell an intentionally hideous novelty sweater emblazoned with the words "obsessive Christmas disorder," because it makes light of those with mental illnesses - because as we all know, the primary intent of soulless retail giants is to subliminally marginalize those with oddly specific health conditions and NOT pander to the brain-dead, kitsch-centric youth culture by repackaging and mass marketing memes that were outdated three years ago. The same thing happened to Nordstrom recently, whose "Chai Maintenance" Chanukkah sweater has drawn fire from extraordinarily sensitive members of the U.S. Jewish community, who will no doubt spend the remainder of the holiday sulking over the ordeal instead of reflecting on the fact that 46 percent of their ethnic countrymen reside in households making more than $100,000 a year.

...and your weekly reminder that America might not be that bad of a place to live...

While the ISIS attack on Paris drew most of the international headlines, rest assured, there were PLENTY of other stories 'round the globe this week to make each and every man, woman, child in America thank their lucky stars they were born in the lower 48. Do we begin with Saudia Arabia, which just surpassed a 20-year-record for most government-sanctioned beheadings? Or how about Indonesia, where drug trafficking has gotten so bad that the government recently unveiled plans to sentence the worst offenders to an island surrounded by crocodiles, piranhas and tigers? And the next time anyone brings up how "awful" LGBT and immigrant rights are in the States, just remind them: South African natives are welcoming Ethiopian refugees to their country by incinerating them, while Kenya's abhorrent treatment of gays is so ghastly that some homosexual refugees are actually fleeing BACK to Uganda. 

...and lastly, a few headlines that speak for themselves...

Progressivists score one for social justice by changing shape of sci-fi award

Court determines Pennsylvania taxpayers must pay pensions for super-pedophile 

A Claremont McKenna double whammy: Asian studied booed by black students for stating that African Americans aren't immune from being racists themselves AND a faculty member resigns for taking heat for saying she wants to HELP minority students

Comcast refuses to go into dangerous black neighborhood in Chicago

Goth chick from 'NCIS' nearly beaten to death by homeless person 

Read More