Part II — Who is telling all those lies…and why?
They met on the mall in Washington, that renowned place for great assemblies. They were baby-boomers and beyond and overwhelmingly white. (Maybe when you call a Liberal African-American President, raised by white grandparents a ‘racist” as Glenn Beck did, you may turn away people of color.)
Glenn Beck spoke about religion, a subject about which he is eminently unqualified to speak. Sarah Palin, the femme du jour of the Republicans, the failed governor of Alaska, failed Vice Presidential candidate, failed mother…spoke….about….something.
It will not be long remembered. Most people have forgotten it already. This modest assembly to “restore America” will not be long remembered in a place of so many significant assemblies of concerned citizens. The only person clear on what is being restored is Glenn Beck, and that appears to be his version of some kind of new Christian doctrine. Doctrine may be to complex a word to describe it. “Fantasy” might be better.
Other marches will continue to be remembered. Coxey’s rag-tag band in 1894, marching from Ohio, after our first really big recession, to protest joblessness and the lack of concern for the People would only set the precedent for other marches. Some would protect economic conditions or wars, others for a variety of reasons, but all meant to dramatize a cause…not to promote a charlatan and a mope.
Beck’s “Restoring Honor” day will not likely be remembered as long as the assembly in the Spring of 1939, when Marian Anderson held her famous concert after the Daughters of the American Revolution would not allow her to use Constitution Hall because she was black.
Nor will it be remembered as long as Cox’s Army or the Bonus Army marches of 1932 calling for jobs in the heart of the Great Depression. President Hoover sent General Douglas MacArthur, who brought his adjutant, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower to scatter them and send them on their way.
Beck’s group will never be remembered in conjunction with the magnificent assembly by Martin Luther King. It might appear somewhere in some obscure footnote to Dr. King’s dramatic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where 250,000 people and a national television audience in the millions watched Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Nor will it be remembered as long as the anti-Vietnam War assembly of 100,000 in 1967 that led to the famous march on the Pentagon described vividly in Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction novel, “Armies of the Night.” Or the subsequent anti-war marches and assemblies at the Lincoln Memorial of half a million people each in 1969 and 1971.
It will not be remembered as well as those of the March for Life in 1974, or the Solidarity Day march of 1981 or the Million Man march of 1995 or the Promise Keepers of 1997 or the Lesbian and Gay Rights marches of 1979, 1983 or 1997. [Read more →]
















