They are about to trot him out again. MLK, that is. It's a ritual as automatic and antiseptic as the Super Bowl, a pageant of irrelevancy that occurs around the same time. The guy they show us isn't MLK. They show us a saint, even a martyr to the cause of racial justice, a goal that most Americans think we achieved a long time ago.  

The icon serves an important role. It preserves the power structure, a strange claim when considering MLK was a subversive through and through. We will have the President  and political and business leaders say solemn words on MLK Day. The military will be held up as a paragon of integration.  Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell will be invoked. It is a call to keep going where the Decider directs us ... over the cliff.

This is not new.  Apple Computer used MLK and Gandhi to sell computers in the 1990s. Anti-affirmative action zealots love to invoke MLK.   

The funny thing is that Martin Luther King, Jr. would be hated and condemned by these very same politicians and corporate types if he, or someone like him, managed to somehow pop up in our nation's consciousness. He would be hated, condemned, spied upon as a terrorist, and probably made to disappear. Sort of what really happened to him.

There is an antidote to this communal self-blinding, of course. It's called history. 

Now only does a thorough historical review reveal a more accurate picture of the man, but it also makes the tale  more interesting.  

After his "I Have a Dream" Speech, Martin Luther King expanded his efforts to even more controversial topics. To his racial justice agenda, he added anti-militarism and economic justice. It took him some time, but he came out against the Vietnam War.  Indeed, he came out against all wars.  And he paid the price. Many in the civil rights movement cautioned him not to stray beyond civil rights, but Coretta Scott King and a few others prevailed upon him to take a principled stand. His anti-war views will not be mentioned on MLK Day. No one will point out the incongruence of having the military march in parades celebrating his birthday, that having Blacks and Hispanics make up the bulk of recruits needed for 20,000 troop surge that is Iraq-bound is an incongruence that no one on the Left should stomach.

No one will point out that this Nobel Peace Prize recipient understood that institutional violence, as manifested by the military and foreign wars, was even more insidious than anything happening on the home front.  Even "liberals" trip over themselves when discussing the Iraq war with the disarming statement, "I, of course, support the troops."  No one will quote from MLK's anti-war pronouncements, however prescient or relevant they may be, including this one from April 4, 1967, from a speech called "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence."

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

Studying MLK's history, we would discover that if things have changed, they have only gotten worse.  That's the down side.  There's an up side, too.  Looking at MLK's history, we would realize that we can and must still join his campaign to rid ourselves of bigotry, economic inequality, and war.

Oscar Gonzalez is a liberal attorney lost somewhere in Texas.  His website is www.lawslant.com.  He can be reached at: comments@lawslant.com.