Posted 2:46 PM by Gene

I must confess I'm not entirely comfortable with MLK Day. It was created out of appeasement -- Ronald Reagan signed it into law presumably to get black Republican votes (ha ha!), and Je$$e got the stock exchanges to close -- and it's yet another paid vacation to people in government, many of whom take a paid vacation 365 times a year, and we get MLK SALE DAYS!!!!! It's also an annual burr in the side, a reminder that as far as we've come in race relations -- a black secretary of state? Black CEOs? Who'd believe it? -- many would like to see us go back, particularly in the newsrooms, where the OJ trauma morphed from a miscarriage of justice to a referendum on race. As Trent Lott proved, the old idiocies die hard. I suspect the superannuated former Ku Kluxer Bob is celebrating the day somewhere in the coal pits, without irony. The weekend's psychotic tantrum over Bush further proved that people can appropriate a name for any reason; witness how _________ (fill in the blank with the name of any Bush cabinet member) goosestepped side-by-side with Hitler; willful ignorance is the handmaiden of bigotry. In the end, MLK still had his dream, and that's a lot more than can be said for the extinguished fire-breathing dragons' nightmares.