Monumental Hubris

[Geee]

Human Events:

Will work for national honor.

We don’t know if the Chinese stonemasons who built the new Martin Luther King memorial got the job by shoving a sign bearing that message into the faces of its overseers. We know only that unpaid, nonunion, foreign nationals built the massive shrine on the Mall. They toiled for “national honor” and “to bring glory to the Chinese people,” one of them explained to an investigator hired by the DC-area stonemasons promised the job.

Happy Labor Day!

Martin Luther King died in Memphis supporting a strike by the city’s garbagemen. So it’s not a stretch to assume that he would be horrified that imported workers making the Chinese minimum wage constructed an American tribute to him. Hurricane Irene postponing the monument’s opening ceremonies last weekend, and an earthquake moving a service scheduled for the National Cathedral, suggest that maybe the Great Shop Steward in the Sky wasn’t pleased, either.

The National Martin Luther King Memorial Foundation, like those who commissioned the pyramids, hope future visitors to their stone temple won’t wonder how it was built. Alas, the slave-labor scandal is just the most discussed way that an honor has become an insult to Martin Luther King.

King’s children charged the foundation building the memorial for the use of their father’s words and image in the project’s fundraising. A clue to their indifference to history came when Bernice King, at an event celebrating the new memorial, noted her father’s place on the National Mall not far from Abraham Lincoln, “remembered for signing the Declaration of Independence.” Confirmation came when they skipped history for economics by burdening the overburdened organizers of the monument with an $800,000 bill.

Is that why the foundation had to go cheap on labor?

Martin Luther King had a dream. His children have a scheme.

One of the quotes attributed to King etched into the memorial actually comes from Theodore Parker, an antebellum reformer who helped bankroll John Brown’s Kansas activities. Should Parker’s descendants seek their cut from the King family?

Another “quote”—I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness—is a cut-and-paste job compressing several sentences into one. Unsurprisingly, the words that King didn’t say do not reflect King’s sentiment, which was the opposite of a congratulatory self-eulogy. “The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit,” poet Maya Angelou, a consultant to the memorial, reacted. “He was anything but that.”

[NCTexan]

A clue to their indifference to history came when Bernice King, at an event celebrating the new memorial, noted her father’s place on the National Mall not far from Abraham Lincoln, “remembered for signing the Declaration of Independence.”

 

Confirmation came when they skipped history for economics by burdening the overburdened organizers of the monument with an $800,000 bill.

 

This sounds like Pigford meets American History 101. A scandal in many ways.

[pollyannaish]

Liberals and leftists are, in the end, the most greedy , money obsessed people I know. They will set aside almost any principle to obtain or save it, constantly beliveeveryone but them got it by cheating, and never seem to have enough for things to be fair. That the words had to be paid for and this thing was built other than in America doesnot surprise me one bit.