BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, WEDNESDAY APRIL 4, 2018) — Fifty years ago in the evening, THE PLANET found ourselves on Lyman Street then Deming Park looking for our dog Chubbie, a 14-year-old beagle who had wandered off. We searched for awhile before returning home dejected, only to find her wagging tail waiting. Entering the house, we learned from TV of the assassination of Martin Luther King. It felt raw.

It had been less than five years since Jack Kennedy met his fate at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. In the interim, the accidental successor president had let the Vietnam conflict — “police action” would be the more accurate term — escalate beyond recognition, and the draft began eating up young men like so many after-dinner mints to sweeten the breath of the perpetual war machine.

This doomsday device that today does its harvesting in the Islamic Middle East had been activated by a greedy “military-industrial complex” (Eisenhower) using various versions of the Cold War to sweeten its breath and fill its wallet. That machine, of course, saw King as a major threat given his sway over so many black votes. He was a marked man. His murder still shocked us, for we had hung on to the illusion of good government about 30 years past its shelf life.

As with the shootings of JFK and RFK (two dismal months after MLK), King’s murder prompted a flawed investigation and a churchful of unanswered questions, with evidence suppressed, witnesses coerced, and “facts” manufactured. Officials hung the shooting Osward-, Sirhan-style on a similar patsy, one James Earl Ray. The bespectacled Ray had met his 15 minutes only to be confined to Brushy Mountain, his secrets devalued like post-WWI Deutschmarks.

Major U.S. cities with significant black populations rioted, an infernal racial schism that propelled the short-lived rise of the Black Panthers, a political terrorist group that watered down Malcolm X’s turn to Islam and beefed up his militancy. To gain a proper perspective on the domestic political climate, you must recall that Malcolm X had, too, been assassinated during the mid-point “lull” (1965) between Jack Kennedy (1963) and King (1968). He was literally Malcolm in the middle.

First X then King. Blacks found their voice in the shocked silence, and its diction broke off fiery words with clipped sharpness: Eldridge Cleaver made us all realize that Ward, June, Theodore, and Tony weren’t the only Cleavers with America as their pupils.

King and X represented heads and tails of the shoddy piece of counterfeit coin that had been minted since the disembarking of the first slave ship somewhere in the South. King preached non-violence; X urged the sword. Both used words — brilliant words written and spoken — to shake the earth (King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” ranks among the finest American essays of all time). Both were considered equally dangerous by Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and the rest of this country’s hidden government. The cross-dressing, gay Hoover had assembled quite the dirt file on both men, with King’s thicker only because the “Christian” Hoover saw hypocrisy in the reverend’s personal life. Hoover’s stooges feigned outrage to learn that King was as fully human as the rest of us, this while their sainted chief oozed corruption out of every pore of his petrified face.

Before April 4, 1968, this country had perhaps a last chance to get its founding principles right by choosing to live by those ideals instead of hiding behind them. One 30.06 bullet fired into an impossibly courageous man on a motel balcony in Memphis took care of any such nonsense.

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“We can only be equal at the starting line” — Sir Tiberius Fruitjuice.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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