January 12 th, 2005 - 00:01 [Z-5:00]

       These are desperate times for Jesse Jackson. You can see it in his face and his actions. Everywhere he has tried to leave a marker, conservatives have hounded him into a corner. It's not just the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, who are tough, hard-hitting heavyweights. Even Minor Conservative Talk Radio Deities, like Mike Gallagher and Michael Savage, feel comfortable taking meaningful shots at the one-time civil rights leader.

       Jackson, in his declining years, has become an easy target. He says and does things that hurt himself. He refuses to let anyone look at his books. He uses heavy tactics, which, if anyone else were to use, would get them a Ricco Statute arrest. Still, were he to use those tactics to feed poor kids in Appalachia, or build schools in poor northern rustbelt states, most people would leave him alone. But he continues to hide his money and there are no schools built or bellies filled that anyone can put his or her finger on.

       Instead, we are asked to lean on a ghost which is now four years short of 40 years old - the image of Martin Luther King being killed on a balcony with Jesse standing there - to garner his credibility.

       Martin Luther King is arguably the second greatest man in the Great Civil Rights Movement which began for real in the late 1830's. The first great man has to be Thurgood Marshall. (Third would have to be Frederick Douglass.) Without Marshall, there would be no Brown v Topeka Board of Education. Marshall knew the mind of the High Court. He knew the mind of a willing president. He took a case which had only righteousness on its side and little else - and won. King could have preached a million sermons and it would have made little or no difference had not Marshall won the day, so many years ago in Washington, DC.

       And then MLK got killed, and everything changed.

       People forgot about Thurgood Marshall, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and the honor and dignity the inhabitants of Dawfuskie Island, and Rosa Parks. The list is very long of forgotten heroes.

       Now, it's all about an itinerant insurance salesman and minister who had a gift for preaching. Before his death, he was only one of three leaders. Do you even remember who the other two leaders were? Here's a hint for one: "Oomgowah!"

       No matter what anybody thinks, it can be fairly said that whatever else MLK was, he deeply believed in Ghandi's idea of peaceful protest. And for that, the United States was able to make the most remarkable change in the history of humanity. But only after he was killed. Shakespeare and Marc Antony's speech about Julius Caesar come to mind. He was ambitious, but his ambition and his death synthesized each other into a movement which worked, and most of the time, worked for good.

       Now, the world is not perfect. There will always be bigots just as there will always be liberals. Neither are desirable, but a smattering here or there cannot be fatal. They become jokes about themselves. They become minimized.

       Greenville county, of course, has an MLK day, but it's voted on every year by the workers as to whether or not they want to take the day off, and they NEVER do. Instead, they vote for Confederate Memorial day and a paid day of their own choosing. EVERY TIME.

       There are those in Greenville County - this last bastion of whatever you want to call it - who feel cheated that a paid holiday has to go to a womanizer and former, brief, Communist party member. They almost voted for a Civil Rights Day, but when the wife of the now deceased national NAACP leader put MLK's name on the motion, it got voted down, again.

       However, the history of it is against those who want to have their civil rights pure. But compromise will always win. It is the quintessential English virtue. And there WILL be an MLK Day, paid holiday and all. Greenville County residents have already seen to it that this will happen by voting three critical, conservative members out and voting in three moderates. The Council vote is coming soon.

       Now comes Jesse, along with his league of pretenders in the form of '60's NAACP refugees, who are going to "show" that mean old county of Greenville just how bad they are. . .

       Envision a little boy, dancing naked in the rain, refusing to come in because he knows that whatever the adults do to him, he will have his moment to shock and scandalize. It's all about him.

       Of course, Jesse is a socialist. He thinks, and has said as much, that socialism is the answer to all black peoples' problems. This is what he means by "economic equality." If you don't believe it, listen to him for more than two minutes and you will hear it. He'll say it for you. It is only those who are still genuinely afraid of him, such as many of small intellect in big business, who still capitulate to his threats of boycotts and bad press. But this is not the issue. Nothing that Jesse says is the issue anymore. It's all about Jesse

       So, there will be a March in Greenville. And there will be cameras. And there will be even more bad feelings as people of recent African heritage say untruths and hateful things about people of ancient African origin. Some of the white majority will even pretend that they agree. And those on both sides who are unhappy, for whatever reason, will journey even further into the backwater of their discontent.

       But there is one bright lining in all of this: No matter what Jesse Jackson organizes or does or says, he will never be King or Marshall. He will never be any of the people in whose names he continues to do the things he is does. He would be King. But, he only would be.

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