BEIJING, 5th Oct., 2011
From the Paramount Leader
People's Republic
A Stern Message:
MANY AMERICANS are urging their government to demand a refund from
what they call
"the chuckling Chinese." Have 'em come and dismantle the thing and
take it
back to what they criminally call CommieLand.
Then, using solely U.S. workmanship, Americans want a complete
redesign
of the whole monstrosity, as they term it, stateside, including an MLK
likeness that
doesn't resemble Mao Zedong.
As is, they say, it's a total, laughable failure.
Almost as laughable, Americans say, as we silly-looking, buck-toothed,
slant-eyed,
yellah-skinned, smelly Chinks themselves! Most of whom still shit in
the
streets and alleys because there aren't enough toilets in China yet
Not that most of 'em would know how to use a toilet. Or would want
to.
As your President, or Premier, or whatever, I personally am offended,
and don't think this is a good idea.
Let me have your thoughts, my Party members. I promise not to kill
you for using banned e-mail.
-- Hu
www.xinhuanet.com/english2010/
=================
"Fix the King monument"
Editorial
The Washington Post
October 2, 2011
THE DEDICATION of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial,
postponed from August, has been rescheduled for Oct. 16. That date
should be moved forward again, unless the ceremony includes a pledge
to correct the embarrassingly misleading quotation on the side of the
Stone of Hope.
The quote — “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness”
— sounds jarringly immodest, particularly since it was excerpted from
a sermon that King delivered about the folly of prideful bombast. The
reason for this dissonance is that, in a misguided effort at
concision, the words were pulled out of context. The full quotation
was conditional; King did not claim these qualities but said that, if
others insisted on calling him a leader, he hoped it would be in the
service of those noble causes. That’s a big difference.
The poet Maya Angelou, who knew King, asserts that the ham-handed
editing makes the civil rights leader sound like “an arrogant twit.”
She called for the monument to be reengraved. She’s right.
What makes this matter even more troubling is that the distortion
apparently took place without meaningful review. The secretary of the
Commission of Fine Arts, Thomas Luebke, revealed in a letter to The
Post that the commission never approved this truncation of the quote,
as had been asserted by Ed Jackson Jr., the memorial’s chief
architect. A spokesman for the National Parks Service told us it had
not been notified of the editing either. “We were neither informed
nor consulted about this abbreviated quote, and we believe we should
have been,” said the spokesman, Bill Line. We tried to ask Mr. Jackson
about this, but he has not returned our calls.
Meanwhile, the botched quotation, first noted in an op-ed by The
Post’s Rachel Manteuffel, has become something of a national
laughingstock. Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert recently
suggested that if Washington was willing to subordinate accuracy to
brevity, we might as well truncate the quote even more, reducing it to
“I was a drum major” — and then put a funny hat on the statue’s head.
“Hey,” Mr. Colbert deadpanned, “he did lead a march.”
In today’s poisonous, polarized political atmosphere, it sometimes
seems as if monuments and memorials are the only thing Washington
still does well. Are we willing to abandon even that? In this case,
“chiseled in stone” does not mean — or should not mean — unchangeable.
Generations of Americans will learn about the Rev. King from this
monument. What they learn should be correct and not demean the memory
of a great man. The memorial’s Web site is still soliciting donations,
with this quotation: “the time is always ripe to do what is right.”
Time to find out if those words have any power left.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fix-the-king-monument/2011/09/...
http://mlkmemorialnews.org/images/stone_sm.jpg