Saturday coffee.

Medgar Evers

In August of 1963 I was 15 years old.

I was a member of Liberal Religious Youth, part of the progressive Unitarian Church. In LRY every year we would organize a summer camp for a week in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles at de Benneville Pines campgrounds near Lake Arrowhead.

We were all following the events in the South that summer. Bull Connor and his dogs and fire hoses.  Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. The murder of Medgar Evers. All that in the summer of ’63.

Later that year we would cry at the news of the bombing of a Birmingham church that would kill four young girls not much younger than we were.

But on this day in August we found an old portable black and white TV. We plugged it in and attached a coat hanger and some aluminum foil as a makeshift antenna. About 100 teenagers gathered around to watch fuzzy images of a half million people on the Washington Mall 3,000 miles away.

Tony LaRussa and Albert Pujols at the Beck Rally in DC?

No wonder Cubs fans hate the Cardinals.

The best part of the event was probably when St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa came out to give an award to… Albert Pujols, his best player. What the hell? At the Glenn Beck Lincoln Memorial “Restoring Honor” Rally of the Century? This ain’t the ESPYs! But the throngs lining the reflecting pool cheered anyway. Albert Pujols spoke favorably of Jesus, in his award acceptance speech.

Listening to Beck makes you want to take a shower.

Bob Herbert in this morning’s NY Times:

Facts and reality mean nothing to Beck. And there is no road too low for him to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.” He makes you want to take a shower.

Actually, Pujols shouldn’t be at that rally.

Dave Zirin writes:

As a person who believes strongly that athletes shouldn’t just “shut up and play,” and have a responsibility to speak out on political issues, I’ve been asked if it’s hypocritical to ask Pujols not to attend Beck’s rally. Hardly. Pujols is more than just the finest Major League hitter of his generation, and the third youngest man to ever hit 400 home runs. He also emerged recently as the most prominent voice in Major League Baseball against Arizona’s anti-immigrant racial profiling law SB 1070. At the 2010 All-Star game, Pujols told reporters, “I’m opposed to it. How are you going to tell me that, me being Hispanic, if you stop me and I don’t have my ID, you’re going to arrest me? That can’t be.” It was all the more dramatic because Pujols made the statement just days after his own manager Tony LaRussa said, “I’m actually a supporter of what Arizona is doing… That’s just part of the American way.”

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