Martin and Barack and Gaza

The Great PD and The Great 5H texted all day yesterday from the Mall in Washington DC. "Stevie's on! The Obamas are dancing on stage!" "Wow! John Mellenkamp. Queen Latifah. Biden just spoke." The Mardi Gras atmosphere sounds like it was a contagion picked up by everybody in town. The above shot was taken from half a mile away, within a mass of hundreds of thousands of people, and Plot and Duck really wish they could have been there...no, really.

Yes, it's true that in 1969, when P and D first met, one of the first things Duck said to Plot on the phone was: "I hear there's supposed to be this music festival upstate, lots of people are going to be there, wanna go?" Plot said "What, all those crowds? And it's supposed to rain. And they're holding it on this guy Yasgur's farm? Fawgeddaboudit."

But that was then and this is now. This is music but a lot more.

Today it's Martin Luther King's Birthday, and for the first time in Plotnik's lifetime, and yours too, we are getting to see black anchor people talking on TV with half a dozen black faces on the screen behind him or her, and there's no need for other talking heads to comment about it.

Their words are irrelevant anyway. What counts is that America gets to see well dressed, intelligent people of color on TV, instead of the usual diet of drug dealers, muggers and Ebonic trash talkers, on one hand, and distraught victims from the projects gathered around their tiny, sad bouquets on the street, as they gather for the wake of another twelve year old gang victim, on the other.

It is so easy to feel the power. Plot heard Sting singing "If you love somebody, set them free" yesterday at the BART station in Oakland, coming home from Stiletto. Don't get this backwards: we are the people who are being set free here.