"Harry Belafonte - Patriot"

Singer Harry Belafonte, probably best known to the younger generation as the voice that calls out "Day - O!" at Yankee Stadium and other sporting events, spoke here in Durham the other day as part of Duke University's celebration of the life of Martin Luther King. As expected, the assholes in Young Americans for the Freedom to do Things the Way we Tell You To had some issues with Harry (you can google the link yourself, i'm not going to sully my words). Seems the marketplace of ideas, which to most conservatives is more likeable as an abstract concept than as part of their reality, isn't an adequate tool when it turns out that people really want to hear progressive and even radical ideas.

It doesn't seem, though, that Harry had anything particularly radical to say during his speech at Duke Chapel on Sunday.

Killing is our easiest tool. When you look at the president who has led us into a dishonorable war that has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, many our own sons and daughters, I ask myself what Dr. King would have asked...

"It is an act that has driven fear and terror into the hearts of the American people. What is the essential difference in quality of our humanity for those who would do the cruel and tragic deed of flying an airplane into a building and killing 3,000 innocent Americans and those who would lie and lead the nation into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands?

"Excuse me, fellow citizens, if the line for me becomes a little blurred."

. . .

A cancer survivor soon to turn 79, Belafonte said that if he could choose his epitaph, it would be, "Harry Belafonte, Patriot."