Planners of the city's annual MLK Day celebration at Seattle Center were brutally disappointed this year: they wanted, but were unable to arrange, for retired general Colin Powell as their marquee attraction. It's hard to know whether to laugh, cry, or take something to quell the uncontrollable vomiting.

It's also hard to imagine a more insulting gesture to King's memory than Colin Powell on the memorial stage, unless he's there for serious atonement. (Not Powell's priority; as it turned out, a rider in his contract for a Jan. 20 corporate pep rally prevented his participation.)

King is, along with Mohandas Gandhi, one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his too-brief adult life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority, and gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents. Colin Powell, by contrast, is celebrated for spending his entire adult life obeying white folks' orders and contributing to the shooting, bombing, poisoning, and incineration of people of color, by the millions, on as many continents as the Pentagon could find on its satellite maps. The only thing King and Powell have in common is that they're both famous black males. It's hard to know which is worse: the tokenism, or the whitewash of history.

But a Colin Powell or a John Stanford as contemporary role model is only a symptom of what has happened in a few short years to the birthday and memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. MLK Day is becoming the Mississippi Burning of third Mondays. What began as gratitude (that they made a movie about it) gradually becomes revulsion at how new generations of white people mislearn the story.

King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. He is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black southern churches behind him. And because he died before he had a chance to be widely believed a relic or buffoon.

What little history TV gives us this week is at least as much about forgetting as about remembering. We hear "I have a dream"; we don't hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. We see Bull Connor in Birmingham; we don't see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago, or the generations of beatings and busts before he got famous. We don't hear about the mainstream contempt at the time for King, his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe. We don't see retrospectives on his linkage of civil rights with Third World liberation. We forget that he died in Memphis lending support for a union (the garbage workers' strike), while organizing a multi-racial Poor Peoples' Campaign that pushed affordable housing and decent-paying jobs as basic civil rights transcending skin color. We forget that many of King's fellow leaders weren't nearly so polite. Cities were burning. We remember Selma instead.

But the bigger problem is that King has become an icon, not a historical figure (distorted or otherwise). The racism he challenged four decades ago in Georgia was also dominant here, but few white Seattleites today are familiar with that history: the housing and school segregation, laws barring Asians from owning land, the marches downtown from Garfield High School, police harassment of both radical and mainstream black activists. We don't know the stories of the people, many still with us, who led those struggles in Seattle. And we rarely acknowledge that the overt racism of Montgomery 1955 is no longer so overt, but still part of Seattle 1998; it shows up in Seattle's geography, in its jails, and yes, in its very earnest and extremely white leftie activist groups.

If Seattle were serious about his legacy, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. would run through Belltown or Ballard, not the CD and Rainier Valley. Literally, in just about every big city in the U.S., urban planners and city councils put King back in the ghetto, along with both the legions of people who worked with him and the many more who've taken up his work since.

Anti-affirmative action bigots like John Carlson can claim King's mantle and "if he were alive today" approval only because in 1998, TVland's MLK has no politics. And, for that matter, no faith. Instead, for white America, King's soft-focus image often reinforces white supremacism. (See? We're not so bad. We honor him now. Why don't those black people just get over it, anyway? We did.) Dr. King, nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a Hallmark Card, a warm, fuzzy, feelgood invocation of neighborliness, a file photo for sneaker or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo ops by barely retired generals. Be sure to check out the Three-Day-Only White Sale at The Bon.

He deserves better. We all do.