Another third Monday in January has passed, as has another weekend of platitudes and sound bites selectively remembering the life and times of one of our nation's great activists for social justice, Martin Luther King Jr.

Most Americans would probably be scratching their collective heads wondering why Seattle's annual MLK Day celebration and march originating at Garfield High School was the occasion for a 10,000 strong anti-war march to the Federal Building in downtown Seattle -- much less why such a large anti-war contingent in the rally would be welcomed by the march's organizers. There couldn't have been a more fitting tribute to King's activism than the site of the hundreds of thousands of people who rallied across the nation against Bush's planned invasion of Iraq over the King weekend.

King is overwhelmingly viewed in the mass media as a campaigner against Southern segregation. But King saved the best for the last years of his life, after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, by becoming more, not less, radical in his middle age, as he began campaigning for a class-based vision of economic equality and justice and against the Vietnam War.

The annual canon remembering King's life, presented to the public in the mass media, is of King marching against segregation in the South in the '50s and early '60s. Then he tells the nation he has a Dream in 1963 in Washington, after dodging police water cannons and the bomb throwing of white racists down in Birmingham. Then he visits the White House a couple years later to witness the signing of the Voting Rights Act. Three years later he's shot dead on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis. Of course, the context of King's visit is left out of media accounts of his assassination. He was in Memphis in support of striking black sanitation workers. Viewing most media accounts of King's life, one is led to believe he went on a long sabbatical between the signing of the Voting Rights Act and the day he was assassinated.

King never stopped marching and his activism was much broader than simply fighting Southern segregation. We've all seen images of police and white mob brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Selma, et al., but how often do we see the 1966 image of King getting hit by a rock thrown at him by a white bigot while marching in Chicago?

Of course, King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech given in New York City on April 4, 1967 is conveniently forgotten in most of the mass media as well. In his speech King denounced the US government as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world and said it was on the wrong side of world revolution. He rightly saw the war effort as a drain on the federal funds necessary to combat domestic economic inequality. King was roundly denounced by Time, the Washington Post and the rest of the mass media for his anti-war position. This speech helped make King deeply unpopular in elite liberal circles by the end of his life. While "Beyond Vietnam" may be given short shrift in media accounts of King's life, it was not forgotten by the organizers of this year's MLK Day celebration. As thousands of anti-war MLK Day marchers converged on the plaza in front of the Federal Building, and on Second Ave. and the plaza of the adjacent Wells Fargo tower, a recording of "Beyond Vietnam" was played.

The peace movement has never died. Much to the chagrin of the right, it's grown and expanded and is the reason why President Bush, Sr. turned around and retreated from invading and occupying Iraq in 1991. "We've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome," Bush, Sr. gushed in March 1991 at the end of the Operation Desert Storm aerial bombing campaign against Iraq. He was wrong. The real test of whether or not the "Vietnam Syndrome," i.e. public opposition to unfettered US war around the world, has been kicked will be learned in the coming months and years, if President Bush, Jr. follows through on his administration's plans to invade and occupy Iraq. Such a full scale invasion and occupation of another country has never been attempted by Washington since withdrawal of US soldiers from South Vietnam in 1973. The politics of following through on invading Iraq loom large for Bush and company. I don't doubt for a second that they have contemplated Bush's reelection prospects if hundreds of thousands of US troops are occupying Iraq and fighting an internal guerrilla resistance during an election year 12 months from now. Bush's reelection prospects would be severely hurt by a deeply unpopular military occupation of Iraq and hundreds, possibly thousands of US soldiers getting killed each year.

As I stood in front of Garfield before the rally began, I couldn't help but think of windbags on right-wing talk radio, stocked with chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and Seattle's own Michael Medved, who have been choking on their rage over the burgeoning peace protests the past few months. San Francisco's Michael Savage wants us anti-war dissidents locked up and sent to work camps. Closer to home, I turned on Michael Medved's show and, predictably, he opened it by chiding the January 18 anti-war demonstrators in Washington, DC. I really enjoy listening to these chickenhawks bloviating about the anti-war movement. Thanks to the peace movement, these warmongers are condemned to a lifetime of kicking and screaming behind a microphone about the inability of Washington to wage unfettered war on the world, and that's really cool.