By Dave Zirin, Edge of Sports, 1 August 2008
Jonah Goldberg’s regular column in the LA Times is usually an awkward grab bag of right wing talking points backed by knowledge of history that would shame a poodle, although a poodle would never be so pompous. Goldberg stepped on to my beat this past week with a column about the 1968 Olympic protestors, Tommie Smith and John Carlos. His piece was such a cheap, dishonest scribble, I feel compelled to respond. The column’s starting point was the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, given to Smith and Carlos at the recent 2008 ESPY Awards. Lest you had any doubt about Goldberg’s take, the headline blares, “’68 Olympics salute deserves no honor: ESPN ignored the violent extremism behind the black power salute given by two medalists at the Mexico City Games.”
One could tell right away that Goldberg didn’t read a book, an article, even a fortune cookie, about the 1968 Olympics before whipping out his laptop. I know, research is hard … and who needs facts when you have dogma? — but Smith and Carlos never advocated any kind of violence. Furthermore, they saw their symbol as a sign of resistance that would connect broadly across ethnicities, not a narrow expression of “black power”.
But the title turns out to be the intellectual summit of the piece.