Street people

Caught a lot of Washington D.C. protest coverage on C-Span today, markedly more than the professional news channels combined. I’m sure C-Span will rerun coverage from the antiwar rally and march this weekend. Try to check it out if you couldn’t make it out to the D.C. or San Francisco rally. If I wasn’t saving money for my upcoming England/Scotland/Paris jaunt, I would have taken some time off and flown to D.C. to be part of the fun. Always wanted to see the Smithsonian anyway.

Good news: Found out about a weekly protest in my neighborhood every Saturday morning. If I can’t be in D.C., I’ll wave my sign with my community at the nearby shopping mall.

A few notes from my C-Span crow’s nest.

* I hope that protestors aren’t going to be portrayed more as coddling Saddam Hussein than wanting a more peaceful method to removing the man, perhaps through his gassing of his own people in the 80s. I’ve said it before: If Slobodan Milosevic can be hauled in on war crimes, why not the Iraqi dictator?

* The speakers (mostly belonging to progressive interests) at these rallies really have to tone it down from the shrill talk-shout they use at the mike. Martin Luther King Jr. was a master at the booming, attention-getting, nearly hypnotizing speaking method. Let the words have the weight, not the pitch. I have King's "I Have a Dream" speech playing in my mp3 player right now, and it's giving me chills just hearing him speak those words.

* Speaking of speakers: Give more mike time at the rallies to the non-professional rally speaker. A few months ago, I was at a large antiwar rally/march in Seattle. Out of all the people who got to the microphone to pump up the crowd, the most moving and energizing speaker came from a mother whose son was jailed under very shady circumstances. She was only told "terrorism" and off her son went, into the black hole of John Ashcroft’s Justice Machine. Her quivering voice, her honest fear in public speaking, her unpretentious plea for her boy back gave the proceeding a silent validation. We’re here today for him, and us, and truth, and making this country something more than Pinochet’s Chile.

* We need an antiwar concert, akin to the Free Tibet concert pulled off a few years ago. What’s U2 up to? Radiohead? Sting? Patti Smyth spoke and sang in Washington D.C. today. It’s a start. Yes, it violates my rule about not wanting the celebrities to run the show, but I remember the Amnesty International shows of the 1980s and how many young people joined the human rights group after they saw U2 and Sting take the stage and give a few words about how they, the crowd, can save lives. "Live Aid" raised $100 million with two simultaneous concerts in 1985. Just think of what can be done again.

* Upon retrospect, Congressman Charles Rangel’s (D-NY) proposal to bring back the draft (under the guise that everyone –rich and poor – would share the burden carrying out Team Bush’s foreign policy of invasion and intimidation) is a really bad idea. While I see what Rangel is trying to do, giving Team Bush more cannon fodder (let’s face it, the rich kids will find their way away from combat) by proposing a draft weakens the only weapon the public had against a Bush-backed draft: outrage. If Team Bush was seen as dragging kids off to war, there would be a massive backlash on campuses and by parents across America. Now, a democrat is offering up something that Bush could grudgingly accept as good, fair policy while secretly cackling over getting more grist for his mill. Also, Rangel misses another snake in the basket: Namely, how the draft is obsolete when you have at least one out of 10 American soldiers in reality mercenaries for armies belonging to shadowy companies like DynCorp, MPRI and the better known Halliburton, former roosting ground for Vice President Dick Cheney.

No one knows the exact number of protestors in D.C., but the C-Span cameras showed great masses of humans marching down streets and chanting. Some placed the number as low at a few tens of thousands to 200,000 or more. There are no official estimates, but more than 20,000 were identified as marching today in Portland. Whatever. I’m sure we have a solid idea of the number in D.C., but I’m guessing it’s enormous, something that’s giving Team Bush fits of demoralization. We’ll probably get some impressive number later in the week. I’m guessing it was at least 100,000.

Again, this is before the shooting starts.

Best snip from the Washington Post’s protest coverage. As Jon Stewart would say on "The Daily Show": Here it is, your moment of Zen.


"You guys should go get a job," said a man traveling in the passenger side of a black SUV that pulled over briefly to heckle protesters in the morning on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Later in the day, on the Pennsylvania Avenue SE march route, a group of people sharing a bottle of champagne on one building's second-floor balcony displayed a sign reading, "Hippies Go Home." Protesters responded, "We are home."


Today’s Word: Noose

From One Word

I see the hangman, unhappy with his task. I see the crowd, mired in the rain, looking for closure. I see the boards under my feet and the preacher before he slips the leather hood over my head. This fabric separates the crowd from the harsh face of their vengeance. The coil of rope has come.

Note: The hanging motif was common in other responses. Hard to slip away from the ready-to-go, ingrained image with a word like “noose.” Reminds me of the comedian who joked that the name Hitler was tarnished forever and, as a consequence, you’ll never see a sign advertising “Hitler’s Fish and Chips.”