The bureaucracy, the march, and the war: American disengagement -- II
Thursday, 15 November 2007
Tom Engelhardt in the concluding part of his two-part article
WHEN people look back on the Vietnam era, few comment on how connected the size and vigor of demonstrations were to a conception of government in Washington as responsible to the American people. Even the youthful radicals of the time, in their outrage, still generally believed that Washington was not living up to some ideal they had absorbed in their younger years. Whatever they were denouncing, the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in their Port Huron Statement, for instance, spoke without irony or discomfort of "[f]reedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men."
Though they may not have known it, they were still believers, after a fashion. By and large, the demonstrators of that moment not only believed that Washington should listen, but when, for instance, they chanted angrily, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?", that President Lyndon Baines Johnson would be listening. (And, in fact, he was. He called it "that horrible song.") Which young people today would believe that in their gut? Who would believe such a thing of "the bureaucracy"?
Don't forget, demonstrating is another kind of civic duty -- but perhaps a waning one. I was struck this weekend that, even among people I know, many of whom had demonstrated in the Vietnam era and had turned out again in the early years of this war, next to none were on the streets this Saturday. Most were simply going about their business with other, better things to do.
The fact is: Attending a march like Saturday's is still, for me, something like an ingrained civic habit, like.... gulp.... voting, which I can't imagine not doing -- even when it has little meaning to me -- or keeping informed by reading a newspaper daily in print (something that, it seems, just about no one under 25 does any more). These are the habits of a lifetime and they don't disappear quickly. But when they're gone, or if they don't make it to the next generation intact, it's hard, if not impossible, to get them back.
If you need another point of comparison, consider TV comic Stephen Colbert's joke (or is it?) race for the presidency in his home state of South Carolina (or the fact that, in a Rasmussen Report telephone poll, he garnered 13% support in the Republican field just days after announcing his run). Again, I'm old enough to remember the last time something like this happened. Sometime in the late 1950s -- the details escape me -- a few fans of the cartoon strip Pogo decided to launch a "Pogo for President" campaign in election season. (Mind you, that strip, about a talking opossum and his pals in Okefenokee Swamp, was a classic with a critical, political edge. Who could forget the moment when Howland Owl and the turtle, Churchy LaFemme, decided to enter the nuclear age by creating uranium from a combination of a Yew tree and a geranium.) In the strip, Pogo did indeed run for president and its creator, Walt Kelly, used that hook to promote perfectly real voter-registration campaigns. But -- as I remember it -- he was horrified by the real-life campaign for his character and insisted that it be stopped. You didn't, after all, make a mockery of American democracy that way. It just wasn't funny.
No longer. Now, the "character" is launched onto the field of electoral play by the creator himself, who also happens to be promoting a book in need of publicity; and Colbert's ploy is hailed as a kind of transcendent reality, not simply a mockery of it, even on that most mainstream of Sunday yak shows, Tim Russert's Meet the Press. Of course, the joke -- and it's a grim one indeed -- is on what's left of American democracy, which, as Colbert obviously means to prove, is the real mockery of our moment.
Perhaps we all have to hope that, when he's done with the election, he'll turn his attention to demonstrations in a world increasingly uncongenial to "civic duty" of any sort. It seems that we've entered a time in which even demonstrating can be outsourced, privatized, left to the pros, or simply dismissed (like so much else) as hopeless, a waste of time. So I was heading toward this demonstration, wondering not why more people wouldn't be there, but why anyone would be.
Penned in on the Streets
And here's how it felt:
"From the moment I looked across the aisle in the subway and saw the woman with the upside-down, hand-painted sign -- an anguished face, blood, and 'no war' on it -- and she noted my sign, also resting against my knees but modestly turned away from view, and gave me the thumbs up sign, I knew things would be okay. As my wife, a friend, and I exited the subway at the 50th Street station on the west side of New York, I noted three college-age women bent over a subway bench magic-marking in messages on their blank sign boards, a signal that we were heading for some special do-it-yourself event."
Oops! Sorry, that was my description of the first moments of a massive antiwar march -- half a million or more people took part -- in New York City on February 15, 2003, just over a month before the invasion of Iraq was launched.
On my subway car Saturday, there were no obvious demonstrators carrying signs; no eager faces or hands ready to give a thumbs-up sign; no one who even looked like he or she was heading for a demonstration. (Of course, I had no handmade sign and didn't look that way either.)
A signature aspect of this era's antiwar demonstrations, from the first prewar giants on, has been the spontaneous, personal signage, often a literal sea of waving individual expressions of indignation, sardonic humor, hope, despair, absurdity, you name it.
On Saturday, most of the signs were printed and clearly organizationally inspired; not all, however, as the shots by Tam Turse, the young photojournalist who accompanied me, eloquently indicate.
As for the police, well, here's how it felt with them:
"They still had us more or less confined to the sidewalk and a bit of the street on one side of the avenue, and cars were still crawling by. But already demonstrators were moving the orange police cones quickly set up for this unexpected crowd on an unexpectedly occupied avenue ever farther out into the traffic. Soon, to relieve pressure, the police opened a side street and with a great cheer our section of the rolling non-march burst through up to Second [Avenue] where we found ourselves in an even greater mass of humanity, heading north on our own avenue without a single car, truck, or bus."
Uh-oh, my mistake again! That, too, was the February 15, 2003 demo. This time, I came out of the subway at 23rd Street and was promptly accosted by a confused young German woman, postcards clutched in one hand. She pointed at two blue mailboxes on the corner and asked, in charmingly accented English, how you put the cards in. "Oh," I said, "let me show you." And I promptly pulled on each mailbox handle, only to find them locked. The police had undoubtedly done this as an anti-terror measure. The woman was relieved, she told me, that she wasn't "mad." No, I assured her, it was the world that was mad, not her.
The rest of the march was, in essence, a police event, the demonstrators penned in by moveable metal barricades, "guarded" often by more police personnel than on-lookers. From the moment we began to march in the rain, the police presence was overwhelming, starting with a well-marked NYPD "Sky Watch" tower, a mobile tower that can be raised anywhere in which police observers can spy on you from behind a Darth Vader-style darkened window. In fact, we marchers were penned in by the police as we headed south for Foley Square, cut off, for instance, from the large cross street at 14th by a row of dismounted police using their motorcycles as a barricade. Police vehicles and police on foot moved slowly in front of the demonstration as well as behind it. Police even marched in the demonstration (though not as demonstrators). Essentially, it was, as all rallies and demonstrations now seem to be in our growing Homeland Security state-let, a police march.
Led by a sizeable contingent of soldiers, vets, and military families, there were perhaps 10,000 marchers -- a rare occasion when my own rough estimate fit the normal police undercount -- on a dreary, rainy day, which is no small thing. Each of them left his or her life for a few hours to take a walk (or, in the case of one elderly lady, to be wheeled, encased in plastic, or for two "grannies for peace" to be peddled in a volunteer pedicab) in mild discomfort, to chant, to call out, even in a few creative cases, to display feelings on individual placards or constructions or in group tableaux. Each of them, for his or her own reason, was civic, even global. Add up all the people who did this in 11 cities nationwide, and the numbers aren't unimpressive. But with unending war, as well as perpetual death and destruction on the Bush administration menu, with the horizon darkened by the possibility of a strike against Iran, and a population which has turned its back on most of the above, it was, nonetheless, clearly underwhelming.
Meanwhile, in Iraq on Saturday, according to news reports, it was just an ordinary day, the usual harvest of decomposing corpses, deadly roadside blasts, assassinations, kidnappings, U.S. raids, and, bizarrely, the breakfast poisoning of 100 Iraqi soldiers. One American death was announced on Saturday. We don't yet know who the soldier was, only that he died "when he sustained small arms fire while conducting operations in Salah ad Din [Province]." He could, of course, have come from New York City, but the odds are that he came from a small town somewhere in the American hinterlands, from perhaps Latta, South Carolina or Lone Pine, California.
He might, or might not, have ever visited Disney World. He might have joined the overstretched U.S. armed forces for the increasingly massive bonuses the military is now offering to bind the poor and futureless close in a war that has been rejected by the American people; or perhaps he simply signed on with some of that residual sense of civic duty that's fast fleeing the land; or, possibly, both of the above. Perhaps, if he hadn't died, he would, like 12 former captains who recently wrote "The Real Iraq We Knew" for the Washington Post op-ed page and called our "best option… to leave Iraq immediately," have returned to speak out against the war. Who knows. Already, for 3,839 Americans in Iraq and 451 Americans in Afghanistan, we will never have a way of knowing.
(Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq).
TomDispatch
WHEN people look back on the Vietnam era, few comment on how connected the size and vigor of demonstrations were to a conception of government in Washington as responsible to the American people. Even the youthful radicals of the time, in their outrage, still generally believed that Washington was not living up to some ideal they had absorbed in their younger years. Whatever they were denouncing, the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in their Port Huron Statement, for instance, spoke without irony or discomfort of "[f]reedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men."
Though they may not have known it, they were still believers, after a fashion. By and large, the demonstrators of that moment not only believed that Washington should listen, but when, for instance, they chanted angrily, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?", that President Lyndon Baines Johnson would be listening. (And, in fact, he was. He called it "that horrible song.") Which young people today would believe that in their gut? Who would believe such a thing of "the bureaucracy"?
Don't forget, demonstrating is another kind of civic duty -- but perhaps a waning one. I was struck this weekend that, even among people I know, many of whom had demonstrated in the Vietnam era and had turned out again in the early years of this war, next to none were on the streets this Saturday. Most were simply going about their business with other, better things to do.
The fact is: Attending a march like Saturday's is still, for me, something like an ingrained civic habit, like.... gulp.... voting, which I can't imagine not doing -- even when it has little meaning to me -- or keeping informed by reading a newspaper daily in print (something that, it seems, just about no one under 25 does any more). These are the habits of a lifetime and they don't disappear quickly. But when they're gone, or if they don't make it to the next generation intact, it's hard, if not impossible, to get them back.
If you need another point of comparison, consider TV comic Stephen Colbert's joke (or is it?) race for the presidency in his home state of South Carolina (or the fact that, in a Rasmussen Report telephone poll, he garnered 13% support in the Republican field just days after announcing his run). Again, I'm old enough to remember the last time something like this happened. Sometime in the late 1950s -- the details escape me -- a few fans of the cartoon strip Pogo decided to launch a "Pogo for President" campaign in election season. (Mind you, that strip, about a talking opossum and his pals in Okefenokee Swamp, was a classic with a critical, political edge. Who could forget the moment when Howland Owl and the turtle, Churchy LaFemme, decided to enter the nuclear age by creating uranium from a combination of a Yew tree and a geranium.) In the strip, Pogo did indeed run for president and its creator, Walt Kelly, used that hook to promote perfectly real voter-registration campaigns. But -- as I remember it -- he was horrified by the real-life campaign for his character and insisted that it be stopped. You didn't, after all, make a mockery of American democracy that way. It just wasn't funny.
No longer. Now, the "character" is launched onto the field of electoral play by the creator himself, who also happens to be promoting a book in need of publicity; and Colbert's ploy is hailed as a kind of transcendent reality, not simply a mockery of it, even on that most mainstream of Sunday yak shows, Tim Russert's Meet the Press. Of course, the joke -- and it's a grim one indeed -- is on what's left of American democracy, which, as Colbert obviously means to prove, is the real mockery of our moment.
Perhaps we all have to hope that, when he's done with the election, he'll turn his attention to demonstrations in a world increasingly uncongenial to "civic duty" of any sort. It seems that we've entered a time in which even demonstrating can be outsourced, privatized, left to the pros, or simply dismissed (like so much else) as hopeless, a waste of time. So I was heading toward this demonstration, wondering not why more people wouldn't be there, but why anyone would be.
Penned in on the Streets
And here's how it felt:
"From the moment I looked across the aisle in the subway and saw the woman with the upside-down, hand-painted sign -- an anguished face, blood, and 'no war' on it -- and she noted my sign, also resting against my knees but modestly turned away from view, and gave me the thumbs up sign, I knew things would be okay. As my wife, a friend, and I exited the subway at the 50th Street station on the west side of New York, I noted three college-age women bent over a subway bench magic-marking in messages on their blank sign boards, a signal that we were heading for some special do-it-yourself event."
Oops! Sorry, that was my description of the first moments of a massive antiwar march -- half a million or more people took part -- in New York City on February 15, 2003, just over a month before the invasion of Iraq was launched.
On my subway car Saturday, there were no obvious demonstrators carrying signs; no eager faces or hands ready to give a thumbs-up sign; no one who even looked like he or she was heading for a demonstration. (Of course, I had no handmade sign and didn't look that way either.)
A signature aspect of this era's antiwar demonstrations, from the first prewar giants on, has been the spontaneous, personal signage, often a literal sea of waving individual expressions of indignation, sardonic humor, hope, despair, absurdity, you name it.
On Saturday, most of the signs were printed and clearly organizationally inspired; not all, however, as the shots by Tam Turse, the young photojournalist who accompanied me, eloquently indicate.
As for the police, well, here's how it felt with them:
"They still had us more or less confined to the sidewalk and a bit of the street on one side of the avenue, and cars were still crawling by. But already demonstrators were moving the orange police cones quickly set up for this unexpected crowd on an unexpectedly occupied avenue ever farther out into the traffic. Soon, to relieve pressure, the police opened a side street and with a great cheer our section of the rolling non-march burst through up to Second [Avenue] where we found ourselves in an even greater mass of humanity, heading north on our own avenue without a single car, truck, or bus."
Uh-oh, my mistake again! That, too, was the February 15, 2003 demo. This time, I came out of the subway at 23rd Street and was promptly accosted by a confused young German woman, postcards clutched in one hand. She pointed at two blue mailboxes on the corner and asked, in charmingly accented English, how you put the cards in. "Oh," I said, "let me show you." And I promptly pulled on each mailbox handle, only to find them locked. The police had undoubtedly done this as an anti-terror measure. The woman was relieved, she told me, that she wasn't "mad." No, I assured her, it was the world that was mad, not her.
The rest of the march was, in essence, a police event, the demonstrators penned in by moveable metal barricades, "guarded" often by more police personnel than on-lookers. From the moment we began to march in the rain, the police presence was overwhelming, starting with a well-marked NYPD "Sky Watch" tower, a mobile tower that can be raised anywhere in which police observers can spy on you from behind a Darth Vader-style darkened window. In fact, we marchers were penned in by the police as we headed south for Foley Square, cut off, for instance, from the large cross street at 14th by a row of dismounted police using their motorcycles as a barricade. Police vehicles and police on foot moved slowly in front of the demonstration as well as behind it. Police even marched in the demonstration (though not as demonstrators). Essentially, it was, as all rallies and demonstrations now seem to be in our growing Homeland Security state-let, a police march.
Led by a sizeable contingent of soldiers, vets, and military families, there were perhaps 10,000 marchers -- a rare occasion when my own rough estimate fit the normal police undercount -- on a dreary, rainy day, which is no small thing. Each of them left his or her life for a few hours to take a walk (or, in the case of one elderly lady, to be wheeled, encased in plastic, or for two "grannies for peace" to be peddled in a volunteer pedicab) in mild discomfort, to chant, to call out, even in a few creative cases, to display feelings on individual placards or constructions or in group tableaux. Each of them, for his or her own reason, was civic, even global. Add up all the people who did this in 11 cities nationwide, and the numbers aren't unimpressive. But with unending war, as well as perpetual death and destruction on the Bush administration menu, with the horizon darkened by the possibility of a strike against Iran, and a population which has turned its back on most of the above, it was, nonetheless, clearly underwhelming.
Meanwhile, in Iraq on Saturday, according to news reports, it was just an ordinary day, the usual harvest of decomposing corpses, deadly roadside blasts, assassinations, kidnappings, U.S. raids, and, bizarrely, the breakfast poisoning of 100 Iraqi soldiers. One American death was announced on Saturday. We don't yet know who the soldier was, only that he died "when he sustained small arms fire while conducting operations in Salah ad Din [Province]." He could, of course, have come from New York City, but the odds are that he came from a small town somewhere in the American hinterlands, from perhaps Latta, South Carolina or Lone Pine, California.
He might, or might not, have ever visited Disney World. He might have joined the overstretched U.S. armed forces for the increasingly massive bonuses the military is now offering to bind the poor and futureless close in a war that has been rejected by the American people; or perhaps he simply signed on with some of that residual sense of civic duty that's fast fleeing the land; or, possibly, both of the above. Perhaps, if he hadn't died, he would, like 12 former captains who recently wrote "The Real Iraq We Knew" for the Washington Post op-ed page and called our "best option… to leave Iraq immediately," have returned to speak out against the war. Who knows. Already, for 3,839 Americans in Iraq and 451 Americans in Afghanistan, we will never have a way of knowing.
(Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq).
TomDispatch