Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Dope

In 1991, I received the call, and went down to U.T., where I found about a thousand people assembled. George Bush had just launched operation Desert Storm. We were assembled to protest the war. I remember running into my friend Emrys. We didn't talk about the war -- we talked about Emrys' dissertation, which at that time occupied his entire social life. Both of us were old enough to have been demonstrating, at this point, since the seventies. I was thirty two, which was a little above the average age of the demonstrators, but not much. The eighties had been full of demonstrations -- divestment, disarmament, Nicaragua -- and almost everyone there knew the drill. Neither Emerys nor I was happy to be there -- demonstrating had long lost its appeal over, say, having a beer in a burger joint. But duty called. We rallied in the dark -- as I recall, it was around eight o'clock -- and marched to the capital. I don't recall the next couple of weeks in crystal clear detail, but I do know that I went to several rallies, one of which entered the state capital. We lay down on the floor, under the rotunda. We were not, alas, arrested.

Yesterday I went along the path by the lake to the center of town. The anti-war rally was going to be held, either cleverly or bizarrely, on Congress street bridge. The usual demonstration routine is to march to the capital steps and listen to a couple of hours of hopelessly inelegant speeches, which we punctuate with cries of encouragement or outrage. As I approached the bridge, I saw that it was jammed with people -- this caused me to smile real broadly at the women approaching me on the path. They smiled back, and then called my name. I focused -- it was S. and her friend, J. S., who never really utters a political word in my presence, surprised me when I talked to her on the telephone last week by telling me that she was going to go to the anti-war rally. She and J. handed me a sign that they'd been handed. It recommended peace as a means of lowering taxes -- perhaps a sentiment that would appeal to passing Congress street drivers, but not exactly the beatitudes. I think they were a little disappointed -- S. mentioned that the crowd didn't go anywhere. She was up for a march. J. mentioned that it was the first demonstration she had ever been to.

I proceeded with my little tax sign to the bridge. Both sides of it -- the walkways -- were covered with people -- although as I walked from one end to the other, I realized that the crowd came in lumps. There were stretches that were pretty bare. The atmosphere was midway between a serious demonstration and a summer afternoon at Barton Springs Pool. The same kids that you see at the pool -- the lanky seventeen year old boys with goatees and drums -- were assembled at the south end of the bridge, in their third world knits, drumming. There were a number of girls of around the same age. There were some middle aged people like me, there were college students, there was a man who unfurled a large black flag (nice gesture), there were bicyclers I recognized as Critical Mass, there were people in trucks and cars going back and forth across the bridge, there were signs asking drivers to honk for peace, and there was an endless amount of flashing the peace sign at drivers, many of whom flashed it back. A woman --maybe nineteen -- had painted a peace symbol on her face, and was telling her friends that maybe they should sing something by that guy, you know... Bob Dylan, or like the Beatles. Another woman, whose sign was dense with a long quote, was asked about it and gave a long explanation of how she had gotten the quote from the Egyptian book of the dead and how Bush's nephew at Fox news had gotten him in during the coup, etc.

On the whole, the rally showed two things. On the dark side, since the grassroots politics of the eighties were pretty much decimated during the nineties, the mechanics of rallying large groups of people and directing acts of civil disobedience have to be learned all over again. This group, however good hearted, was far from being the shock troops of the revolution, unless the revolution requires a lot of bongoing.

On the bright side, the rally did draw at least a thousand people. It is a start. There are, this time, no leaders, no leading organizations, to organize what will probably be a struggle this year and the next. The Democrats have disappeared into a vacuum. The Greens, after embarrassing the Dems, seem more concerned with extending the principles of the Feingold McCain bill than with the kind of politics we get AFTER we elect our politicians. Perhaps the leaders of the new anti-war movement are still in grad schools in Michigan, or working in software in San Jose -- I don't know. There are big questions ahead. If Bush does commit troops to Iraq, the big question is going to be withdrawing them. Of course, the anti-war side has to be for withdrawal. But the devil in the details is that withdrawal, at that point, will lead to chaos; while occupation will lead to a war of low level attrition as in Vietnam. A peace movement should definitely put these scenarios before the American public continually, before the war starts. When I went home, I switched on the radio, but the unctuous Southern tones of our President were more than I could take, so I switched it off, and then waited for the commentators. An hour latter, I turned it on again and listened to them. Amazingly, the Dem's house leader, Nancy Pelosi, mentioned the hazards of occupying Iraq. Wow -- a woman who actually thinks, in a position of some power!
Surely she will be attacked for that.

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