Remora

Peter Dixon, 34, photographer, lives in London: "Just because war has started doesn't mean that my opinion has changed. The war is still illegal. Marching today is even more important than before. What else can we do?"
--Guardian, Anti-war protesters take to the streets.

LI has been revolving Peter Dixon's question in our little pointy head since participating in the last Austin Anti-war rally Thursday. And we have been sharpening our big idea, which is that the antiwar campaign must either doom itself to irrelevance by playing the game of the politics of expression (hey, we are trying to get into punditspeak, where pronunciations are always from on high, and use the modals of necessity -- must and should, as if we were all Nemesis, Jrs. down here) or turn into a movement against the upcoming occupation.

We went to the Stop the War coalition website, which is the Net hq for the people that organized the huge demonstrations on February 15. Unfortunately, our feeling is that the SW people have only one campaign strategy, which is to repeat February 15. That might work in the UK, but it certainly won't work in the U.S.

Why shouldn't the focus be on stopping the war, you ask? Because this war is moving with extraordinary rapidity, and will stop itself -- at least the first phase -- pretty soon. If you simply want the war stopped, it will soon be stopped.

No, what we don't want is what is forecast in Nicholas Hoffman's column in the New York Observer, which turns the jaded eye of some Joseph Conrad character upon the probable effects of the war. Oddly enough, the horror and nightmare Hoffman evokes is synonymous with Robert Kaplan's idea of sweetness and light, as adumbrated in this month's Atlantic. Robert Kaplan is one of the intellectual architects of the war, and he cuts through the facade of propaganda about the war thrown up by figures of fun like the ineffable Hitchens. We are going to do a post on that Kaplan article -- it is so deliciously open about Bush's foreign policy, which is a sort of Sadism as dreamt up by a backwoods evangelical.

...

To stop the occupation, the antiwar movement, at least that bit of it that shows itself in Austin, Texas (which we assume is a sample of the larger, national movement) is going to have to stop concentrating exclusively on the same demographic Fox comedy shows are aired at: the young and the restless. The speakers at the rally we went to referred repeatedly to their students. They are recruited from academia; they are wholly honorable in their sentiments; but just because they occupy a niche in this country where radicalism can be comfortable, they are limited by their vocabulary and attitudes to what they are used to. So, for instance, the broadcast to the wrong niche. The youth of America might be important consumers of CDs and blue jeans, but they are no longer the chosen vehicle of the kind of efficient political movement that can actually stop the occupation. Polls show that, just as in the Vietnam war and the Korean war, the demographic with the strongest aversion to this war is the Retirement set --- that's right, people above 55. Some of them made it to the rally Thursday, but they were not at all enlisted by the speakers.

This is from a WP poll published on March 4th:


"The poll also found that some of the strongest doubts about a war with Iraq are coming from a seemingly unexpected source: older Americans, who were far less likely to support taking military action than young adults -- a dramatic illustration of how President Bush's policies have reopened divisions in the electorate that were largely absent immediately before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan 17 months ago. At the same time, large majorities of Democrats and minorities expressed opposition to taking military action against Iraq."

From those constituencies, the older group and the minorities were dramatically under-represented in the march, while the young constituted easily 65 percent of the marchers. I suppose that the older segment was well represented on the platform -- there were gray haired musicians playing Dylan songs from 1962. And that is good. But there was no Spanish-language music, there was no rap, there was nothing to appeal to the East side of Austin. And there were no Rotarians up there. There should be.

This is a delicate moment, and it requires coalitions between libertarians and leftists, conservatives and liberals. And the art of making those coalitions is, alas, untaught among grassroots organizers, who more and more come from a narrow segment of this society: academia.

However, we have to appeal to the Business Week reader. Especially as we move into the occupation phase, the cost of the enterprise will start to wake up the businessman type. But they will be thrown back by their instincts into the prowar camp if they believe being anti-occupation is not serious. If, that is, they believe that it is the equivalent of being cool in a coffee house, or being indignant as a form of emotional refreshment. No, the indignation we need is to the death, in the bone -- one willing to give up being right and righteous, always a nice hierarchizing move, for being efficient.