Home > One Year Later Than What?
Yesterday, I took my small sign — "Lies!" — out onto
the streets of New York City for several hours. If
you’re not a cop in a copter looking down on a
demonstration, or a journalist covering it from the
sidelines, or a spectator watching it flow by, a march
is invariably like a neighborhood in some city whose
horizons are beyond sight. All you get to see is your
own block or two as you’re swept along. I was, like any
marcher, "embedded" yesterday, though of my own sweet
choice, unlike our reporters in Iraq. On arrival I soon
found myself next to a giant green human peapod
(protesting what I wasn’t sure); by a pram with a
"Babies for Peace" sign over its blanket (and a baby
under it) pushed by a "Mommy for Peace"; and near a
woman in overalls sporting a "Farmers for Peace" sign
(northern Vermont branch, she told me as we passed).
Heading downtown, the first hand-made sign I noticed,
though, was on cloth attached to the back of a backpack
toted by an exceedingly young woman. It said
plaintively: "Dad come home," and when I asked, she
admitted that her father was indeed in Iraq. The last
sign I caught before I slipped out of the march several
hours later, was on a shivering dog, perched by some
miracle on top of a man’s backpack and wearing a
little, grey "Stop Bush" sweater.
In between, I noted, among so many other, lovingly
produced, hand-drawn signs: "Morning in America" (with
a red "u" in the process of being slipped between the
"o" and "r"); "Give Martha’s cell to Cheney"; "Unmanned
Drone" (with George’s head looming over the White
House); "Bring Em On — Home"; "Our boys died for
Halliburton"; "The point is Bush sucks!"; "Elect a
madman, You get madness"; "Hey New Yorker!!! Commit to
a swinger!!!" (with swing states in which to work
against Bush listed below); "Regime change now, impeach
Bush"; "We support our troops, we don’t support their
mission"; "It’s not collateral damage, it’s 10,168 dead
civilians"; "If you’re not outraged, you’re not
listening"; and so many more - all indicative of the
fact that, in the year since the last major antiwar
demonstrations, no one’s creativity or verve had fallen
off greatly.
My personal home-made favorite was a tiny sign, hardly
bigger than your hand, attached to a tiny stick. It
said on one side, "The emperor," and on the other, when
twirled, "has no clothes." The woman twirling it
assured me: "It’s a happy sign. People always smile.
It’s in its third demonstration." And then she smiled
winningly and walked on.
When it came to "Lies!" (one of the reported cries of
Spanish demonstrators after their government tried to
blame the Madrid attacks on the Basque organization
ETA), I was in good company. Among the variations I
happened to notice were: "Bush lied, they died"; "Who
dies for Bush lies?"; "Bush lies, who dies?"; "Bush
lied, Spaniards died."
Giant puppets seemed to be a dime-a-dozen in my neck of
the woods, ranging from a huge, garlanded Ma Nature
("stop the internal combustion of earth," it said a bit
mysteriously) to the row of enrobed, masked mothers
holding charred grey (ragdoll) bodies and backed up by
a line of dark-suited men, all in blood-stained white
gloves.
In our vicinity, along with a set of vigorous drummers,
we had a band of cheerleaders, who called themselves
"the Syracuse System Shakers," and vigorously shook
their pompoms for hours while performing robust numbers
with lines like "Cheney is an oil hog." Passing us were
the members of R.E.V.E.R.E with their mounted-rider
signs labeled "The Republicans are coming." I asked
one, dressed in a Salvation-Army used-clothing version
of colonial garb ("And I have no idea where my friend
got the hat") what their acronym stood for, and he
confided that it meant "the Revolutionary Ensemble
Vanquishes Evil Republican Extremists," which wasn’t,
he confessed, really an organization, "just a group of
friends." Then he returned to banging out a rhythm on
two not-so-colonial (imagine perhaps Herman Melville in
the South Seas) coconut-shell halves. And not far away
were the Zapatistas del Mundo Unidos and de Nueva York,
as their giant banner announced, some in elaborate
feather headdresses, and one holding an exceedingly
modest, pleading, hand-lettered sign: "Please, no war."
That sign and the button I noted a young woman wearing
— "still against the war" — seemed to catch something
of the moment. In the media, the marches, organized
worldwide from Sydney to Tokyo to Rome to San
Francisco, not to speak of so many points between, were
compared to the massive demos of February 15, 2003, the
last prewar moment, and often found lacking. They were
"small," or at least "smaller," and "tame," or at least
"tamer," which indeed was generally true. But the
comparison is perhaps not such an appropriate or
enlightening one.
The crisis moment before the war began brought huge
hunks of the world piling into the streets, hoping
against hope somehow to stop a war that the Bush
administration — we know now oh-so-clearly (though
many of us knew it then) — had no intention of letting
anything on earth stop. The world was to be an audience
for our global dominators; the people of the planet, or
their "ineffectual" representatives at the United
Nations, were to watch and ratify, but certainly not to
vote against. When it looked as if the vote at the UN
might actually go against the administration, despite
the bribing, bugging, and imperial arm-twisting, as if
there might be governments not capable of being
stampeded like our Congress by fear, then the
resolution was simply withdrawn and the die cast
anyway.
Now, the antiwar movement is back. As the recent
impressive Spanish vote indicated, it never fully
demobilized (and in the U.S. in the intervening year
took much of its energies elsewhere — into the Dean or
Kucinich campaigns, into organizations like MoveOn.org,
or onto the internet, and so on. Just over a year
"later" — though with so many "one year later" pieces
flowing by, I keep wondering a year later than what?
Maybe, given our world of intimidation, threat, and
violence, it’s a year "sooner"— it’s impressive that
some sizeable portion of the world turned out again in
smaller but still surprising numbers. At least
30,000-plus thousand in New York (if you believe our
mayor), upwards of 100,000 or more if you believe the
organizers; 500,000-1,000,000-plus in Rome;
25,000-100,000 in England; and so on.
All this despite the fact that today we’re at a murky,
quagmire moment, not one of absolute, immediate crisis
as we were then. The war has happened; Iraq is a mess
and the Middle East possibly almost as bad, but
casualties remain limited, if horrible, and for most of
us (though not the demonstrating military families)
still far away; policy options are unclear; neither
presidential candidate is for withdrawal; protestors
are sure to disagree about what’s to be done; a
presidential campaign (much influenced by the last
round of antiwar demos) is just gearing up; and
terrorism is clearly on the increase and the world, a
distinctly less safe place to be, but the United States
has not been attacked at home since September 11, 2001.
These demonstrations, at least here in New York, were
also less widely and well publicized than those of a
year ago, and the moment clearly less mobilizing, and
yet ...
Think of Saturday’s demos as a calling card at the door
of the Bush administration and its "coalition" of
un-democracy, led by leaders all of whom voted against
their own people’s wishes on the matter. (Democracy, it
seems, is basically something you only hand over to
oppressed peoples elsewhere, and then only if they’re
willing to follow your wishes.) In any case, the
general feeling in my two blocks of protesting New York
fit this moment of return. Spirits were good; the mood
creative; the noise level modest. It had the feeling of
a beginning, not a desperate end; of something holding
and waiting to build, not exploding and in danger of
collapse.
These were, I believe, demonstrations largely for us —
and we are, by the way, a distinctly variegated lot.
They were, first and foremost, a reminder and an
encouragement that we’re still here, still a force,
still ready. There is, I have to say, something about
that moment when you find yourself surrounded by a mass
of people in something like your own spirit that does
make you feel better — especially in a crowd like the
New York one where you never sense that you’re being
called upon to lose yourself in the process.
There were ominous aspects to the New York
demonstration, though, like the early shadows that fell
on the marchers in the city’s skyscraper canyons as the
still wintry sun sank quickly from its noon perch and
the chill spread, even on the first sunny day of
spring. For one thing, the whole march, in a sense, was
"embedded," as, in our increasingly security mad world,
is everything. Along much of the way to the rally, at
least, we were partially penned in and surrounded by
prodigious numbers of policemen and women, all looking
remarkably alert, observing, photographing, and
corralling a protest of the most striking peacefulness.
As the Patriot Act hangs over the nation, so a sense of
oppression, of a world always prepared not only for the
worst but to do the worst, hung over the moment, which
was also surely a police pre-performance run-through
for the Republican National Convention’s arrival in the
city at the end of August.
You might say that there was an urge, in the Psy-Ops
lingo of the moment, to "dominate the environment." I
couldn’t help but be reminded of all those
Pentagon-embedded reporters who struggled in their
partially penned-in state to pen reasonable accounts of
the Iraq war from our side, while a few brave reporters
like Robert Fisk of the British Independent struggled
to do the same in an unembedded and so distinctly more
vulnerable state.
I recently attended a conference on war coverage at the
Journalism School of the University of California,
Berkeley where a few of the "embeds" struggled to
describe how limited was the view from within those
military "pens." A jolly, blunt Lt. Colonel Richard
Long of the Marines, a professional embedder, spoke
quite proudly on one panel of that military urge to, in
his words, "dominate the media environment." From him I
also learned something new. He spoke, as we all do, of
"the media," of course; but while the rest of us talk
about "journalists" and "reporters," he referred to
each journalist as a "media" (as in "I took four medias
to that unit"). It seemed to catch a truth of the
moment from the other side — not just from the point
of view of the Pentagon, but from that of the few large
corporations which now own so much of our media space
and which are generally so eager to co-produce war
spectacles, right down to the logos and the prating
on-screen pundits who so often turn out to be retired
generals from our last wars.
I listened, for instance, to the foreign editor and a
panel of journalists from the Los Angeles Times
describe what gearing up for war meant for them and
became aware that such news organizations actually had
to mobilize for the coming invasion of Iraq in a
fashion not so dissimilar from, and in distinct
coordination with the Pentagon. To the largest,
best-funded mega-outfits, whether the Pentagon or AOL
Time Warner, what can most "reporters" be but little
units, little "medias," squirming as they are fit into
their places in the bigger picture.
Once you have giant organizations, whether media or
military, whose aims are to "dominate the environment,"
you’re bound to end up with a bunch of little "medias"
and then you have to ask: Who exactly are we, when we
read or watch? I suppose we’re just the "eyeballs."
Counting heads/delivering calling cards
As for U.S. press coverage of Saturday’s
demonstrations, I had to laugh this morning. My
hometown paper, the New York Times, never one to skip a
local tradition, buried its coverage of the
30,000-100,000 people who turned out (ho-hum, the
article indicated, another mayor-versus-organizers
dispute... yawn) on page 27. Actually, it was page three
of the "Metro" section to be exact, under a classically
Metro-ish headline, "From Midtown to Madrid, Tens of
Thousands Peacefully Protest War in Iraq." I’m assuming
the "Madrid" to which the Times’ "media" Alan Feuer was
referring must be a Spanish neighborhood somewhere in
the borough of Queens; otherwise, the headline would
surely have read, "hundreds of thousands" or maybe
"millions" and the story might have crept up a bit
closer to national or international coverage or even
(gasp!) the front page. If only the march had taken
place in New York City, maybe the Times would have
given it the coverage it deserved.
Here’s just a little sampler of headlines and first
paragraphs to choose from, beginning with the starting
paragraphs of that Times piece:
"Marking the one-year anniversary of the invasion of
Iraq, crowds of sign-waving, slogan-chanting
demonstrators marched through Midtown Manhattan and
scores of cities from Alaska to Australia yesterday in
a largely peaceful global rebuke to the war.
"Coming 13 months after millions took to the streets in
the weeks before the war last year, yesterday’s
demonstrations were markedly tamer and smaller as they
sought to send a message that the troops fighting in
Iraq should be recalled."
Newsday, out on Long Island, where they obviously don’t
know nuthin’, ran an AP piece by Verena Dobnik with the
ignorant headline: 100,000 at NYC rally as protests
gather nationwide. I mean, what did Ms. Dobnik take
before she accepted the estimates of the demonstrators?
Of course, maybe she counted. Certainly, when I did my
own multiplication tables from within my two blocks of
march, my math (always faulty, even when my checkbook’s
at stake) came out to 100,000 or so as well — but
whaddo I know?. Her first two paragraphs went:
"Anti-war protesters turned out nationwide Saturday to
mark the first anniversary of the U.S.-led war on Iraq,
with tens of thousands marching through Manhattan to
call for the removal of American troops from the Middle
East country.
"’It is time to bring our children home, and declare
this war was unnecessary,’ said the Rev. Herbert
Daughtry, addressing the crowd at the New York rally.
It was one of 250 anti-war protests scheduled around
the country by United for Peace and Justice."
Under the headline Thousands Worldwide Demand Troops
Pull Out of Iraq, Reuters cited not "thousands," but
the million figure for Rome alone:
"Thousands of antiwar protesters poured into streets
around the globe on Saturday’s anniversary of the Iraq
war to demand the withdrawal of U.S.-led troops.
"From Sydney to Tokyo, Madrid, London, New York and San
Francisco, protesters condemned U.S. policy in Iraq and
said they did not believe Iraqis are better off or the
world safer because of the war. Journalists estimated
that at least a million people streamed through Rome,
in probably the biggest single protest."
While the San Francisco Chronicle — oh, those West
Coast liberals — ran its piece under the catch-all
head, Protesters jam S.F. streets, Marchers in the city
and around the world oppose U.S.-led war,
Demonstrations mostly peaceful. Its first paragraphs
combined those "thousands" with "millions," emphasizing
the "s":
"Thousands of anti-war demonstrators marched across San
Francisco on the first day of spring Saturday, joining
millions around the world in the peace movement’s
biggest showing since the Iraq war began a year ago.
"The San Francisco protest was upbeat and defiant, as
many marchers who filled the streets from Dolores Park
to the Civic Center said they felt reinvigorated by
seeing so many kindred spirits opposed to the war. The
crowd clogged thoroughfares and blocked traffic at
dozens of intersections as many protesters banged
drums, shouted slogans and danced in the streets."
For those wanting a bit more on all this, check out, at
the Nation magazine website, Peter Rothberg’s always
informative blog Act Now! (One year later — not
feeling safer) from which you can get to the magazine’s
quickie demo rundowns on London and Spain as well as an
account by the magazine’s editor Katrina van den Heuvel
of a demo in, of all places, Moscow.
Thought of another way, the Saturday demonstrations
were really the second calling card of the global
antiwar movement proffered in the last week. The first
was delivered in Spain where, in the wake of a
terrorist atrocity, millions poured into the streets
and then turned a government that had betrayed them on
its head at the polls. Democracy in action, you might
say — if you weren’t America’s neocons or the Bush
administration. Now, the second calling card has been
delivered. The global antiwar movement is back in the
streets in varying numbers, but very much alive. It’s a
reminder that we can’t be forgotten. In fact, in some
places, as in Rome and Tokyo, the demonstrations may
seem more immediately threatening to governments and so
to the Bush administration’s ever more fragile
"coalition" in Iraq.
Just a small sign of this fragility under the pressure
of popular demands is to be found in a comment by Rocco
Buttiglione of the Christian Democrat Party. It
represents a small post-Spain but
pre-Rome-demonstration warning to the Berlusconi
government which has been about as gung ho as it’s
possible to be in support of the Bush administration in
a country where polls indicate that two-thirds of the
populace opposes its Iraq policy. As James Cusick of
the Glasgow Sunday Herald reports (Bush and Blair:
Blood Brothers):
"In office for barely hours [Spanish Prime Minister
Zapatero] distanced himself from Washington and
threatened to pull Spanish forces from Iraq by July
unless the United Nations were in control by then.
"If that was the first indication that the coalition
would mark this first anniversary of war by
fragmenting, more was to follow. Last Thursday in Rome,
the Italian European affairs minister, Rocco
Buttiglione, told the Il Messaggero newspaper: ’The war
may have been a mistake. What is certain is that it
wasn’t the best thing to do.’
"Italy currently has 3000 troops in Iraq. And, like
Aznar, the Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi is one of
the strongest European proponents of the US-led war.
Buttiglione is one of Berlusconi’s coalition partners
in the Italian government and now clearly feels that
his silence on what the war in Iraq achieved is no
longer politically advantageous to his Christian
Democrat Party. He added: ’Terrorism cannot be defeated
only by the force of arms and if we give the impression
that weapons play the dominant role, we will only stir
up feelings among the Arabs against us.’ Arab democracy
will not, according to Buttiglione, ’be born through
the force of arms or because we have defeated Saddam.’"
Stay tuned. CNN is global, but so are we and there’s
more to come.
Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by
Tom Engelhardt, a fellow at the Nation Institute, for
anyone in despair over post-September 11th US
mainstream media coverage of our world and ourselves.