Guess What Came Yesterday?
My Canon Powershot S300 that I bought to replace one I left at a trailhead last week arrived yesterday, and I strapped it on for a post-prandial stroll to - where else - Gasworks Park. We arrive there just in time to see the not-quite-full moon rise over Capitol Hill. We also unexpectedly encountered there one of several dozen Cindy Sheehan vigils around the city: people standing on the hill, holding candles, chatting, some low singing.
I’ve always sort of disdained mass protests as a vehicle for public discourse. It’s always seemed to me that, yes, they’re manipulated by their organizers, and they’re too reductive, using sloganeering and the singing of cornball songs to address complex topics deserving of something more nuanced and articulate.
And, I’m not sure what to think of the Sheehan woman’s tent revival in Crawford. On the one hand, I’m all for anything that causes GWB a moment’s discomfort. However, how wise is it to allow Bush to control the confrontation’s fulcrum point, the decision to meet or not meet? Project forward to the conversation that might ensue if GW does bike over to chat with Cindy. Each will have some sort of prepared statement that will be further truncated by the media and spoonfed on the 6 o’clock news. Bush ends up looking like a human being, and Sheehan like a fool for leaving the better part of a California summer to spend it in godforsaken Texas, where no brush has been left to provide shade. She’ll go home with a handful of platitudes that she could have gleaned in half an hour’s work on the White House website, and the “movement” will be over. The only way this ends well is if Bush chooses not to meet her. But that’s the problem - it’s his choice.
Robert Jamieson, a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (does post-intelligence have any analogy to post-modernism?), takes Sheehan to task:
Cindy Sheehan is no Rosa Parks. Nor is she Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. … I deplore the disingenuous way Sheehan has politicized the death of a son who signed up to fight, but this much is true: In Sheehan, America may be finding its anti-war voice.
I haven’t followed Sheehan’s deeds, writings or pronouncements very closely, but even if Robert has, I don’t think he can be far enough inside her head to make that assertion. I don’t know why history might not view her as it does Rosa Parks - sitting someplace where the power elite doesn’t want you and daring it to respond according to form. She’s taking a caustic blistering from a right-wing propaganda machine that was only a gleam in John Birch’s eye in the 50s, so I’m not sure it’s fair to trivialize the consequences she’s garnered. And MLK was certainly not without at least a dash of disingenuity and megalomania. If I were Sheehan, I might tell Robert, “It’s a Dead-Kid thing - you wouldn’t understand.”
That said, I’m consonant with Jamieson in being chary of the rush to sloganeering and iconography that Sheehan has catalyzed, unless it morphs into something more substantial - Democrats and journalists finding the backbone to press the case that Sheehan has barely articulated: What were the real reasons the NeoCons bullrushed us into the Iraq war? Were they so important to the national interest that it was worth engaging in a massive institutional deception in order to pursue them? And, given that they were, why did they fuck up their prosecution so badly? (This flatters them by presuming that what we’re seeing in Iraq is not the desired outcome.) These are questions that should be profferred and answered in congressional hearings, on television, at the highest levels. It’s not gonna happen between George and Cindy while dodging tumbleweeds on a Texas roadside.
That was an interlewd, not a political discussion. We don’t do politics here at Perils of Caffeine. What we do is walk around the neighborhood taking pictures with our new/old camera. You’re probably getting sick of pictures from Gasworks Park, and wondering if I might actually live in one of those rusted hulks, addled and feverish from exposure to all those hydrocarbons. I promise I’ll try to expand my range a bit, but for now, I’m gonna lay a couple more on you just because I can (again).
