Here

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

Ripped open by metal explosion
Caught in barbed wire
Fireball
Bullet shock
Bayonet
Electricity
Shrapnel
Throbbing meat
Electronic data processing
Black uniforms
Bare feet, carbines
Mail-order rifles
Shoot the muscles
256 Viet Cong captured
256 Viet Cong captured

Prisoners in Niggertown
It’s a dirty little war
Three Five Zero Zero
Take weapons up and begin to kill
Watch the long long armies drifting home

Hair soundtrack.

Mullah Cimoc say ameriki so smart for hating the bush for allow the israeli spy and neocon for control all of usa espeically military and usa media so cvorruption now the killing each day abortion the child.

also taking the LBT (low back tattoo)

Thanks for the pics MJS. Here’s me being an irritating contrarian over at the Mahablog. Props to her for even posting about protests at all. I haven’t seen any mention from Lords Kos or Atrios.

for posting these pics, and for going.

And in the spirit of Christian fellowship and brotherhood, I have this to say to the warbloggers, wingnuts, and administration officials:

Fuck you all. In the ass. Hard.

People who were surprised at the number of counterprotesters need to get on some of the Christian evangelical mailing lists.

The incident at the Capitol steps has been a major talking point for weeks.

The real issue is this: the right is willing to call people (however profane and abusive). Democrats aren’t. I don’t even have to read the Mahablog entry because I already know what the talking points are.

They will make fun of Answers speakers lists, for example, even though, unlike most Answer protests, this rally was very much on topic. The corporate press is far, far superior to the Democratic blogs in covering these events.

Whatever its flaws, the Washington Post at least sends people out to the site and talks to people. The liberal democratic blogs just post talking points.

The crowd at the Answer rally in DC was one of the better I’ve seen, mostly young, mostly students, very few of the usual ultra left sectarian usual suspects.

But knowing this required that you actually got your ass out to the site in the cold. This is why blogging can’t replace real journalism.

…the country by attempting to save it from yet another quagmire.
Ruth

I dare say that as long as we use the right of protest it will continue to be a part of what we are. Rightly or wrongly, imperfectly or what-have-you, people need to be reminded of their Constitutional rights from time to time, as well as get out and meeting each other. There were many young people at the Los Angeles/Hollywood protest: networks are created, moments become foundations for a furtherance of the American Revolution. Down with tyrants, for fuck sake!

I will post more images tonight…gotta run.

+++

You aren’t going to like this, but I’m saying it anyway:

The first photo is of some people (including Martin Sheen) carrying a flag-draped coffin. I’ve seen those in antiwar marches, and the display is pretty effective. But why are most of the people in the photo dressed as if they were going to the beach? Why aren’t they wearing suits, or at least something understated, as Sheen is?

The underlying message of the clothes is “this is just a stunt; we don’t take it seriously.”

Other photos show a guy wrapped in a Che Guevara flag (what’s Che Guevara got to do with Iraq?) and some clown in a flag cape carrying a bucket of “blood.” These are not serious people; they are children playing dress up. At this point it’s neither clever nor effective communication. It trivializes the issue.

If you look at nonviolent mass demonstrations in the past, there have been some that were very effective. You can go back to the suffragette marches and then move forward to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and see that these demonstrations had a big impact on public opinion. More recently, I think last year’s immigrant marches really did have an impact on public opinion, so you can’t say they are always a waste of time.

But what strikes me, looking at successful demonstrations in the past, is that the people who participated understood that their dress and behavior was part of the message. MLK instructed civil rights marchers to look dignified and wear suits and their best dresses, for example. But for some reason, since the late 1960s people got it into their heads that demonstrations were about dressing up in outlandish costumes and/or pulling off flamboyant publicity stunts. I’m not sure where that came from, but it’s the norm now. The big demonstrations I’ve been to were like street carnivals at best, and at worst could be pretty raunchy.

The message to the public should be, “we are American citizens, like you, and we are concerned about this extremely important issue.” Instead, the message is “we are a pack of circus clowns and you don’t have to take us seriously.”

The people attending this march are showing off to impress each other. Someone watching who isn’t already against the war is more likely to be turned off than impressed.

What’s the point — to have fun, or to end the war?

I look forward to more. And yes, we need to use our rights to keep them strong and supple, and yes, to make sure they stay part of who we are. We should do so unapologetically. I was scheduled to join a MoveOn vigil, but my on-going medical problems said “no” this weekend.

CD, I had no idea “Hair” was so…on point. Thanks for the memories.

Ruth, thanks for making the point that the “thanks for serving” trope should be expanded to include those who push back against the war, in all the various ways there are to push back.

Notanamerican, you are wrong about not needing to read the Maja post, it’s well worth the time, even if you end up disagreeing with it; follow Shystee’s link and take a look.

Barbara and I share the common background of being old enough to remember actually participating in the Vietnam War protest movement. Much is different this time around, not least that so many military personnel are part of the push-back, and that, despite the best efforts of the “what, me serve?” rightwing war mongers, any critique of Bush’s invasion of Iraq isn’t automatically considered an attack on the men and woman who are over there, carrying out Bush’s policies.

Still, there is much to be learned from that previous mass-protest movement about what worked, and what didn’t, and lots didn’t. Think I’ll save that for a separate post.

Lots of blogs “do” the protests; here’s me doing one here at Correntewire.

No two bloggers or blogs could be more anti-this-war than those of Atrios and Kos; so what if they don’t do protests. Pushing back against this war takes so much effort, do we really have the time and energy to be disappointed at the very notion that there are disagreements among us? No one is talking about a no disagreement policy. We should be talking and arguing. But please, spare us the purity tests.

I see that since I started this comment, Maja has paid us a visit. In my own formulation, there ought to be room for playfulness within the most serious of demonstrations. But paying attention to those images which turn off the very people one is attempting to influence is just fundamental good common sense.

Irony of ironies is the supposed worry, on the right, about threats to deface the Vietnam Memorial; the right hated it for years, until ordinary folk made it their own. I’ll post an amazing response by Charles Krauthammer to the original flap over Maya Lins design, published at the time in The New Republic; come back to see just how out of tune with mainstream America Krauthammer turned out to be. That’s another reason why the conversation Maja is attempting to have is such an important one. This time, a majority of Americans are on our side, and against having been taken…to war in Iraq. That should change the dynamics.

Barbara and I share the common background of being old enough to remember actually participating in the Vietnam War protest movement.

Unfortunately this is part of the problem. Too many people who lived through the 1960s are obsessed with fighting the last political war over again.

There was a very vital, effective anti-war movement in the 1980s before St. Bill Clinton gutted the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party.

But it got help from the Democrats in Congress. Remember the Boland Amendment? That made it nearly impossible for Reagan to intervene directly in Central America and opened up space for groups like CISPES and the various Nicaraguan solidarity groups.

If someone proposed the Boland Amendment now, the entire “liberal” blogosphere would be talking about how it “hurts the Democrats”.

I also remember a guy named Ben Linder. Serious guy but he also used to like to dress up as a clown and entertain Nicaraguan children. If someone like that got murdered by the contras today, LGF and FreeRepublic would dig up some photos of him in a red nose and a clown suit, post them all over the internet, and the gang at Atrios and the Daily Kos would probably tell you to “get your own blog” if you suggested that they should, perhaps, mention it.

Yes, there’s a need to think about image. But part of “image” is what the press makes it and if the liberal Democratic blogs either ignore the anti-war movement or contribute to the problem by posting the same predictible talking points every time people try to make themselves heard, then all I can say is that you shouldn’t be surprised if the war in Iraq hurts the Dems in 2008 as much as it hurt the Republicans in 2008.

Because like it or not it’s not an important issue. It’s really the only issue. Help find a solution or get out of the way.

Irony of ironies is the supposed worry, on the right, about threats to deface the Vietnam Memorial; the right hated it for years, until ordinary folk made it their own.

To be perfectly honest, part of the the reason “we” are in Iraq today is the fact that there’s a memorial in Washington DC for the Americans killed in Vietnam, but not one for the Vietnamese.

It was good that the right originally hated Maya Lin’s design. At least it was somber and called attention to the black gash ripped into American culture by the war.

But as long as it singled out Americans to be remembered apart from the Vietnamese, it was inevitably going to be coopted by the right.

The sheer moral idiocy and blindness of American culture was on display in DC with the counterprotesters. They have a motorcyle club called “Rolling Thunder”.

You 60s generation people should know what “Operaton Rolling Thunder” was. It was the carpet bombing of Vietnam. A “Rolling Thunder” motorcycle club in the USA is a bit like a “Final Solution” motorcycle club in Germany.

Now that’s all over the media but nobody (not even you “liberals”) think to call them on it. There’s the problem. You live in a morally bankrupt, morally dead culture. What’s going on in Iraq should cause convulsions in your entire being, not make you think of “helpful” suggestions for anti-war protesters.

A nice pictorial. I went over to Mahablog to check out the discussion. It was interesting until I made the mistake of disagreeing with Barbara. I was then treated to the following:

“Marching around in goofy, sometimes raunchy, costumes and carrying signs ridiculing one’s opposition is several light-years away from Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance. I can’t believe anyone who pretends to know something about MLK wouldn’t understand that. Non-violence means non-violence in one’s mind and speech, not just refraining from punching someone out.”

After this the closer:

You are a gasbag, sir. Lots of words, no understanding. We’re done here.

For someone so concerned about “violence in mind and speech” she certainly seems intolerant and prone to name calling.