DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA 'No Iraqis left me on a roof to
die' By Tom Engelhardt
George was out of town, of course, in the
"battle cab" at the U.S. Northern Command's
headquarters in Colorado Springs, checking out the
latest in homeland-security technology and picking
up photo ops; while White House aides, as the
Washington Post wrote that morning, were
attempting "to reestablish Bush's swagger." The
Democrats had largely fled town as well, leaving
hardly a trace behind. Another hurricane was
blasting into Texas and the media was preoccupied,
but nothing, it seemed, mattered. Americans turned
out in poll-like numbers for the Saturday antiwar
demonstration in Washington and I was among them.
So many of us were there, in fact, that my wife
(with friends
at the back of the march) spent over
two hours as it officially "began," moving next to
nowhere at all
This was, you might say,
the "connection demonstration." In the previous
month, two hurricanes, one of them human, had
blown through American life; and between them,
they had, for many people, linked the previously
unconnected - Bush administration policies and the
war in Iraq to their own lives. So, in a sense,
this might be thought of as the demonstration
created by Hurricanes Cindy Sheehan and Katrina.
It was, finally, a protest that, not just in its
staggering turnout but in its make-up, reflected
the changing opinion-polling figures in this
country. This was a majority demonstration and the
commonest statement I heard in the six hours I
spent talking to as many protesters as I could
was: "This is my first demonstration."
In
addition, there were sizeable contingents of
military veterans and of the families of soldiers
in Iraq, or of those who were killed in Iraq. No
less important, scattered through the crowd were
many, as I would discover, whose lives had been
affected deeply by George Bush's wars.
This was an America on very determined
parade. Even though the march, while loud and
energetic, had an air of relaxed calmness to it,
the words that seemed to come most quickly to
people's lips were: infuriated, enraged, outraged,
had it, had enough, fed up. In every sense, in
fact, this was a demonstration of words. I have
never seen such a sea of words - of signs, almost
invariably handmade along with individually
printed posters, T-shirts, labels, stickers. It
often seemed that, other than myself, there wasn't
an individual in the crowd without a sign and that
no two of them were quite the same.
The
White House, which the massed protesters marched
past, was in every sense the traffic accident of
this event. The crowds gridlocked there; the noise
rose to a roar; the signs waved, a veritable sea
of them, and they all, essentially said, "No more,
not me!"
Here's just a modest sample of
those that caught my eye, reflecting as they did
humor, determination, and more than anything else,
outrage: "Yeeha is not a foreign policy"; "Making
a killing"; "Ex-Republican. Ask me why"; "Blind
Faith in Bad Leadership is not Patriotism"; "Bush
is a disaster!" (with the President's face in the
eye of a hurricane); "He's a sick nut my Grandma
says" (with a photo of an old woman in blue with
halo-like rays emanating from her); "Osama bin
Forgotten"; "Cindy speaks for me"; "Make levees
not war"; "W's the Devil, One Degree of
Separation"; "Dick Cheney Eats Kittens" (with a
photo of five kittens); "Bush busy creating
business for morticians worldwide"; "Liar, born
liar, born-again liar"; "Dude - There's a War
Criminal in My White House!!!"; "Motivated
moderates against Bush"; "Bored with Empire"; "Pro
Whose Life?"; "War is Terrorism with a Bigger
Budget."
Because just about everybody had
the urge to express him or herself, I largely
followed the signs to my interviewees. People were
unfailingly willing to talk (and no less
unfailingly polite as I desperately tried to
scribble down their words). The meetings were
brief and, for me, remarkably moving, not least
because Americans regularly turn out to be so
articulate, even eloquent, and because so many
people are thinking so hard about the complex
political fix we find ourselves in today. I've
done my level best to catch (sometimes in slightly
telescoped form and hopefully without too many
errors) just what people had to say and how open
they were - the first-timers and the veterans of
former demonstrations alike.
A day of
walking and intensive talking still gave me only
the smallest sampling of such a demonstration. To
my amazement, on my way to the Metro heading back
to New York at about 5:30 (almost seven hours
after I first set out for the Mall), I was still
passing people marching. So I can't claim that
what follows are the voices of the Washington
demonstration, just that they're the voices of my
demonstration, some of the thirty-odd people to
whom I managed to talk in the course of those
hours. They are but a drop in the ocean of people
who turned out in Washington, while the President
was in absentia and the Democrats nowhere to be
seen, to express in the most personal and yet
collective way possible their upset over the path
America has taken in the world. As far as I'm
concerned, we seldom hear the voices of Americans
in our media society very clearly. So I turn the
rest of this dispatch over to those voices. Dip in
wherever you want - as if you were at the march
too.
Angry Graphic Designer: On the
corner by the Metro, we meet Bill Cutter and a
friend. Cutter is carrying a sign with a Bush
image and enough words to drown a city. We stop to
copy it down. It has a headline that asks, "What
did you do on your summer vacation?" Inside a
bubble is the President's reply: "Well, I rode my
bike, killed some troops, killed even more Iraqis,
raised lots of money for my friends, ignored a
grieving mom and, for extra credit, I destroyed an
American city!" Cutter, a forty-five year old
Washingtonian with a tiny goatee, says simply
enough, "I'm just an angry graphic designer with a
printer." The previous day he made his sign and
his friend's (an image of Bush over the question,
"Intelligent design?"- and, on the back, Dick
Cheney with quiz-like, check-off boxes that say,
"Evil, Crazy, or Just Plain Mean, Pick any three!"
We're all looking for the demonstration's initial
gathering place, and so we fall in step and begin
to chat. A sign-maker will prove an omen for this
day - the march will be a Katrina, a cacophony, of
handmade signs, waves and waves of them,
expressing every bit of upset and pent-up
frustration that the polls tell us a majority of
Americans feel.
Cutter explains his
presence this way: "I figure that if we live here
and don't do something, it's ridiculous. Cindy
Sheehan's sacrifice is so much huger than anything
anyone has done, so how could we not?"
On
what is to be done in Iraq itself, he first says,
"It's a tough one" - a comment I will hear again
and again, even from those intent on seeing
American troops withdraw immediately. On this day,
you would be hard pressed not to come away with a
sense of Americans in protest over Bush's war and
the mess he's brought to our very doorstep, and
yet deeply puzzled by what is now to be done and
how exactly to do it. "We've gotten ourselves down
a rat hole," he continues. "I don't know what to
do. Ultimately, I think it's going to end up as a
civil war there and we'll have caused it. I only
wish the Democratic Party had the balls and would
seize the moment. It's like they're practicing the
politics of safety. Do what's safe, not what's
right." He pauses. "It's the politics of
expediency," he adds with disgust just as we
arrive at a plaza filled with a sea of pink
balloons - a sign that the antiwar women's group
Code Pink is gathering here. We part at this point
with him saying brightly, "I'm not sure 慹njoy
yourself' is quite the right thing to say... but
enjoy yourself!"
Disabled (Peacetime)
Vet: On the plaza we run into 48 year-old
Steve Hausheer ("How-ser," he says, "but if you
look at the spelling, you'll never pronounce it
right.") - or rather he rolls past us at quite a
clip in his wheelchair. He's dressed severely in
black, but has a kindly, open face. When I stop
him, he swivels around, removes his black-leather
wheeling globes ("my hands are a mess...") and
shakes firmly. "I'm disabled," he says, "but I was
in the peacetime military. I'm a peacetime vet.
Seventy-six, seventy-seven. I just missed the
Vietnam War." He's unsure about giving an
interview. "I get really excited. I'm impassioned
about this cause, but then everything just flies
out of my head!" He's from New York, he tells me,
and adds, excitement in his voice, "I've looked
forward to doing something more than just talk to
my friends and donate. I'm just so tired of seeing
this country head in the wrong direction. It's
time to get proactive!
"We need to support
the troops," he insists with feeling and then,
after a pause, "by bringing them home. We're stuck
now. We've torn Iraq apart and there are going to
be no easy answers. George Bush has taken us so
far down the wrong road that it's going to be very
difficult to find our way back. My wish is that
the people speak up until Congress and the other
forty percent of America that still thinks he's
doing a good job change their mind.
"The
men we're trying to bring home are true heroes and
we need to treat them as such. It isn't bad enough
that he put them in harm's way through a lie, now
he's working to treat them as anything but heroes.
Can you believe it? He wants to cut their
disability payments!"
I thank him, we
shake hands, he begins to don his gloves and then,
at the last second, he calls me back. "One more
thing," he says and begins to give me this final
comment in a slow, measured way as you might
dictate to a stenographer: "I want to put this
country back into the hands of men and women who
are dedicated to serving the American people
instead of themselves and their cronies." He
stops, satisfied, and then adds, "This would be my
quote, if you have to pick one."
Ms
Statue of Liberty: Just down the plaza near a
Montana Women For Peace sign, a group of women of
all ages are scurrying to get their Styrofoam
green Statue-of-Liberty crowns and green robes in
place. A welcoming, white-haired Norma Buchanan is
among them. "I am fifty-six years old. I have
never been in a peace march in my life. I just
snapped and I had to be here. Enough is enough.
This war, the leadership, is against the law. What
I hope is that, at a grassroots level, we're going
to wake up the forty percent of Americans who are
still asleep at the wheel. I hope we're going to
stop worrying about what kind of dog Paris Hilton
is carrying around or who's divorcing whom, and
pay some attention to what matters!"
Suddenly a cry goes up, "The march is
starting!" It's true. Hundreds of pink balloons,
all attached to Code Pink women, are slowing
beginning to bob out of the plaza heading for the
gathering area near the Washington Monument where
Cindy Sheehan is to speak and the official march
is to begin. So Norma Buchanan excuses herself,
picks up her placard, and a bevy of Montana-style
Lady Liberties, hoisting aloft a cumulative
painting of a Western mountain scene, head off to
join what will soon be an ocean of protesting
humanity, much of it, like Buchanan, at such an
event for the first time.
Vietnam
Nurse: In a jaunty pink beret and a white
"Stop the War" T-shirt ("My daughter made this for
me!"), Peggy Akers is carrying a colorful
hand-lettered sign that says, "Another Veteran for
Peace." She's 58, cheery, has flown in from
Portland, Maine and is marching in the Code Pink
contingent with her daughter and sister. She's
active in Veterans for Peace and promptly tells
me, "I was a nurse in Vietnam." If I want to get a
sense of her sentiments about her Vietnam
experience, she suggests, I should check out the
Commondreams website which has posted a poem of
hers on the subject, Dear America. ("I hear a
helicopter coming in - I smell the burning of
human flesh. It's Thomas, America, the young Black
kid from Atlanta, my patient, burned by an
exploding gas tank... And Pham. He was only eight,
America, and you sprayed him with napalm and his
skin fell off in my hands and he screamed as I
tried to comfort him... America, we have sent
another generation of children to see life through
an M-16 and death through the darkness of a body
bag.")
"I just feel it's so important for
people like myself to speak out about what I saw
and did in Vietnam. I'm part of the conscience of
this country. If people like myself don't speak
about what war does, it'll never end. The images
of war are not being shown to Americans. Not
really. No one here knows what it's like to see a
young soldier, eighteen or nineteen years old, in
a body bag, or an Iraqi mother who has lost her
son. If Americans really saw that, this couldn't
go on.
"If it wasn't for people marching
like today, if they hadn't done that during
Vietnam, that Wall [the Vietnam Wall honoring
America's war dead] would be wrapped around this
city ten times over.
"You know," she says
with excitement, "we met so many people coming in
who had never marched before. From Utah, from the
Midwest, from everywhere. I think we should bring
our troops home and instead send in a Peace Corps
- plumbers, electricians, carpenters - to help
rebuilt that country; whatever the Iraqi people
want from us, not what we want from them."
Republican for Impeachment:
Approaching the rally, we notice Cathy Hickling, a
financial consultant from Maryland, standing on
the curb in a bright red T-shirt holding a
"Republicans for impeachment" sign on a pole and
can't resist a stop. "My odyssey," she says,
"simply is: I've been a registered Republican for
in excess of thirty years and I think the Party's
been hijacked by the policies of George Bush! I
think a president should be smarter than I am.
"This is my first demonstration. I felt
strongly enough to come. What I hope will happen
is that the Democrats and Republicans with a
mindset similar to mine get people to change their
minds about the direction this country is taking.
Remember, Clinton was impeached for a lot less. I
saw a sign that said, 慍linton lied, no one died,'
and that just about sums it up.
"This is
an antiwar protest, but I'm not here to support
the idea that we should be leaving Iraq
immediately. Now that we're there, we need to
finish the job, but it's folly to think that the
people who got us there can get us out."
"Right on!" says a woman who happens to be
standing next to her.
And after just a
moment's hesitation, she says it too: "Right on."
Sign of the Times: As we head into
the rally, I run into Susan, a social worker from
the New York area, and ask her to stop so I can
copy down her sign. Its front says: "What if they
gave a war and nobody came?" The back reads: "What
if they had a hurricane and nobody came because...
They were all at War!!" She insists I get front
and back in the right order. "See, the front is
that old Sixties slogan and on the back it's been
adapted to the present. A teacher I work with made
it. She's more artistic than I am. I was
absolutely infuriated after the hurricane. All our
resources were at war. There was nothing to help
our people here. I was infuriated and, after
thinking about it, wanted to be here with this."
The Man from Alabama: He's
white-haired, wears a striped oxford shirt, and
carries an "Alabama has lost too many young people
to this war" sign. He's with a small group of
fellow Alabamans. When I introduce myself and
mention the Tomdispatch website, he responds, "Do
I know it! I send it to my lists, maybe 100
people. I can't believe I'm actually meeting you
here." He introduces himself as Wythe ("Get Wythe
it!") Holt. I ask - as I do of many people - "What
do you do in real life?"
"Protest," he
says definitively. And then he chuckles. "But in
the business world, I'm a retired professor of law
at the University of Alabama. What I really do now
is work for democracy, which means protesting,
which is, of course, what democracy's all about.
Even those nitwits who are protesting on the other
side are exercising their democratic rights.
"Alabama has lost a lot of children to
this war. It's making its mark on the state. The
Tuscaloosa News is beginning to come out and
question what's going on. So the truth is
filtering through to Alabama. There are, at this
moment, big demonstrations in Birmingham and in a
little while we're going to be in communication
with our colleagues there. We belong to Tuscaloosa
People for Peace. We meet 2 or 3 times a month for
discussions. We read books together. We go to
protests.
"I was against Vietnam in 1971.
Then, we had two busloads of people driving up
here. Now we have one SUV.
"I agree with
Jefferson that unless you're vigilant, you're not
going to have liberty. And this country is slowly
losing its liberties. But we're making liberty
here today. Unfortunately, we don't make enough of
it in Alabama, but we try.
"As for Iraq, I
say get out now. Leave Iraq to the Iraqis. Bring
our young people home this minute. All that
equipment that could have been used in New Orleans
and Galveston and Houston. If we want democracy in
Iraq, we should encourage it, not impose it. I saw
a sign earlier that said, 慠ead between the
pipelines,' but it's deeper than oil. Oil just
happens to be the greedy object of the moment. The
real struggle is between those of us who want to
speak up for ourselves and want to have a
government we have a part in, and those who have
other goals, which are mostly selfish and greedy,
and are interested in imposing their wills on
others."
Mother Lion: She's holding
up a hand-scribbled sign which reads, "Not with my
sons." She's Robbie from New York. "I'm a writer
and a mom. I have three sons. One is almost 19,
one's almost 18. I wrote this sign. I mean it. You
know, the mother lion. I feel so outraged. It's
the outrage of mothers - and fathers too - to see
children sacrificed for these lies. We have to
start getting angry and that's why I'm here.
"I thought of this sign when I was home
and identifying with those mothers who had lost
their sons. Seeing all of these banners here
representing each child who has been killed, that
is just so graphic. You stop thinking of the war
as being fought by another group of people. I feel
this outrage, this energy. Like Cindy Sheehan
said, we have to get back to our humanity, and so
we mothers have to begin to be teachers. We've
lost our way."
College Students:
Samantha Combs and Andrea Solazzo are weaving
happily through the crowd, wearing matching
tie-dyed T-shirts, pink and blue. Samantha's says,
"Peace Takes Time, Not Lives!" They're startled to
be stopped, embarrassed at the thought of being
interviewed. Extremely charming, a little giggly,
they're both 18, from Ecker College in St.
Petersburg, Florida and they've spent 19 hours on
the Alliance for Concerned Individuals' bus to get
here. ("It's a campus group that focuses on
everything that deals with human rights," Samantha
tells me.)
Why are they at the
demonstration? The responses are brief and to the
point. Samantha: "So much money's being spent
in Iraq, when it should be spent here."
Andrea: "My cousin went to Afghanistan and
then Iraq. He's been trying to go to college for
years and he keeps getting called up! I don't
think Iraq's worth his life."
And then
they exclaim in unison, "Our group's leaving," and
with another round of embarrassed giggles they
bound off.
School Teacher: Sadida
Athaullah is a social studies teacher in
metropolitan Baltimore. She's wearing a blue
"March on Washington/End the Iraq War" T-shirt and
a light blue headscarf. She's quiet-spoken and
thoughtful. "This is my first time at such a
demonstration. I'm a naturalized American of 25
years, originally from India. I gave up my
heritage to be an American because I admired
American values, and I don't like what this
country is turning into. When the war first began,
I didn't really take an active part against it. I
thought it would be a quick action, over in weeks,
not months, and not turning into this big, long
disaster, which makes no sense to me. I don't
think the Iraqis are going to drink the oil in
their country. They're going to have to sell it on
the open market and we could buy it like anyone
else."
Father and Daughter: As we
leave the rally grounds, in a milling mass of
humanity and pour out onto 15th Street, the sound
level beginning to rise, I notice Frank Medina in
a reddish baseball cap, and on his shoulders, his
young daughter in a pink shirt and bright yellow
dress. As I ask for his name, she leans over and
shouts out with delight: "Claire Elizabeth
Medina!" He's a lawyer with the Securities and
Exchange Commission. "I was at the demonstration
before the war," he tells me. "And now, this is
just an appalling circumstance. That's why I'm
back. It's an appalling war and it needs to end
immediately. There needs to be a coherent plan to
turn the country back over to the Iraqis, with
definite dates for the return of American troops.
What can't be done is to continue to justify the
war there by the sacrifices that have already been
made. It's like saying that, when you've lost
everything at the casino, you're going to
double-down. At some point, you need to cut your
losses.
"However, it's an administration
that can't admit its mistakes, that can't admit
the truth, and consequently that can't change. So
there is no hope."
Why bother to come
then, I ask.
"It's important," he says
firmly, "to express your views, to protest."
Grandfather and Daughter: Only
moments later, another man with a little girl on
his shoulders catches my eye. I approach him,
introduce myself, and mention that he's the second
father I've seen this way in so many minutes. Joe
Stone promptly corrects me: "I'm her grandfather.
Her father's in Iraq." He lifts MacKenzie down
from his shoulders, tired and ready for her nap,
and puts her in a stroller pushed by his actual
daughter Cindy. Then he turns back to me. "I
haven't done this in thirty years. I was here in
1970. I was tear-gassed at the University of
Maryland. Same kind of war, different time."
From Virginia, he's the assistant
controller at a dairy ("an accountant basically").
Like a lot of people at this demonstration, he
speaks calmly, even quietly, but with a
deep-seated disgust. "I'm just sick of it. I think
Bush is immoral. You have to say something. We're
proud to be here. I'd slam the door in George
Bush's face if he came knocking."
His
daughter, like most of the demonstrators, is
dressed casually - sweat shirt, blue jeans,
sneakers. She tells me her husband, a combat
engineer who joined the military in 2002, is back
for his second tour of duty in Iraq. He was gone
for his daughter's birth, home for nine months,
returned in the winter and now is stop-lossed.
They're not certain when he'll be back.
I
ask whether he knows she's at the demonstration -
her first, it turns out, other than a small "free
Tibet" one.
"He wouldn't say not to," she
replies in almost a whisper. "But I haven't had a
chance to tell him yet. I just feel the same as my
dad, though. I'd had it. I can't believe there are
so many people in this country who still think the
President's so great, especially after his first
term. I couldn't get a single one of my friends to
come. I work at a government contracting company
and my co-workers thought it was strange to do
this because I might not have a job if the war
ended. One of them even said, 慪ou know, there's
video cameras down there.' So what!"
Her
father chimes in: "Defense contractors don't need
a war to keep going."
She adds, "I don't
really know what to do about Iraq now. They can't
just leave, but I don't see a plan of action for
how we're going to get out. I wish George Bush
could get out of office. I just don't see how,
though."
The Farmer: His sign
reads, "U.S. Farmers Say No to War" and we bump
into him just as we turn the corner and head for
the White House, the march slowing into gridlock,
the roaring of the crowd ahead rising to a din.
But Michael O'Gorman's voice carries well. "I'm a
real farmer," he says in response to my query. "I
farm a thousand acres of organic vegetables for
sale to the U.S. market in Baja, California
[Mexico]. I've been farming for 35 years. I've
earned all these wrinkles." And indeed his face is
deeply creased.
"When I began in 1970,
U.S. farmers were feeding the world. This is the
first year, possibly in our history, when we're
importing more than we're exporting, when we're
not feeding ourselves. China will feed itself.
India will feed itself. We won't. When I began
farming, there were 2 million farmers in the U.S.
Three hundred thousand of us remain; average age,
sixty-two. I'm almost there." He laughs.
He tells me that he sits on the steering
committee of United for Peace and Justice, which
helped organize this demonstration. He flew in
from Baja. "I was supposed to be in the lead
contingent." He shows me a badge that indicates
exactly that. "But we were swamped by the crowd
and so I'm here. I remember joining protests back
on July 4, 1987 in my community. We were supposed
to speak about local issues, but I was protesting
that the U.S. was arming Saddam Hussein's Iraq and
[Ronald Reagan aide] Oliver North was arming Iran
in a war between those two countries where two
million young men would die. I warned that it
would come back to haunt us.
"On 9/11, my
oldest daughter was at Ground Zero, right across
the street, and she survived. My son volunteered
after that because his sister had been there. Now,
he's at Guant?namo, so that war is haunting not
just our society, but my own family.
"My
son joined the Coast Guard Reserves. He thought it
was a peaceable way to serve. Then they shipped
him off to Cuba. I support him. We don't argue
about it too much. I'm waiting for him to make his
peace with it. He had a week off recently and -
can you believe it - they didn't even fly him to
Florida. We had to pay $750 to get him home.
"It's a horrible situation. People say
it'll be a total mess if we pull out, but it's a
mess and we're there. I don't see any argument for
the United States staying. If, in pulling out, we
could create an alternative to the U.S. military
that would, of course, be best."
He shakes
hands and invites us to visit his farm in Baja. "I
believe," he says in parting, "that this is a very
American movement. We're reclaiming our country."
Protester with Cane: I approach
Camille Hazeur, who works for George Mason
University's Office of Equity and Diversity,
because of her cane ("arthritic hip"). I say that
I thought, in a march like this, the cane
indicated real commitment. "Darn right!" she
replies. "I'm against this war. It's indescribable
that we're even there. It's my small way of
saying, no, get out! And it's for our kids over
there. To bring them back. And for the Iraqis. You
never even hear what's happening to them. And I
feel we're just sitting here while atrocities are
going on, and I'm afraid our kids will have to
suffer the impact of what we're doing there now.
Those of us who are reading and thinking people...
I'm not na?ve about the Middle East or Saddam
Hussein, but none of it justifies this.
"I
was here in the seventies. I went to college in
this town. I remember the demonstrations. I
remember them all. They had a distinctive smell,
of tear gas and grass, and we haven't smelled
either of those today."
Protester with
Cane (2): We're past the White House now and
Ann Galloway is walking with determination, cane
well deployed ("I need a knee replacement"). The
gridlock of the march has ended and open space has
appeared. She has a blue backpack strapped on. A
little sign sticks out: "Support our troops, Bring
them home alive."
"I hosted a Cindy
Sheehan vigil in Stanford, Connecticut, and have
been a leader of one of the MoveOn teams there.
This is the first big march I have been in since
Doctor Martin Luther King, Doctor Benjamin Spock,
and the Reverend William Sloan Coffin demonstrated
in maybe 1967 against the Vietnam War. I actually
became energized again because everything this
administration does is so antithetical to what
America is about and I intend to be part of a
movement that takes back the Congress in 2006.
"I'm a grandmother and, if anything, I am
marching for my grandchild's future. She'll be two
in December. I wrote to a friend that I'm going to
show up with a cane and a floppy hat [which indeed
she's wearing] and become one of those little old
ladies we used to joke about. But this - the
abuses, there are just so many - has to stop. They
won't take the tax cuts off the table, but they're
willing to squander our precious dollars on the
war in Iraq that could be used for a myriad of
other things in this country, including" - she
says it emphatically - "homeland security. These
guys don't care about any of it, just those tax
cuts for their people who are not sending their
children to fight this war."
Flight
Attendant: She's standing at the curb in a
green shirt with a sticker on the back that reads,
"Sex is back in the White House. Bush is screwing
us all!" She introduces herself as Liane. "I'm a
flight attendant," she says. "I got this sticker
from a woman I met at a union rally by the Labor
Department. I liked it and she was so interesting.
She had a history of coming to protests. She told
me, if I gave her my address, she would send one
my way. It was at least six months ago. I just
haven't had a chance to use it until now."
This is her first antiwar protest. "I
don't know what to do," she says. "I just think
that the war in Iraq is a big mistake. Especially
when I saw New Orleans and thought about the money
for the levee system diverted to Iraq. That was
upsetting. Even before that, though, I got the
impression that the ones pushing the war were
really planning for the best-case scenario, that
they hadn't planned for anything but the best
outcome. I think what they're doing is creating
more terrorism."
Toy Soldiers: As
we turn the corner, heading up 17th away from the
White House, I'm approached by a young man dressed
all in black and wearing headgear that looks like
a cross between a fedora and a top hat. It's
fronted by a yellow piece of cardboard with images
of toy soldiers stamped on it. He hands me a
little bag of green plastic soldiers of the sort I
played with as a child and, strangely enough, in
the midst of this antiwar demonstration, my heart
takes a leap. I genuinely want them.
Each
soldier, whether shooting or throwing a grenade,
turns out to have a little piece of paper attached
that says, "Bring me home" and includes the Mouths
Wide Open website address. There's even a small
explanation in the bag that begins, "We're
spreading plastic Army Men around the country and
around the globe as small, everyday reminders of
the ongoing horrors of the war in Iraq - using
them as tools to foster dialogue, action and
resistance to the war."
I ask if he'd mind
being interviewed, which flusters him. He finally
indicates Merry Conway, who is older. "She's
better to talk to," he says. And it's true. She's
happy to talk. In fact, she's an enthusiast as
well as an artist who "creates performance and
installation shows with a very large community
element."
So I ask about Mouths Wide Open.
"We're a little group of friends in New York. Many
are artists. We came together after 9/11 to see
what we could do. We created the Four Horsemen of
the Apocalypse Crusade. Maybe you've seen it at
other demonstrations. It's huge. But we were still
thinking about how to create a dialogue, because
so many people were acting as if the war wasn't
happening if they didn't have a relative involved.
It was business as usual. What, we thought, if we
left a trace, started that dialogue with a
poignant emotional effect. And these little toy
soldiers that so many boys have played with are
it.
"The other night in New York at a
Cindy Sheehan event, we were handing these out and
I gave a packet to one of the mothers there. She
recoiled. She said, 慚y son's in Iraq. I can't take
those. I used to hide them from him.' But you know
what she said then? She said, 慘eep going. But keep
going!'
"People get very excited about
putting them in places and then other people find
them. The other day we got an email from a cop who
had found one in the Federal Courthouse in New
York and he was so moved he wrote us."
New Orleans Evacuee: She's holding
up a bright red sign that says, "New Orleans
Evacuees for Peace." Erica Smith is twenty-five, a
law student at Loyola in New Orleans. ("We've been
relocated to the University of Houston law
school.") "I've probably met about ten people from
New Orleans today and I've had lots of people come
up to give me a hug.
"I was planning to
come to this anyway. But with what happened in New
Orleans, well... I was lucky, I live uptown and my
place is on the third floor and a friend had a key
and checked. It's okay. But all of our National
Guard troops were off in Iraq instead of rescuing
people here. Instead of being here to help out,
they were off making problems in the rest of the
world."
Mother and Son: As we
circle back toward the Mall, we pass a mother and
son standing on the sidewalk. She's holding what,
for me, is the most striking sign of the day: "No
Iraqis left me on a roof to die." Her twelve
year-old son, Muata Hunter, holds a sign too. It's
simple and eloquent. "No war." Just as I approach
them, a young black woman comes up to ask (as I
was about to do), "Is your home in New Orleans?"
"No," the woman answers, "but my heart is.
It's my people."
She's Aziza
Gibson-Hunter, a local artist. "I've been thinking
and thinking," she says, "trying to figure out how
to make my people understand the direct
correlation of this war and our well-being and I
just thought this put it succinctly."
Her
son shyly tells me that he made his sign that
morning. "I just think war shouldn't be done. War
isn't necessary. My uncle's been in war and my
cousin Jimmy was in Iraq."
His mother
adds, "He made it back."
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
