2003-01-26 - 2:53 p.m.
OK, so there is one good thing about having the Superbowl in San Diego. The fireworks down in the harbor last night were wicked cool--especially since I could enjoy them with a glass of spiced rum from the balcony of the Lair of Doom instead of with cheap beer and a hundred thousand knuckleheads at the waterfront.
Other than that? I got some free movie passes from a friend for Christmas and I haven’t seen Gangs of New York yet, so that’s probably how I’ll spend the afternoon.
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Magpie asks a valid question here, but damned if I can come up with an answer. I suppose there’s value in letting the world know that not everyone in the U.S. is on board the war-with-Iraq bandwagon--but then, as Mag herself points out, the fact that on any given day, a couple of hundred thousand Bay Area residents marched down Market Street to protest some U.S. policy or other is hardly earth-shattering news.
I’ve never been to a demonstration in the Bay Area, but I did attend a handful of them in L.A. years ago. In L.A., protest marches are tightly choreographed set pieces: The organizers get all the proper permits from the police department, assemble at the agreed-upon hour, and march down the street holding signs of an agreed-upon size and shouting agreed-upon slogans that are almost exactly the same as the agreed-upon slogans from 1968 (usually rhyming couplets of the "1, 2, 3, 4/yadda yadda yadda war" variety). A few carefully selected troublemakers are always there to get in minor scuffles with the police, or to break some windows, or to do that going-completely-limp thing so that the cops have to drag them away like sacks of oranges. Those few who get arrested are out on bail in a matter of hours; meanwhile, everyone else finishes the demo on schedule and gets home in time to see if they make it on the six o’clock news. More often than not, they don’t--not because of any media conspiracy, but (speaking as a journalist) because they’re boring.
I suspect it’s like that in the Bay Area too, only a thousand times more so.
In America, demonstrations by and large have ceased to be dangerous, and that’s sucked all the energy and effectiveness out of them. It’s like that episode of original Star Trek where the two warring planets have made their conflict so sanitized and painless that it’s lost all meaning and just goes on and on for centuries with no end in sight. Taking to the streets for what you believed in must have meant a lot more when you could be beaten, teargassed, mauled by police dogs, thrown in jail or killed for your trouble. With the exception of Seattle in 1999, that hasn’t been the case in America for over 30 years. And Seattle is the exception that proves the rule, in my opinion--it was news precisely because the police went off-script and starting lobbing tear-gas grenades, and because the demonstrators themselves were such a loud and obnoxious counterpoint to the blah-blah-New-Economy laissez-faire capitalist clusterfuck that was the 1990s.
Go to a protest today and look around you--mostly, what you’ll see are a lot of aging hippies, trustafarian college kids, and middle-class card-carrying members of White Guilt R Us. Are any of them risking life or limb by being there? The hippies are in it for the nostalgia. The college kids are probably earning extra credit. And the rest can drive their SUVs back to Marin County or wherever smug in the knowledge that they’ve "done something." If more of them had actually voted in 2000, or voted for the guy who could have actually kept George W. Bush out of the White House, there might be no need for anti-war demonstrations today in the first place. But that, I suppose, wouldn’t have been any fun.
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As for the Iraq issue itself, my opinion is mixed. Or, more precisely, I have a lot of opinions and I can’t keep any of them on top of the others for more than 15 minutes. We should have taken Saddam Hussein out of the picture in 1991, instead of pulling out too soon and hanging the Kurds and the Iraqi opposition out to dry. That said, there are simpler ways to remove a power-mad dictator than by throwing 400 cruise missiles a day at him and everyone in the vicinity. A Special Ops team could do it much more quickly and cleanly. But that wouldn’t let us take possession of the Iraqi oil fields and would deprive the chickenhawks in the administration and the media of the chance to make gonadal whoop-whoop sounds. So I suspect the anti-war crowd is right when they claim this is all about oil and power. I don’t want Dubya to be redrawing the map of the Middle East. Every time he tries to draw anything he gets crayon all over himself.
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A quick note to my minions (you know who you are).
If you’re reading this, could you drop a note in my guestbook while you’re at it? No one’s written in it since like October and I could use the validation. Gracias.
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