Tom Engelhardt: With the Antiwar Demonstrators in NYC

Historian Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com (March 21, 2004):

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 …