The Great Hollywood Peace Parade
Antiwar Angelenos mark the fifth year of war by throwing a party
By Ron Garmon
The State of the Movement
Most of us remember the deafening passion of the antiwar movement at the outset of Team Dubya’s Iraq adventure a half-decade ago. The sheer unlikelihood of the administration’s claims of Iraqi WMD coupled with open-manufactured hysteria quickly made it the biggest antiwar movement in history, with the protest action on February 15, 2003, bringing tens of millions into the streets all over the planet. The New York Times intoned “[T]here may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”
Steve Mikulan wrote some impressive dispatches on the early demonstrations for the L.A. Weekly. “Well, at that point it was growing by leaps and bounds,” Steve remembered of 2003. “I spoke to Tom Hayden and he pointed out at that time that the antiwar movement was then far ahead of what it was in Vietnam. It took four or five years to accomplish what they did in a matter of months. I think there was a lot of expectation that this thing would keep building and get bigger. That didn’t happen, of course. I think part of the reason is that the mainstream media got a dose of what it perceived as patriotic duty and stopped covering these rallies, even though they were still attracting hundreds of thousands of people. The networks pulled all the antiwar commentators from talk shows and then stopped talking about the movement. You can only sustain energy at that level for so long and, in L.A., the ironically-named ANSWER-LA had no answers. Outrage will only carry enthusiasm so far.”
Pinked
Not everyone just gave up and went home. One of the antiwar movement’s most durable organizations is Code Pink, the prankish feminists whose giddy stunt-politics include “kiss-ins” staged near military bases (“Make love, not war”) and draping a 30-foot satin “pink slip” out of a window of the Century Plaza Hotel while the president was inside at a reelection 814 fundraiser.
When I spoke to co-founder Jodie Evans, Code Pink was in the middle of planning various pre-rally actions, including an activist “training camp” in the wilds of Malibu and a series of demonstrations at the offices of selected local congresspersons. “I mean,” she laughed, “they shouldn’t go on vacation. We’re gonna take in visuals that show the amount each district has lost in not bringing the troops home. The other message that we’re carrying is that their votes are very critical on the Pfizer bill, which allows immunity for the phone companies to spy for Bush. So there’s actually a few members of the Judiciary committee ready to join Rep. Wexler to demand impeachment proceedings.”
That the outgoing president may well be beyond Constitutional reach at this point scarcely matters. “You have to care as much about the war ending as soldiers care about putting their lives on the line fighting for it,” Evans put it grimly. “We spent the last year pressuring Congress to quit funding the war and obviously that’s not gonna happen. The people who are making money off the war seem to have more power with these members of Congress than the voting public. We’re modeling what it looks like not to pay for war by not paying seven percent of our taxes. You can see that on our Web site.”
We spoke of trying to imagine a time when the war might conceivably end, but that seemed phantasmal, if satisfying to contemplate. “Unfortunately,” she sighed, “we’re all stuck like deer in headlights inside a war. The lack of imagination on everyone’s part is devastating. After we got back from Iraq five years ago, we went to see Hillary and she told us the reason she wanted to invade Iraq is to protect the people of New York.” Here she paused, then continued with care. “I said, ‘Are these the only two choices your mind can concoct?’”
Published: 03/19/2008
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