Once again ANSWER, the anti-war coalition, has done its level best to screw things up. They held an anti-Iraq War protest in Washington DC yesterday, attended by "thousands" (they claim 100,000 but the claims of mass-gathering organizers are usually rightfully discounted) and a couple of hundred people were arrested.
There are two basic reasons for mounting a protest march:
You want to put pressure on public officials to change whatever policy or action you're protesting against; and
You want to convince other ordinary people to come out to your next protest, so the larger number of people will put more pressure on those public officials.
Unfortunately, to put pressure on public officials, you've got to have some leverage on them. They have to be vulnerable in some way, say by needing to be re-elected, or by having a conscience that can be reached. Neither of these things are true about the Bush Administration. In fact, their only vulnerability I can think of is that they're prone to disliking messy PR -- and the Administration's current situation in that respect is so very bad that a lousy protest isn't going to do diddley to make it worse.
So, the Bush Administration can't be reached through protesting -- but we knew that because they weren't in any respect affected by the previous protests, including those that were relatively massive. However, there are public officials who could conceivably reached by an anti-war protest: the Democrats.
It's possible that the right kind of protest would put some backbone into the party's relatively weak and unfocused position concerning the war and stiffen their opposition. What kind of protest would be the right kind? One in which the vast majority of the protestors were bourgeois middle-class and working-class people, one in which there were no huge puppets on display, one in which placards and banners were straight-forward and to the point, but politely so. The kind of protest where everyone focused on the issue at hand and didn't go off about their own favorite liberal/left-wing issue.
What we needed was the kind of protest where people don't get arrested because they want to perform a piece of half-baked political theatre like a "die-in" to dramatise their point.
In short, what was needed was a Middle American protest, not the kind of bullshit demonstration that ANSWER has been responsible for in the past.
What this protest did was to underline the cliched prejudice that "anti-war" equates to "half-baked lefty flake", instead of creating a new perception that, at least right now for this war, "anti-war" should mean "concerned everday American." Bush & Cheney don't care one way or the other, but moderate Democrats, who might have been subject to some pressure by the right sort of demonstration, can easily evade it now because ANSWER, once again, fucked up.
But a flawed demonstration is better than not at all, right? No, not really.
The Bush Administration is on the ropes, it's reeling from the pain of a thousand cuts, the last thing we would want to do is to give them some encouragement to believe that perhaps their position is somewhat more tenable than it appears. At this juncture, they don't have the people on their side, all the polls show that, but looking at Saturday's feeble, badly-conceived march, all they could possibly feel is encouraged, because all they saw there were the nutjobs and wackos they expected to see.
They won't bend to pressure, for sure, but 100,000 middle-class Moms and Dads and Aunt Bertha and Uncle Henry politely telling them in person that they're wrong has got to be a bit depressing, even for conscience-free assholes like the Bush Administration, and it's certainly not encouraging in any way.
Way to go, ANSWER. Keep it up, and you'll snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet.
Update: My previous comments of a similar nature can be found here, here and here, and my friend Roger weighs in here.
Afterthought: I think perhaps a large part of the problem is that people don't think hard enough about what they want to achieve with their actions, and instead focus on what they feel they need to do. The resulting action, therefore, becomes primarily about people feeling good about themselves.
Someone really should ask the organizers and participants a question: Do you want to feel good, or do you want to get something done?"
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
guest-blogged for:
Be sure to visit them all!!
recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.
Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
