I’ve said before that I don’t like getting into left-meta discussions about who wore what to the rally, because I don’t care that much. I think one of the comments toTbogg’s post here is largely correct, that the two people with the “Say No To Veal” signs wouldn’t get noticed so much if there were 600,000 people with “Say No To War” signs, so if you want a protest to conform to your expectations, ain’t nobody stopping you from having one.
Would perfect message discipline be nice? Absolutely. But you know, the veal people get press because everybody but the veal people stays home. Plus, the veal people aren’t hurting anybody, unlike Dick Cheney.
All of which is my way of saying I was in Washington last Saturday to speak at Camp Democracy, and I loved the Bush Puppets, and so did the six zillion Japanese people who stopped by to take pictures of them. It was wet, it was muddy, there were protest songs and signs about lots of different things, and it was still profoundly moving to see this kind of dissent in the heart of the city’s patriotic tourist pageant. I sit here in Chicago, in the bluest city in one of the bluest states, and talk about how Bush sucks. Other people do it on his front lawn.
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The other thing that was moving, and I wrote about it in my column for next week, was that all this was taking place just over the Washington Monument hill from the World War II memorial, where I stopped for a while:
In the face of that, and the contrast between the two displays of patriotism could not be more stark, I’m not gonna say anybody who wants to speak up should stay quiet. No matter what your sign’s about.
A.
ps. Except the kid with the ponytail dry-humping the giant blow-up Bush as Pinocchio display. Dear kid: I support your right to molest representations of our national leaders as a powerful expression of your distaste for them (or an equally powerful if more disturbing expression of your admiration), and I hope you’ll support my right tobe as squicked out as I’ve ever been in my whole life, okay?