In theory, people are supposed to sit at home and watch TV—read the paper if they're high-brow—and grumble quietly. We are fully expected to watch our government and military machinery operate like tin-men players on a Coleco vibrating-table hockey game. If they're moving in a direction you don't like, well, that's just your tough luck.

So it's always an amazing thing when the urge to hit the streets becomes so overpowering that individuals gather and actually do it. This is Freak Power at its best. Masses of citizens storming around the citadels of power and waving pitchfork placards while some fuzzy-haired grad student with a bullhorn justifies eight years of higher education by coming up with snazzy lyrics beginning with "One, two, three, four..."

Losing Hearts and Minds

The power of stupidity should never be underestimated. Nobody wants to be on the losing side, especially those who wear cowboy hats, vote Republican, and drive pickup trucks. Simple solutions always play well to people who cemented their understanding of human relations in high school.

Mohamad Marrar, on the left visually and conceptually, meets with Matt Zebrowski on the right in Normal, Illinois. We don't have the soundtrack, but you could imagine it:

"War is not the answer to the world's problems—"

"The hell you say! Why don't you go back to where you came from!"

"New Jersey?"

While rallies are scheduled all across America today to lend visual support to the calls for reason, millions are marching in Europe. For most of the world, a U.N. decision to violently oust Saddam would represent an international agreement that no card has been left unplayed in the hand of diplomacy. Until that consensus is reached, the image of blazing oilfields and a punished people isn't sitting well with a surprisingly broad cross-section of the body politic.

In New York, organizers expect up to 100,000 people to join the protest near the United Nations headquarters. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and actors Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover are scheduled to address the rally.

The Bush team is probably more worried about the European action, which spotlights the growing anti-Americanism that's rumbling underground and making businesspeople more nervous than a 45-year-old guy on his first visit to a proctologist.

The refusenik voice is hard to ignore when it aims at the corporate spreadsheet and the good-will we've been hunting:

Analysts warn that a whole generation of America-haters is being created, a European generation which they say believes Americans deliberately bomb civilians and kill Arab babies.

While he may not be Superfly, Hans Blix is looking like the man of the hour, according to the UK Independent. His efforts may have resulted in this encouraging statement from Ari Fleischer:

The White House said President George Bush was not on a tram-track to war. "The President remains hopeful that Iraq will, indeed, disarm and therefore avert the need for force to be used to disarm him."

A Bright Note

Always good to get one of these. In this morning's The New York Times: White House Scales Back Cyberspace Plan.

You might recall they were planning to engineer an entire USAPATRIOT-like structure of Federal oversight to guarantee Internet security.

The revamped national strategy on cyberspace security was a response to lobbying from industry groups that were worried about an overly heavy-handed approach by government regulators.

He described companies who sell consumer Internet connections without firewalls as akin to "selling cars without seat belts."

Our Wise Legislators

We can always count on lawmakers to indentify critical problems and mandate sensible solutions. That's their job. Here's Georgia's geniuses with a bill that seeks to lighten the weight of student's textbooks. They won't be the first:

In California last year, a school board in suburban Los Angeles began issuing students an extra set of textbooks for home, and Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation that eventually will ban textbooks over a certain weight.

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