What democracy looks like. So what's it take to goad a dispirited, marginal semi-blogger out of his torpor? Well, certainly it gave me a twinge, when I got back from my weekend in D.C. and started catching up on the blog reading, to bang into James Wolcott's snide, high-handed dismissal of the march I flew halfway across the country to join as a "flea circus." (Wolcott seems to have been most dismayed by how badly the event, "a sea of tiny, ugly billboards," scaled to his TV. I don't know, James, maybe you want to think about getting a larger screen before you do your next rally critique?) But I counted it as just a lapse: kinda dumb (a dumb he caught from Steve Gilliard, apparently), to measure the political worth of a march by how you thought the images played while you parked your ass in front of the C-SPAN, but Wolcott's too good too consistently for me not to forgive the occasional lapse, even one I have to take somewhat personally.

But then along comes a smug, ass-stupid, finger-wagging post on the same topic from the mighty keyboard of Kos, and the dam breaks. "The lack of focus" of the marchers, Kos intones, "is maddening, obviously." (Love that "obviously.")

But my biggest problem with anti-war protests is that they're obsolete. What do they accomplish? Historians still argue about the role Vietnam-era protests had on ending the war (shortened it versus prolonged it). But today, they mean nothing.

We are a media-saturated world, bombarded on all angles by information. A bunch of people marching in the street no longer have any serious emotional effect on media consumers. One picture on a front page and CNN of flag-drapped coffins would likely have a greater effect on war opinions than 1,000 marches like the one we had last weekend. ...

My question ... becomes whether the money and effort people expended getting to DC to march might've been better spent in other forms of activism -- letters to the editor, contributions to anti-war candidates, politicians, and organizations, calls and letters to their elected officials, creating anti-war media (e.g. Flash animations, documentaries), and so on.

I'm sure Jeff Jarvis would be on the same page: protest is sooo old media. Because, yeah, you want to fund those Flash animations, don't you? That's twenty-first century politics, dood. Nothing moves opinion like whimsical little thirty-second cartoons on some Web page.

It's one thing if James Wolcott is obtuse about activist politics; no one goes to a Wolcott to understand activism. Markos, on the other hand, as a self-appointed Reviver of the Democratic Party, might perhaps feel himself responsible for a bit more nuanced understanding of—not to mention uncondescending respect for—the political agency of a hundred thousand and more of his fellow citizens and ideological compatriots, and for the commitment that brought them to D.C. to exercise it. Then again, for all his gabbling about the netroots and such, it's been clear for some time now that Markos is not fundamentally more comfortable with popular activism than the Establishment consultantocrats he makes a show of railing against. "Netroots," when you come down to it, is just Kos's branding statement: as his strictures against the non-branded (or competing) forms of grassroots work should make plain. He's managed to progress not an inch past the Establishment's degraded, and degradingly passive, reduction of all politics to a traffic in "messages." There are the funders (and, optionally, in small ways, disseminators) of messages, the professional operatives (enforcers of "message discipline," one of the more unfortunate phrases of our moment) who formulate and direct them, and the "media consumers" who receive them, and if Kos has any brighter idea than that about what activism is supposed to be, I'm not aware of it. And that, I'm afraid, is the endpoint of the vaunted Kos revolution: a few new faces taking (appropriately compensated) seats around the same goddamn old conference tables. But now they've all got Blackberries!

I mean—media consumers? Does it even occur to Kos that there might be something else going on here, should be something else going on here, than a form of political advertising?

Let me tell you a little about how my march day went, since I think there's a kind of object lesson in it. My friend Mark and I got to the Ellipse not long before the scheduled start of the march, a little later than we would have been if I hadn't had the evil thought to detour first past the pathetically under-attended Freeper counter-demonstration at the Navy Memorial. (A point of historical interest for me, since it was at just that location that ol' Baldy McManwhore made his first attested appearance as Jeff Gannon at the beginning of 2003. Didn't see him there, though he was spotted at the next day's pathetically under-attended pro-war thing.) There was still a steady, strong influx of people from all directions in to the staging area along Constitution Ave., and obviously no march about to commence any time soon, so we picked our way through the tents and the knots of picnickers toward the speakers' platform, where things were in full cry. It was not edifying. Ramsay Clark was in the middle of a tedious harangue on Haiti that seemed to have been freeze-dried a year and a half ago (when the kidnapping of Aristide was still a fresh atrocity to be opposed). Followed by a Haitian speaker, followed by a Palestinian, followed as it seemed by anyone with a protest to make not on the subject of the Iraq war: no information about when we could expect the march to start, or why it had been delayed. (ANSWER's auto-erotic desire to prolong what it thought was its closeup being the only reason I could conjure myself, under the circumstances.) It felt like all the air was leaking out of the event. It got to the point that, if I'd heard one more damn no-name speaker introduced as a "tireless fighter" for this that or the other, I was gonna have to throw something.

I hit a toxic level of boredom and annoyance at the point where yet another tireless fighter declaimed, in tones of highest outrage, to the effect that sub-standard wages for African-Americans were a form of genocide. (Imagine how narrow and moldy a world of agitprop you have to live in for a statement like that to seem to have any actual political meaning.) Hoping that movement and a sense of scale might recover spirit enough yet for us to keep on with the day, we decided to hike back down across Constitution and up to the vantage of the Washington Monument. It was a good decision, even before we got to the vantage. The street was choked with people—far more than when we'd passed along it maybe forty-five minutes before. Hard to imagine such a throng of humanity clearing the air, but that's what it did. Drums, from what seemed all sides, made themselves felt as we pushed into the mass. (Nothing like rally drumming to angry up the blood.) There was a seething energy in the crowd: not an energy of rage, but of expectation, of delight even, of people ready and eager to burst out of their confines. Gaining the other side of the avenue, we slipped into the narrow, slow stream moving between the curb and the Park Service's temporary wooden fencing (made less narrow when a few people decided to take revolutionary action against the fences, to general cheer), past the flags and the signs and the Statue of Liberty on stilts and Code Pink's garish (not to say vaginal) pink-balloon peace sign that lit up the middle of the block: and sometimes the air was full of drums, sometimes of spontaneous isolated chanting, and sometimes in the intervals of the drumming and the chanting, or just from a change of the breeze, some half-heard scrap of oratory from the Ellipse drifted over: and made a direct, physical communication of just how irrelevant the haranguers, the purveyors of message, were to the people and to their purpose here.

By the time we'd got up to the Monument, then back down on the other side to the Port-a-Potties lined up at the end of the Mall, and back at last to the headwaters of Connecticut and Fifteenth, the march had commenced. It was on a scale vastly different from even the biggest marches I was at in Chicago before the war. There was a kind of exhiliration in seeing, still some distance before the turn that would take us in front of the White House, the head of the march a block over coiling back on itself, already passing down Sixteenth while we were still struggling up Fifteenth. And with the tension of those Chicago marches in mind, it's impossible for me to exaggerate how spirited and relaxed and cheerful this one was. Not even a clammy drizzle could bring anyone down. (Earlier, on our way up to the Monument, I'd complained to Mark that I'd been there for more than an hour and hadn't yet smelled joint one. Just didn't seem right. Somewhere along the route, near the FBI building I think, I finally caught a whiff. So did everybody around me: a group of college-age girls on my right, all wearing big Dubya masks, broke off whatever it was they'd just been chanting to improvise a new one: "Share! The! Dope! Share! The! Dope!" The whole thing was like that.) As the parade thickened and all but clotted along Pennsylvania—nobody could resist the White House, the rooftop snipers, the Secret Service scattered on the lawn, as a photo backdrop—it came to me that, for all our legitimate anger, for all the ugliness of state apparatus we were surrounded with, this march resembled nothing so much as a victory lap. For three years now we've persisted, in spite of Republican thuggery, in spite of Democratic fecklessness and bad faith, in spite of media cowardice and inattention; and without minimizing any struggle ahead, we know for a certainty that the main job is done, that we've won the argument. Hell, the truth was there right in front of us, in a White House missing its principal occupant: hadn't we just collectively forced that little punk-ass WASP bitch to flee the city for the weekend?

Along the way, somebody asked me to say why I was marching. I made some weak answer that boiled down to something like "solidarity." My answer now, I think, would boil down to "exhiliration," or maybe "carnival"—to one of those unruly quantities that make the consultants and consultant wannabes and the policy hacks feel all dirty, or (worse!) irrelevant. Protests are "obsolete," Markos? They can't change anything? Well, one thing I know inescapably is that protests change the people who do them. It couldn't have mattered less that the Big Media sights weren't trained on us, or what impression anybody not on those streets might have taken from whatever coverage was given. A hundred thousand, or two hundred, or three, of your countrymen last weekend spent a few hours of their lives, some of them for the very first time, embodying democracy. Not spectating it, not commentating it, not buying access to it—but being it, in the most direct way possible. Is it a small thing to know, in your bones, in the soles of your feet, that your citizenship belongs to you? Is it a small thing that a hundred thousand or more Americans came back home from their capital this week, came back to their communities with that knowledge? Ready, many of them, to spread it? Not a small thing at all, in my book.

Democracy is foolish, loud, ill-disciplined, inexclusive, undignified. It doesn't make a good conference panelist. It is never on message. People walk down a street, and somebody starts a chant, and in embarrassed good will you take it up for a while. And weary of it, get self-conscious again, and it peters out. And then after a while somebody somewhere else starts up another one. That's our silly, raggedy-ass democracy, and it's all we've got. God bless it.

posted by michael  4:00:46 PM  
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