Wolcott on Rita and Anti war protests

[ZinZen]

Systems Failures
Posted by James Wolcott

Now that the post-Rita coverage is reduced to showing footage of overturned mailboxes and replays of Shepard Smith being blown sideways (by the wind and rain, I hasten to add), it'll only be a day or two before the media's collective camera eye swerves back to Iraq, which hasn't been mending and beautifying in the interim.

"Just when it didn’t seem like Iraq could get any worse—it gets worse," writes Robert Dreyfuss at tompaine.com.

"This time, it’s the simmering battle between two Shiite paramilitary armies: the forces of the Badr Brigade, the 20,000-strong force controlled by the Iranian-supported Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and the Mahdi Army, the thousands-strong force that worships the fanatical Muqtada Al Sadr. The battle, which might flare into a Shiite-Shiite civil war in advance of the October 15 referendum on Iraq’s divisive, rigged constitution, could put the final nail in the coffin of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy."

SNIP

In November of last year, the iconoclastic military historian Martin van Creveld, peering through a glass darkly, foresaw this spectre of defeat in an essay called Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did.

" who fights against the weak – and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed – and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however, advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if U.S troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did. Namely, with the last US troops fleeing the country while hanging on to their helicopters’ skids."



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The absence of debate is undeniably a sign of shame and cowardice, yet I can't blame high-profile Democrats from absenting themselves from yesterday's antiwar demo and march in DC. Steve Gilliard confessed that he watched about an hour of the rally and was so p.o.'d that he wanted to do an Elvis to his TV screen. I'm a less patient hothead than Steve. I only lasted about ten minutes watching the rally on C-SPAN, which made Stepford Wives selling Christmas kitsch on QVC--no fooling, at QVC the "Christmas Countdown" has already begun--must-see viewing by comparison. Here are the problems with mass rallies and marches on TV.

1) They all look alike. They're interchangeable pedestrian jams. If you didn't know what year it was, you wouldn't have known whether this demo was taking place in 2003 or 2004 or spring of 2005, because apart from Cindy Sheehan and a few others, it was the same cast of characters you always get at these protest smorgasbords, which remind me of WBAI at its most doctrinaire PC, where every faction and caucus has to be represented and heard no matter how boring or splintery or tangential to the event they are.

SNIP

2) The scale is all wrong for TV.

To be heard before thousands of gatherers, speakers feel they have to shout into the mike and every every phrase sound STENTORIAN. But for the larger audience at home, it's like being harangued, and who wants to be harangued, especially by speakers pounding you with played-out slogans? And no matter how large the crowd, on TV it looks like congested clutter, a sea of tiny, ugly billboards. It really doesn't help that so many of the signs are homemade and hackneyed.

With her vigil near the Crawford ranch, Cindy Sheehan carved out an original protest space. The magnitude of yesterday's protest miniaturized her. It was as if she was swallowed up inside a whale aslosh with flotsam. I don't know what the answer is to the lack of adversarial energy against this accursed war, but what I do know is that yesterday's flea circus wasn't it.

www.jameswolcott.com

[ZinZen]

1. As someone who is proud of marching in SF on Saturday

Wolcott trivializes the marches. I agree that groups like ANSWER muddle the message, but those of us who marched did not do so to be made fun of by a high paid blogger and writer for Vanity Fair who can be fairly questioned to what purpose he serves to end the war.

[wryter2000]

3. Glad to see I'm not the only one who finds this snarky

I love Wolcott, but in this case, he's picking on the wrong folks.

I do wish we could stick to one issue -- the war -- at these events, but who am I to tell other people their concerns don't deserve some attention?

[Mist]

5. I agree 100% that protests should FOCUS on one thing--his remarks

on "splinter" groups should be taken to heart. A protest should be about one issue. "Splintering" reduces the overall impact.

[wryter2000]

2. CSPAN

I'll admit I didn't watch the coverage of the march yesterday, but I'm not convinced that CSPAN is in bed with *. They're not a big budget production company with writers and producers. They put their cameras someplace and let them roll. It works in the Congress and book talks. Maybe it doesn't work for large protests.

At least CSPAN puts this stuff on, and they appear to respond to viewer requests for coverage. The real crime is that other networks that are better equipped to cover a large event didn't do anything.

[asjr]

4. Another crime is the fact that we had to have a rally to

bring this to the attention of others. This country is going down the toilet so fast it makes my head spin. The whole world knows it; we know it. I keep wondering if there is another country somewhere on this planet who will free us. We have reps and senators who are supposed to represent the PEOPLE. Where are they? The corruption of this administration is well known. We are not getting our money's worth at all. If the people in charge (Republicans) do not bring peachment proceedings against this administration we are lost forever. Another 3 years and there will not be a USA. This business of Shrub wanting the military to take over in disasters is just another way of putting this country under martial law. There will be another civil war in this country because we can't take much more.

[mcscajun]

6. C-Span is all about "talking heads"

so it's no wonder they'd focus more on the A.N.S.W.E.R. rally stage than on the marchers.

They Could Have, and Should Have, though, cut back and forth in their coverage to show a true picture of the entire event. They may or may not be in league with BushCo, but they're not doing their job, either.

[KoKo]

7. They needed to have camera's that pulled back in the crowd so that

the speaker would be seen the way the crowd saw them. It would have given some distance and not have made the speakers shouting seem like it was at you through the TV screen.

Wolcott can be very pissy sometimes and the "rabble of the crowd" might turn him off...masses of people, I think is not his cup 'o tea.

I enjoy reading him...but on this, it's really an opinion I can't agree with. :-(