Fresh Loaf

Seeing the ragtag forces on street corners back in early 2003, there was the sense that the antiwar/anti-empire movement was doomed. There was that one big blast of a protest in New York City right on the eve of the Iraq invasion, reinforced by protests around the world, but after that, with a few exceptions, those who knew Iraq was a mistake stayed out of no man’s land, stymied by the post-9/11 blues and the useless exercise of shaking signs at passing cars while American men and women in uniform were already running across the sand between Kuwait and Baghdad. The streets were largely empty, and the sense was so many would-be Cesar Chavez/Che Guevara/Tom Hayden/Amiri Barakas in the making were slumped in front of computer screens somewhere with saliva dribbling onto their shirt fronts, leaving the ground to a handful of radicals and resisters who’d already been beaten up 40 years ago.

"On Jan. 27, 2003, I got in the well of the House and spoke out against the intent of Bush to invade Iraq," Rep. Bob Holmes, D-Atlanta, told a crowd assembled on the steps of the state Capitol Friday, on the eve of an antiwar march in Washington. "People walked out of the chamber in the middle of my remarks. I was called a traitor."

Most people didn’t want that kind of stigma, and so the leaders who kept going out into public view week after week in 2003 with the candles and battered signs were mostly leftovers from Vietnam, a mummery of pacifists animated only by the Kucinichs of the world making speeches like dirges delivered in honor of already-fallen antiwar heroes. The blood of rebels was dried up, it seemed.

It wasn’t good at all.

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But as the state faces a shortfall of federal funds for PeachCare, "There is a direct nexus between the Iraq war and health care for our children," Rep. Stephanie Stuckey-Benfield, D-Atlanta, told the small crowd of protestors, some of them preparing to board buses bound for D.C.

"Three thousand dead Americans," said Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, "22,000 wounded Americans, tens of thousands more who are psychologically damaged. The best experts predict we will spend $2 trillion on this war that should never have been waged."

Bush’s call for a "troop surge" of 21,000 soldiers represents "an unconscionable decision on the part of the president," said Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta. "It’s a decision that borders on the criminal."

Signage

The voices of discontent spread outward.

The price of civic disengagement then now forces a last stand of civic engagement.

Bush, unspeakable from the time he first entered the public consciousness as part of his father’s entourage, boiling over with vengeful expletives in the face of anyone who ever criticized "Dad," had come to power only as a symbol of the country’s collective decay. From the beginning, the perplexity one felt at the sight of this misfit dredged out of the annals of an irrelevant European aristocracy, like some belt-buckle-clad cousin at the corner of Goya’s portrait of the family of Charles IV, was always blunted by the realization that one had not done enough in his own way to perform a civic duty, to rage against the rising consciousness of war.

The country had wandered off course, so many of its shamans and warriors glutted themselves into consumption as a political philosophy and reason for being, far from the founders’ designs. The consequences would be self-defeating, to say the least. As Hegel said, "A people which loses its metaphysic is a people in whom mind occupied with its own pure nature no longer really exists."

A few had tried to point the way.

At Riverside Church 40 years ago, Dr. King told the world what was going down.

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

But we didn’t want to listen, and so we unwilled ourselves to a condition of eternal return.

"This is a throwback," lamented Holmes on the steps of the Capitol, "to the days when we invaded Latin American countries."

What was clear early was that Bush and his immediate allies had spent so much time with the machinery of money that they had ceased to possess any demonstrable understanding of human nature. Striving to justify their conflicts of interest, they preferred an abstract concept of "freedom" to the anthropology of occupation, for example, where men among the occupied tire of watching foreigners with guns who know better, and resist — as they had in Scotland, and Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland and Algeria, etc. Bush’s people were aware of the disconnect, and so the leader repeatedly tried to convince us he was a student of human nature. "I read two Shakespeares," he told a reporter, and "reading is a great escape," he told another — and simply confirmed what we knew already: Not only did they fail to understand human nature, they were devoid of human intelligence as something bigger than appetite for profit. Still they endured. And our young people died and were maimed, and died and were maimed, and died and were maimed.

But there were bands of peaceniks and beatniks, Vietnam-era outcasts and exhausted feminists, mothers tormented by the thought of their babies at war, shriveled-up bearded prophets and gray-haired old dog soldiers and aging Civil Rights veterans with their votes and their voices, who took to the streets before the invasion, dug in against Iraq before the beginning, who have been there all these years, week after week … screaming against the madness.

"War," said U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Atlanta, Friday on the steps of the Georgia state Capitol, "it kills people. … We must do everything possible to stop the madness. The greatest moral crisis we are facing today is this war. Stop the madness, and stop it now."

– Max Pizarro

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