Crossposted at Sacred Space: Reflections from the religious left
Yes, it’s a diary about Cindy Sheehan. It features an article by Matt Taibbi, the smartass campaign reporter I first saw on the Daily Show last month.
The first article of his that I read was one in which he described reluctantly attending a panel discussion on “what went wrong in Ohio”. He walked into that discussion as someone who felt “revulsion and irritation” at any talk of voting irregularities in Ohio, and walked out having this to say:
Here’s the thing about Ohio. Until you really look at it, you won’t understand its significance, which is this: the techniques used in this particular theft have the capacity to alter elections not by dozens or hundreds or even thousands of votes, but by tens of thousands.
Now Matt has an article, Bush vs. the Mother in Rolling Stone magazine, in which he reports on the time he spent in Crawford with Cindy Sheehan’s supporters, detractors, and with Cindy herself. He describes the circus on both sides, not cutting either any slack, and at the end of the piece shares his impressions upon meeting and talking with Cindy…
But for all this, Sheehan seemed a very lonely woman. Tall, lanky and clunkily built, with the most common and therefore most tragic of faces — the forgotten housewife whom life, with all its best joys, has long ago passed by — Sheehan had begun to move around the compound with a preternatural slowness, like a ghost. She floated, rather than walked, into the trailer. After a week of media madness, she was like a superhero unable to return home after falling into a vat of disfiguring acid. Her past — the middle-class family life in Vacaville, California, with her four kids and the yellow station wagon they nicknamed the BananaMobile — all that was gone.
…
“I never knew,” she said, sighing. “Not only that I would become the face of the anti-war movement but also that I would become the sacrificial lamb of the anti-war movement.”I asked her if she was referring to all the personal attacks. She nodded.
“But I’d still do it again,” she said. “Because it’s so important.”
…
In the end, the movement might overtake her, but while she is still at its center she seems genuinely to be trying to do the right thing.“This thing,” she said, “it’s bigger than me now.”
Sheehan believes that no matter what happens, one thing she accomplished was the returning of the Iraq war to its rightful place at the forefront of the national consciousness. She describes an experience earlier in the week when a TV producer offhandedly mentioned to her that her timing was perfect, that Sheehan had been lucky to hold her vigil on what was otherwise a slow news week.
“And I said to her, ‘A slow news week? Didn’t thirty soldiers die in the war this month?'” She shook her head. “It’s crazy. Iraq should be the lead story every day.”
That’s the thing. Bush calls himself a “war president”, but only when it suits him. For the most part, there has been a concerted effort to keep the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the consequences of those activities on the periphery of our national consciousness.
Matt concludes:
In the Sixties, the anti-war movement was part of a cultural revolution: If you opposed Vietnam, you were also rejecting the whole rigid worldview that said life meant going to war, fighting the Commies, then coming back to work for the man, buying two cars and dying with plenty of insurance. That life blueprint was the inflexible expectation of the time, and so ending the war of that era required a visionary movement.
Iraq isn’t like that. Iraq is an insane blunder committed by a bunch of criminal incompetents who have managed so far to avoid the lash and the rack only because the machinery for avoiding reality is so advanced in this country. We don’t watch the fighting, we don’t see the bodies come home and we don’t hear anyone screaming when a house in Baghdad burns down or a child steps on a mine.
The only movement we’re going to need to end this fiasco is a more regular exposure to consequence. It needs to feel its own pain. Cindy Sheehan didn’t bring us folk songs, but she did put pain on the front pages. And along a lonely Texas road late at night, I saw it spread.