A Welcoming Community
This is a short diary. Horrible news ought to be slugged down quick:
They’re shooting dogs in NO. Here’s video (WARNING–I’M GUESSING IT’S HORRIBLE; I couldn’t watch it after I heard the shots):
Here’s the message board for NOLA Pet Rescue. It sounds like they’re looking desperately for lawyers. They’ve called the state atty. and she doesn’t care (if I’m reading them right; their posts are kind of cryptic):
Saturday at Casey II
Two weeks ago we were chopping potatoes at the Peace House amid utter chaos. The place was overwhelmed with people, donations, and cars. Camp Casey was 100 people and their gear in a ditch at a triangular intersection in the middle of nowhere. I put $20 in the donation coffee can, stayed the day, helped out a little, and went home.
We went back yesterday, Saturday, and boy howdy, things have changed!
There are people in orange vests directing traffic. Busloads arrived from Houston, Austin, and Dallas. The storeroom of the Peace House has new industrial shelving to hold food. The lot next to the house accommodates cars and shuttles. Broadcasting equipment was being set up in the yard. But for all the new organization, in the kitchen there were still three women pitching in, chopping vegetables.
As we waited on the bus at the Peace House to go to Casey II, three… well, I’m sorry, there’s no other word for them… rednecks with pro-Bush/war/troops signs ambled east across the railroad tracks trying to walk in front of the Peace House. I hesitate to describe their beer guts as I am similarly afflicted, but you get the picture. A small woman in an orange traffic vest stopped them. I couldn’t hear what she said. I guess that either she wanted to keep the drive clear for the shuttles or that the Peace House grounds are private property. Whatever it was, these three big, menacing guys amiably complied. They turned back and stood on the other side of the tracks past which all the shuttles to the camps had to drive and genially waved their signs at passing traffic.
From my seat high in the bus, I could see down main street Crawford where the opposition was congregating. Very large men with very large bellies in tight white muscle shirts stood on the main corner waving flags at the shuttles. I watched as a family of three (blonde mommy, little daughter, guy in white t-shirt–it’s the uniform) left their parked car and crossed the street holding hands on their way to the warmonger fair. Later Laura Flanders had estimates of numbers: pro-war 3000-4000, anti-war 6000-7000. I don’t know if that’s official or true.
We got to Casey II about 11:30. I hear the opposition is snidely calling it Cirque du Soleil. Well, when they’re right, they’re right; that’s the kind of tent it is: big pointy peaks. Somebody said it reminds her of the Dallas airport. The kitchen and the port-a-potties are at the back, the stage is at the front. Under the tent are big round wedding-reception-style tables, in front of the stage are folding chairs set up theater style. Cindy was sitting at a table in the center of the space when we arrived; that was the first time I’d seen her. She’s prettier and thinner in person. There are awnings for different groups: the Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Gold Star Families, and there were some people doing tai chi in the heat. And holy shit it was hot! There was a medical booth continuously full of overheated people with ice packs on their heads. We were instructed to drink water water and more water, and bottles of it were everywhere packed in coolers full of ice. We lucked out and got hold of a terrycloth rag and kept dunking that in the freezing water in the coolers and draping it around our necks. By the time we left we were drenched.
When we got there the place was still a little sparsely populated, but over the next 90 minutes, four or five busloads of people arrived and things started hopping. The show started about 12:30. Families spoke; Iraq veterans spoke; Russell Means spoke (he was very funny). A little girl sang a Jewel song (I’m sorry I don’t know what it was) and she started out kind of shaky but got better and better and the crowd quieted down, and she was very clear at the end. She was really good! She got a standing O. Joan Baez led us in Amazing Grace and We Shall Overcome, but the best, the best best best, was Joan singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”. Oh lordy I’ve always loved that song. I know every word.
Cindy came up to speak and got such a wave of applause and love from us it made her cry. We were going to scream and stomp and applaud another 20 minutes if she’d let us, but she shushed us up and then was succinct and to the point and clear. (Damn, she’s good. She is sharp as a tack.) She talked about the early days in the ditch and the smears from the right and this groundswell that’s changing things. She ended by advising us to “DRINK WATER!” so we did.
During the main rally we could hear voices through bullhorns from the street, but they were faint; we couldn’t make out what they were saying, and when there was music onstage or someone was speaking (they had a really good sound system) the counter-protestors couldn’t be heard at all. Even their little bit of noise ended long before the main rally ended. I heard later that they’d packed up after an hour and left.
The people who bore the brunt of the opposition were the volunteers protecting the perimeter and Arlington West–the crosses at the front of the camp. About 30 people stood along the roadway and held a canvas sign that said “Bring Our Troops Home” (we took a turn standing behind it holding it and couldn’t read it from there; we were joking that it might say “Shop At Wal-Mart” for all we knew). Those people must have been standing there in the sun holding that sign all through the rally. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. Because they were there I could sing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” with Joan Baez, which is one of the great moments of my life.
There were more musicians and more announcements and requests for volunteers. (They’d announce that they needed volunteers to do something or other, so we’d go to volunteer, and the problem would already have been taken care of.) They served BBQ at 4:30 (and it was really good). We took the shuttle back to the Peace House about 6. In the parking lot, on our way back to our car, we met a guy arriving from Galveston. He was unpacking kids and gear. He was so excited to be there that he wanted to talk to the first people he came across, we were they. He was driving back that night, too. He said he just had to get there to show his kids what’s going on, even for just a few hours. We knew just how he felt.
I’m going back Tuesday to help pack up.
I caught the tail end of Hardball tonight (Wednesday, 8/17) just as the stand-in moderator asked Christopher Hitchens what he thinks about Cindy Sheehan. Yesterday, Slate posted a very unflattering editorial on Cindy written by Hitchens. I thought about posting my opinion of it then, but decided against feeding the troll. But here he is again tonight.
So maybe there is a little something to say about the dirt he’s throwing at Cindy. He calls her message “piffle” because it’s about feeling, and feeling doesn’t count like facts count, and the fact is (according to Hitchens), if we pull out of Iraq, the carnage we have seen will be as nothing to the carnage that will come.
I’m paraphrasing. No transcript is up yet, but that’s the gist of what he said. He also called Cindy a liar re: changing her tune about the “PNAC neocon agenda to benefit Israel.” That’s a tune I hum myself; if she thinks that way, we’re in the same choir. She says she didn’t say it, and if Hitchens is asking me to choose who’s telling the truth, he or Cindy, guess whom I’d pick. (If somebody does find a copy of her letter and she did say it, who cares? How about we wait to parse everything Cindy says and writes until she’s a professional politician and her words begin to cost lives.)
Which brings us back to the first point Hitchens made: we must ignore Cindy’s feeling and stay the course; the fact is, an immediate pull out would be a disaster.
Now I’m a fan of facts. I am a fan of the fact that there were no WMDs in Iraq and the fact that a lot of people tried to tell that to the administration. I’m also a fan of the fact that life evolved. I admit it, I prefer facts to feelings.
But I wonder if Mr. Hitchens truly does. Before the war he thought he had enough evidence of the dire threat Saddam posed to the U.S. to beat the drum for invasion, but he must have missed something. I don’t recall that he predicted then that at this point we’d be mired in disaster. So why should we suppose now that he has any better command of the facts and can predict the state of a post-occupied Iraq?
Or is that just the way he feels?
There are people here: Arctic Beacon
with impressive-sounding credentials who say that some of the grand-jury work is done, and that indictments have been handed down in secret.
(Not unprecedented–happened during Watergate.) And there’s an article here (same site) that says Justice Stevens is in Chicago trying to mediate a deal (with Patrick Fitzgerald?) because indicting everyone from Bush to Rice and including two supreme-court justices would be an economic catastrophe. (Too late. Another three years of Bu$hCo and we’ll have all the kinds of catastrophe listed in the Guinness Book.)
These articles were written last week by Greg Szymanski, whom I’ve heard of, about Sherman Skolnick’s work, whom I don’t know (and whose site looks a little nutty;
sorry Mr. Skolnick, but it does.)
It’s the first I’m hearing of it. Anybody know anything? If this is true, it’s what we’ve all been waiting for, but it’s a secret. Are secret indictments subject to FOIA?
[From the diaries by susanhu — read this through — it’s chock full of great tips and info!] From Crawford (Friday, August 12), and missed the anti-protesters by about two hours. The big story–sorry. I didn’t see Cindy, either. I didn’t want her to waste her energy being glad to see a total stranger, so I didn’t seek her out. THE FUN STUFF IS BELOW:
We left Austin at 9 a.m., got to Waco about 90 minutes later, and got lost looking for highway 6 west (the signage in Waco needs work). We got to the Crawford Peace House around 11, and double-parked in front to unload the supplies we brought, which were nearly identical to all the supplies everyone else brought. The Crawford Peace House has as many cheap loaves of bread as it can use. Ditto on peanut butter, paper towels, coffee, and singly wrapped snacks. They may run out of those things next week, but what they need now is money (they had to have a plumber out today) and a good set of kitchen knives. They go through a lot of sodas and potatoes and tomatoes and green beans, and we wished we’d had tomato paste. They use a big wok outside on an iron column in which they burn mesquite wood. If you’re going, buy a bag of mesquite (I guess charcoal would work, too) for the wok, and at the last gas station, stop and buy a couple of bags of ice.
Their refrigerator is completely stuffed (hint to the rich). They have slabs of brisket and ribs to cook, and one oven. (We put a brisket in the oven to be ready for dinner; I hope somebody remembered it.) The main grilling guy is vegetarian, so somebody else needs to bring a grill and man it and make BBQ history. (Better bring sauce, too.)
The Peace House is very small, and the kitchen is tiny. There were reporters all over the place, one from the Christian Science Monitor. They took our pictures as we cooked. The Peace-House regulars are each trying to do all things at once: answer phones, direct traffic, get food on tables, give interviews, fool with the computer, arrange the shuttle, arrange the parking, get new volunteers occupied–they’re tired.
We went right to work in the kitchen chopping potatoes (Potatoes for Peace, someone said). People came in asking us where to put the supplies they brought. We kept telling them we’d only just arrived ourselves, but after ten minutes of that, we realized it was easier to pretend we were old hands and show them in to the storeroom.
After cooking a couple of hours (and leaving the kitchen a bit better organized, if I do say so myself), we rested outside and drank water and had some food, then we took the shuttle to where Cindy and the protesters are. We’d heard when we arrived at the Peace House in late morning that the road to the protest was closed because the emperor’s caravan was about to pass through (he was on his way to par-tay! for pay). A few hours later, they opened the road, and the shuttle started running again.
After a 10-minute van ride, during which we debated whether Bush is a religious zealot or a corporate figurehead caring nothing for the Constitution if it stands in the way of returning the globe to 15th-century feudalism (we pretty much agreed it’s a bit of the former and a lot of the latter), we arrived at Camp Casey, which is a long, skinny line of camp chairs, coolers, tents, and news trucks, hunkered down in a ditch against a line of trees and a barbed-wire fence, the whole thing about a quarter-mile long. There is a triangle of grass (nice and green–we’ve had a lot of rain lately) probably 50 yards on each side around which the roads run. The road to Bush’s cedar-chipping operation runs perpendicular to and behind the camp, and cars are parked along it. Cindy’s tent and the graveyard of white crosses are perpendicular to the camp and in front of it. There were three or four police cars parked along the side opposite the camp. One cop all in black was friendly and seemed to have a good relationship with the people in charge of Camp Casey. Somebody announced that the police had been nothing but helpful and were absolutely going to protect us from the anti-protesters arriving soon from Irving.
There were kids, a dog, sign-up tables, people making posters. As we got off the shuttle, a meeting was being called. We had at once to gather round and stay off the road, which wasn’t possible. (The “stay off the road” rule was being very loosely enforced, at least right then.) Speakers told us through a bullhorn mike that we were not to react to the anti-protesters. We got further strategic tips, but I don’t want to give them away to the enemy (they involve making sure the police can see who it is that’s causing the trouble. One of the organizers told us that when the anti-protesters had been there before, they’d formed a wall of people around part of the graveyard and kicked over some of the markers. I guess that’s what they call supporting the troops.)
We (my friend and I) hung out for an hour. We talked to a couple from north Texas for awhile; he was wearing a “Veterans for Peace” button. There was an independent film crew there with a tiny video camera. They found an interesting veteran to talk to. He showed them his tattoos. We probably should have waited for the action, but we’d been on our feet for three hours, and I had another two hours’ driving home to do, so when the shuttle came for the return trip, we took it.
We rode with a Japanese journalist and a woman from Iraq on the way back. Everyone I met today, except for these two people, was from a few hours’ drive away. The journalist wondered how we commemorate V-J day. We told him we pretty much skip right over it. The woman from Iraq said her family lives about 100 miles southwest of Baghdad and are living day-to-day.
The shuttle dropped us off at our car on the football field. After driving for an hour we got within hearing distance of KOKE 1600 in Austin and tuned in Air America. Laura Flanders was talking about the anti-protest that we’d missed.
Tomorrow (Saturday) at noon (last I heard–things could change) there will be a rally at the football field near the Peace House.
Potatoes for Peace!
I have been touched by His noodly appendage.
First United Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
The Reverend and webmaster Bobby Henderson of the First United Church of the FSM intends to sue the State of Kansas if the school board there requires science curricula to include intelligent design (lower case mine).
He will request the court to direct Kansas schools to include the creation story of the FSM because it is as valid as any. He’s had some e-mails from some interested lawyers, too.
As a new acolyte I wrote him a fan e-mail and he wrote back that he is doing the paperwork to become a legal church, which I suppose he would need to be to file suit and collect tax-deductible donations (hint, hint).
Church adherents wear “full pirate regalia” (from my readings of the sacred digital writings of the believers there is some confusion as to whether or not that includes a parrot–but an eye patch for sure). There has already been a schism: some insist that the creator is actually made of fettuccine alfredo. They are a small faction, but they’re active.
Most, though, believe that the SFM is spaghetti with marinara and meatballs, perhaps looking something like this (turn up your sound):
If you feel like something’s been missing in your life, consider what the Church of the SFM has to offer.
(This site has been around a month or two, but I saw it for the first time today–did Boo searches and nothing came up, so forgive me if I repeat a diary. Let me know; I will delete. Links tested; spell-check run… here goes.)
Because today Bush has lowered his criterion for those he declines to employ to convicted criminals, and because I heard somewhere on some blog or some site SOMEWHERE that he’s put on the payroll people from Watergate and Iran-Contra (or any felon from any scandal, I’m not picky), I’ve been doing a little searching on whom he’s hired. I’m having no luck, though, finding anyone except John Poindexter, who isn’t exactly IN the White House, and whose 1990 convictions were overturned in 1991:
Anybody know of any more? I want Bush to have to dig up that goalpost again.
There is an astounding article in Salon today by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The studies are conclusive: mercury in vaccines causes autism. Govt. and pharma work together to hide the results. Frist is in the forefront. (Don’t have time to figure out how to link or make a pretty box–sorry. You’ll have to cut and paste: www.salon.com, by subscription, home page as of 7:08 am, central, 6/16.)
…The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.
The number of vaccines the CDC has recommended for children has gone from a few to 22 in the last decade or so, with a corresponding rise in autism. Autism has been rising in the developing countries to whom we ship vaccine. In 2000, government and pharma made the conscious decision to bury the study that proves the link.
Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three — including one child adopted from outside the Amish community — had received their vaccines.
If you’ve been able to stave off feeling like a guinea pig or a pawn or a cog; if you still have a fissure in your cortex hoping that your corporate government views you as anything but a consumer, this article will dispel your naivety.