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Derangement - part 3B

The Plagiarist

The Plagiarist

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In the spring Joel Barkin called and invited me to lunch. Joel is the executive director of the Progressive States Network, a group dedicated to passing progressive laws in America’s state legislatures. He’s a young guy, very idealistic, who grew disillusioned with certain aspects of the system while working as a congressional aide years ago. Whenever the Democrats sell out their electorate somehow, I can count on getting a call from him. And now he was calling me on the heels of the Democrats’ latest failed attempt to stop the war.
 
He was fuming. He said that since the Democrats won the Congress in the midterm election, an entire peace-movement bureaucracy had magically appeared in Washington, a bureaucracy staffed not by grassroots peace activists but, by and large, by the same hacks who were manning the Democratic ship when the Democrats supported the war.
 
“It’s the same groups meeting with Pelosi and Reid all the time,” he said. “It’s groups like Americans United for Change, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, MoveOn, and so on. But here, take a look at this.”

He handed me a piece of paper.

“These are quotes by a guy named Brad Woodhouse,” he said. “Brad Woodhouse is the head of Americans United for Change. He’s one of the leaders of the so-called peace movement in America right now. But check out what he was saying a few years ago, when he worked for [North Carolina Senate candidate] Erskine Bowles.”
 
There were two Woodhouse quotes on the page:


“No one has been stronger in this race [than Bowles] in supporting
President Bush in the war on terror and his efforts to effect a regime
change in Iraq.” said Bowles’s spokesman, Brad Woodhouse.

--Charlotte Observer, 9/20/02


“The fact of the matter is, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said,
we still have a long, hard slog to finish this job in Iraq,” said Brad
Woodhouse, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

--Detroit Free Press, 12/15/03


“A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting with Harry Reid’s people and the peace activism community,” Joel said. “And they were discussing how they were going to pitch the news to the public that the Democrats had decided to pass the war supplemental. And I’m thinking to myself, Why is the activist community working with the Democrats to figure out how to deal with the people? It should be the other way around.”
 
What Joel was talking about made perfect sense. All along, the thrust of the Democrats’ strategy with regard to the war had been to find a way to take political advantage of the antiwar sentiment without hurting themselves electorally. Momentum seemed to have gathered around a strategy of taking a superficial stand against the war while also allowing it to continue long enough to be useful to the Democrats in the ’08 presidential race. Which meant no cutting off the war money, no risking being accused of taking guns out of the troops’ hands during an election season, even if it meant unnecessarily prolonging a deadly conflict. For the activist community to sign off on such a baldly political strategy was monstrous; it was rankest sort of Washingtonian incest.
 
And yet, sure enough, after the Democrats buckled that spring and voted to give Bush his money for the war, the spokespeople for the peace activism community could be seen everywhere giving excuses for the Democrats. Woodhouse himself was outspoken in that regard. “We’re disappointed that the war drags on with no end in sight,” he told Reuters, “but realize Democratic leaders can only accomplish what they have the votes for.”
 
Joel went on to tell me a story about having seen a notice that Barack Obama had been invited to speak at a conference for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a notorious conservative action group dedicated to passing conservative laws in the state legislatures. Joel and his group quickly issued a press release calling for Obama to denounce ALEC, one of the most regressive organizations in the country. Instead, they got a slew of emails from the Obama campaign.

“They were all asking me, ‘Hey, why didn’t you just call us first, before you went to the press? We could have cleared this up.’ And my answer was, one, I don’t work for you. That’s not how this works. Two, if you don’t like ALEC, take advantage of the situation. Use this as an opportunity to tell people about ALEC, denounce them. But the point is, we see this all the time. Everybody acts like they’re on the same team. Nobody is really advocating. And worse, there’s this pervasive sense that if you challenge power, you’ll lose your ability to get hired by the right people down the road. Like me, I’ll never get hired by Obama now, but so what? But that’s why their people were so surprised that we blindsided them. They’re not used to it. That’s the attitude within the Democratic Party. There’s no ideology at all. It’s all about power –nothing more.”
 
The Democrats’ error was in believing that people wouldn’t notice this basic truth about their priorities. They were wrong on that score. In fact, a Quinnipac poll taken around that time found the approval rating of Congress had fallen 23 percent. Other polls saw the number plummet to the teens. The rating of the Democratic Congress was even lower than Bush’s, and it was not hard to see why. Bush was wrong and insane, but he stood for something. It was a fucked-up something, but it was something. The Democrats stood for nothing; they viewed their own constituents as problems to be handled, and even casual voters were beginning to see this.
 
Around that same time, there was a surprising piece of news from noted peace activism icon Cindy Sheehan, the so-called war mom who’d gained notoriety by holding a sit-in against the war at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. Sheehan announced that she was leaving the organized peace movement, among other things because she was frustrated by the attacks she’d received from the left once she began criticizing the Democratic Party for its ineffectual opposition to the war.

“Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on,” she said. She went on:


People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because
we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude,
and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party
system our representative republic will die and be replaced
with what we are rapidly descending into with nary check
or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland.


And right at the time Sheehan left the orbit of the Democratic Party, she made another announcement: she was supporting the 9/11 Truth Movement. “It does look to me like a controlled demolition,” she said. “I do see some very high-profile people saying it was an inside job.”
 
After Sheehan made her announcement, you started to see a change in the 9/11 Truther rhetoric. Suddenly they were selling themselves as the true peace movement. Now we were being told that understanding the truth about 9/11 was the key to righting all the wrongs of American politics, including the war. An end-the-war conference, “in honor of” Cindy Sheehan, was scheduled for the Fourth of July at Independence Hall in Philly.
 
I went to the conference feeling glum. The whole situation made me uncomfortable. I was raised in the cradle of American liberalism, in the touchy-feely schools of Massachusetts and New York, and for better or worse my whole view of humanity was been colored by twenty years of the politics of the liberal arts world, pseudo-Marxian indoctrination with a touch of noblesse oblige. Hard as I try to get these concepts out of my head, terms like “the people” and “the ruling class” are always in my thinking, and in the case of 9/11 Truth and the peace movement, it was now very hard for me to avoid the simplistic notion of a voiceless subject population abandoned by its political parent class, i.e., “the people” cut loose by the Democratic Party.
 
All along I couldn’t help but see the Truther movement as a symptom of a society whose political institutions had simply stopped addressing the needs of its citizens. When people can’t trust the media, and don’t have real political choices, and are denied access to the decision-making process, and can’t even be sure that their votes are being counted –when even their activist advocates are lunching with the Man in fancy restaurants in Georgetown—they will eventually act out on their own. And when they do, who can blame them if the cause they choose to pursue is a little bit crazy?
 
That’s what I was thinking as I headed down to Philly for the peace conference. Against the backdrop of the continued carnage in Iraq and the Democrats’ cynical maneuverings vis-à-vis the war, I felt embarrassed to be attending in the guise of a defender of the “official story.” I decided to lay low, stay out of their way –I kept reminding myself that these people were victims of a broken culture, that it wasn’t their fault, there was nothing to be done about it. It was sad, but it wasn’t evil.

Then the conference began.
 
It was held in a meeting room on the second floor of the Independence Visitor Center downtown. It was a biggish hall, and within a short time after the conference began it was packed to the gills with activists, bloggers, and panelists. The sheer numbers alone testified to what everyone already knew, which is that the movement was rapidly growing and becoming more mainstream. Every day there were new celebrity converts. Rosie O’Donnell. Charlie Sheen (who was said to be in negotiations with Mark Cuban to distribute Loose Change). Even blink-182 rock star Tom DeLonge had signed on lately. Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, America’s only Muslim congressman, was comparing 9/11 to the Reichstag fire, and Bush to Hitler. There was even a video showing Michael Moore wondering aloud about the “strange explosions” in the towers on the morning of 9/11 circulating of late on YouTube. Moore in that video had also asked why the government hadn’t released more videos of the attack on the Pentagon, endearing himself to the movement. And the most recent news was that Cindy Sheehan was even considering running against Nancy Pelosi in Pelosi’s district. Sheehan and Michael Moore were a powerful duo; 9/11 Truth was on the verge of becoming synonymous with mainstream liberalism.
 
The conference ended up being a succession of speakers culled from the upper ranks of the movement –speakers who included Dr. Bob Bowman, a former Florida congressional candidate, impeachment expert Dave Lindorff, the one-man conspiracy clearinghouse Webster Tarpley, journalist Barbara Honegger, and one of the loudest people I’ve ever seen, a heavyset, bespectacled “new media” wunderkind named Samuel Ettaro. One by one they got up there, and though some were more subdued than others, the whole scene quickly devolved into something far different from a conference on how best to end the war. It instead resembled a blogospheric version of the Westminster Kennel Club Show, in which each dog took the floor, ran in a circle, and showed off his credentials as a member of a triumphant new class of True Patriots.
 
The tone of the conference was strange. There was anger there, but more real than that anger was a kind of joyful celebration of their collective status as subjects of the evil corporate-Bushite-royalist-Illuminati-Amerikan-military-industrial paradigm. Everything about America –fat, lazy embarrassingly opulent America, the country of too much stuff, the country where life isn’t quite real enough for most people who live in it, and certainly not for these people—that America was depicted as a cruel, repressive Reich, an unceasing miser of crushed liberties for its aggrieved citizens, morally trailing far behind even such paradises as Iran. As such, every mention of any representative of the “system” drew riotous whoops and catcalls, like for instance when Ettaro held up a copy of his home-published magazine, Republic, a “resource for the modern patriot.”

“So take that Time magazine and that scumbag Rupert Murdoch and throw them in the garbage!” he shouted.

Cheers all around. Ettaro went on:

“We have the distribution that we need to beat the mainstream media,” he shouted. “And nothing short of someone taking me out is going to stop that from happening!”

Jesus Christ, I thought. Who would bother to take this guy out?
 
Later in the day Bowman took the stage for the second time –some of the “stars” of the event got tedious second and even third go-arounds at the lectern—and offered his take on what his inauguration speech would be like if he were elected president. He assumed an air of almost inexpressible solemnity as he promised to deliver an America in which “policemen, nurses, and poets can afford a decent house...an America free of terrorism because it is no longer feared and hated.”

I thought making sure poets could afford houses was a strange cause to be fighting for, but whatever. Bowman put his hand over his breast. “Like Brother Malcolm,” he said, “I have been to the mountaintop.”

Bowman was white and looked like an insurance salesman, but it is a distinguishing feature of the 9/11 Truth crowd that everyone gets to act like a repressed minority of sorts, so the Brother Malcolm thing passed without comment. Later, he indulged in a lot of syrupy imagery:

“So keep the dream alive,” he said. “Drop your own pebbles in the pond, and make your own waves...”
 
The day was filled with metaphorical pebbles and waves and trees and towers and bonds that tie and dogs that bark and other such flowery images. One speaker commented that “for every thousand people hacking at the branches, there’s one hacking at the root,” before pausing to try to figure out which one he was supposed to be. A second said that “we’ve started to put another crack in the Liberty Bell, because it needs ringing.” That one had puzzled me for almost ten minutes. And still another noted that “we don’t wanna fight the machine, we wanna go around front and see who’s driving the machine.”

“And then fight him,” called out someone from the crowd.

“Right,” he said. “Right, right.”
 
As the day went on I sank deeper and deeper into my chair. Suddenly I understood. The People aren’t always victims in the historical narrative. Sometimes the People are preening, chest-puffing ignorant assholes, too. And maybe the polls are right, and these people aren’t the minority—maybe, I thought as I looked around the packed room, I’m the minority. Maybe this is just how Americans like to roll. You can cut them out of the political deal, lie to them, exile them to some barren cultural landscape of shopping and TV and perpetual powerlessness, sell them a cheap dog-and-pony show for an election, and their way of fighting back will be to parade around like strippers in some amateur lunatic forum, dressing up in the garbs of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thomas Jefferson and César Chávez as they bang their silly heads against the wall, screaming about the Illuminati and holographic airplanes and the free-floating currency exchange.
 
Hours later the meeting spilled out onto the streets, where groups of protesters held up signs and chanted “9/11 was an inside job! 9/11 was an inside job!” at passersby on their way to Philly’s Independence Day parade. Then more chanters appeared on the balcony of the visitor center, which prompted security officers to show up and ask them to stop. Some time later, a woman ascended to the lectern and asked the people on the balcony to come inside, noting that they had promised the landlord of the property that they wouldn’t be hanging signs outside the building.

“Screw them!” someone in the crowd shouted. “They can’t keep us silent forever! We have our rights!”

“Well, actually, these aren’t the authorities,” the woman said. “They just own the building.”

“Well, still!” came the shout back.


***
 
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