Protesters clear on anger, but murky on argument
WASHINGTON -- Brimming with frustration, antiwar protesters are coming to next week's Republican National Convention, and New York is bracing itself.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is offering discount passes at local restaurants if the protesters wear buttons pledging to be peaceful. In case the angry lefties don't jump at the chance to get a dollar off a large cheese, the NYPD is devising a labyrinthian version of the Boston "protest pen," seeking to reroute the largest march onto a concrete slab of the West Side Highway.
Unlike at Boston's Democratic convention, where everyone from environmentalists to abortion foes was cordoned off in one small area, as if anyone seeking to exercise his First Amendment rights was auditioning for the theater of the absurd, the New York crowd will be large, directed, and furious.
They know who they're angry at -- George W. Bush, for his Iraq invasion -- but not all of them seem to know what they're arguing for, other than his defeat. The leading organizer, a group called United for Peace and Justice, which is hoping to attract 250,000 marchers on Sunday, declares on its website that its rally will show that "The World Says No to the Bush Agenda." But nowhere in its four-paragraph call for marchers, or its lengthy Unity Statement, does it mention an immediate pullout of troops.
Many antiwar protesters want to bring the troops home now, but many others don't. They recognize that a pullout probably won't end the chaos that has led to the losses of tens of thousands of Iraqis, hundreds of Americans, and many others.
That painful conundrum of being all revved up with no place to go -- no morally satisfying way out -- explains some of the stale air that surrounds the protest movement, the sense of unrequited grievance.
Lacking a clear alternative deprives the marchers of the clarity of purpose that drove their Vietnam predecessors.
It also probably serves to keep the numbers down. Polls suggest the country is deeply, and almost evenly, divided over the Iraq War, but relatively few people seem to feel that taking to the streets will accomplish anything.
For John F. Kerry, giving people something to call for on Iraq that could speed the end of the violent nation-building exercise could hold the key to victory.
Absent a cause to fight for, all the emotions that attend an unpopular war -- the grief over blood spilled, the fury over the perceived misuse of power, the regret over the loss of American stature -- simply melts into the body politic.
Public intellectuals, some of whom played a role in building support for the war, are now attacking it euphemistically, in a way that provokes weary nods of assent from loyal readers but ultimately dissipates into a pool of studied negativity, spurring no action at all.
In the current issue of The New Yorker, for instance, critic Adam Gopnik is moved to commit a long essay on the poisonous legacy of World War I, an exploration apparently prompted by a sense that one of the lessons of WWI -- that patriotic hubris can have fatal consequences -- is necessary today.
But he makes that link only in the last paragraph, concluding, "As the new century begins, the First World War seems as present, and just as great a pity, as it ever did."
Meanwhile, movie critic Anthony Lane sizes up the M. Night Shyamalan horror flick "The Village," in which a group of "creepy" farmers is menaced by creatures in the woods, by saying, "You may scoff at the idea that a community would not just prep itself but define itself by declaring an ever higher level of threat, in which case I would draw your attention to any newspaper of the past month."
These passages project an obvious dissatisfaction with Bush's policies, but one that is already a little weary and resigned.
On the streets, Bush is the recipient of more direct anger, and poor progress on Iraq is hampering his reelection campaign. But the threat to him has fired up his supporters, and his campaign officials have predicted that victory will go to whichever side wants it more.
That's why the president's appeal to moderate voters next week will be to present the war as an unwanted burden, accepted by him in defense of national security, but which now must be borne in much the same manner no matter who is in power.
If Kerry disagrees with that assertion, he has yet to say so loudly enough to register on many voters.
And if those opposing the war have a new message they want Kerry to convey, they haven't pushed it strongly enough to make an impression on the Democratic nominee.
With no alternative path in Iraq, moderate voters could easily stay home, believing -- as they often do -- that voting won't change anything.
And the demonstrators converging on New York this weekend will be marching in circles, no matter where Mayor Bloomberg allows them to go.
