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…went on in Seattle and other cities worldwide on Saturday, despite the war having been mostly turned into an occupation mission by the previous Thursday. As I’d expected it to be, it was a smaller affair with a greater concentration of the hardcore protest community, some of whom went “off topic” with speeches and signs about assorted other issues. It also attracted a couple of aged-male dittohead counter-protestors shouting, vehement but pre-practiced insults.
Yes, I still believe those of us who protested this war were right to have done so.
Saddam Hussein could’ve been restrained and/or removed without this life- and infrastructure-wasting tragedy. The twelve years of sanctions only kept him and his cronies iin power while impoverishing the rest of the nation. And the UN weapons inspections were working, it now turns out. Saddam was effectively a threat only to his own citizens.
Because Iraq’s government and institutions were designed solely to serve him, he leaves behind a big nothing, a land without a society except that of the US/UK occupation force and the long-simmering ethnicities and other revenge-minded factions.
Iraq might seem now like a big-budget version of Panama or Grenada, a quick-and-relatively-clean invasion/coup. But it puts the U.S. in what still might become a morass of Vietnam proportions.
We’re now going to create, and will have to keep propping up, a client state with powerful, permanent, internal and external opposition. The Republicans talk about promoting “democracy” there, but will certainly try to devise a system in which U.S. stooges and yes-men have all the power. The Islamic fundamentalists (whom Saddam was never one of) will exploit this at every opportunity. This could get messier and messier for years to come.
Antiwar “radicals” like to oversimplify geopolitical situations even more than prowar “conservatives” do. But complication is what we’re gonna get anyway.
Some side topics:
AS YOU CAN TELL near the upper left corner of this page, our photo exhibit City Light, City Dark is now online, via the PhotoJo site. You’re all cordially invited to buy as many prints of as many images in the collection as you can fit above your couch, over your bed, and at any other revered place in your home or in the home of a loved one.
TODAY, SOME IMAGES from the past five days of local protests. As in the 1991 war, these were centered at the Federal Building. And as in the 1991 war, they tactically differed from the prewar protests.
The prewar protests included broad coalitions of groups, including labor unions and churches. They were devised to bring as many people as possible to one place at one time.
Last week’s protests were largely coordinated by the Radical Women/Freedom Socialist Party. They were devised as long vigils with a couple of extra highlighted gathering times (particularly Thursday evening). This diffused the number of potential participants, and emphasized the role of those for whom protesting is a year-round way of life.
That meant the speakers’ podium was dominated by dudes (almost all of whom were bearded) and dudettes who wanted to tie in the Iraq war with darned near everything else they didn’t like, from McDonald’s and health-care budget cuts to the capitalist system in general.
Even if we’re not doing this primarily for how it will look in the media, it’d still be to our advantage if it didn’t look like only the lifestyle-leftists still wanted peace. We need the experienced dedicated protestors; but we need to keep the rest of the populace in this as well. And that means bigger coalitions creating bigger events, which also recruit people from all walks-O-life into ongoing works in the more boring parts of the task (organizing, letter-writing, etc.)
IN OTHER NEWS, J.C. Penney had a commercial during the Oscars with average suburban young-women’s clothes modeled on screen while an off-screen singer proclaimed “I’m a One-Girl Revolution.” What if we had a 200-million-girl-and-boy revolution that was about something other than wearing different clothes?
What would an actual revolution be like today? What would be replaced, and what would it be replaced with? Any ideas? Lemme know.
HERE ARE SOME IMAGES of the most recent prewar, antiwar action.
“Hands Across Green Lake” didn’t actually span the entire 3.2-mile circumference of the lake. But hundreds crowded around the Aurora Avenue side of the lake, waving at honking supportive motorists and making one last stand, one last silent shout of hope that the abyss can be avoided.
…here again is the big news about our big art show opening this Thursday:
City Light, City Dark has been moved to the Nico Gallery, 619 Western Avenue, Second Floor (one floor lower than the previously advertised location, in the same building). It still opens next Thursday evening, March 6, 6-8 p.m.
The exhibit features grouped pairs of images depicting similar subjects. One photo in each pair is set in the tourists’ Seattle of sunny days and mellow smiles. The other photo takes place in the “other” Seattle of low overcasts, long nights, and defiant nightlife.
Be there. Aloha.
A FASHION DESIGNER of my acquaintance recently told me she thought antiwar protestors ought to dress up more smartly. She believes if you’re trying to persuade outsiders to your cause, you should be dressed to impress. Make a visual statement of your intelligence, dedication, and awareness. Nix-nix on the ragged jeans and stringy facial hair; oui-oui to happy, harmonious looks that say you demand a happier, more harmonious world.
This student, at a student-oriented antiwar protest Wednesday at Westlake Park, has the idea.
So, in her own silver-and-red way, does this young speaker.
The protest gathered young women and men from grade school to grad school and beyond, from throughout the metro area. They were informed; they were impassioned. They’d rather not have their own asses potentially put on the line for the benefit of a few billionaires, thank you.
This particular protestor really dressed up. The plaque reads, in part:
1 ring =
100 Iraqi children killed by
US bombs since 1991
Duration: one every second
for 100 minutes
IF YOU LIKE THE PHOTOS on my site, you should come to my art show (see above.) You’re also bound to love another Seattle photojournalism site, Buffonery. Despite the silly name, it’s a very accomplished site with gorgeous local architectural photography. It’s all done by Manuel Wanskasmith, a 22-year-old UW sociology grad, and it’s all fab.
UPDATE TO A LONG-AGO ITEM: A year and a half or so after we discussed the end of what had been my favorite Net-radio operation, Luxuria Music is back on line. Sort of.
Clear Channel Communications, the 8000-lb. gorilla of the broadcast radio biz, bought and promptly killed Luxuria, which played a sprightly mix of lounge, swing, space-age-bachelor-pad, and ’60s pop tuneage. One longstanding fan of the station later bought the domain name, and finally has a music stream online again.
The new Luxuria plays much the same sorts of cool stuff the old Luxuria played. But its post-dotcom–crash startup budget doesn’t allow for live DJs (a vital part of the old Lux mix). And its third-party server software has some stringent requirements (a Mac user such as myself can only access it via MS Internet Exploder) and seems to cut itself off, and crash your browser, after a half hour or so.
Still, it’s a start, or rather a re-start, for the kind of programming creativity you not only can’t get on commercial broadcast radio but you also can’t get on those highly-formatted commercial online, cable, and satellite music services.
FOR THE SECOND CONSECUTIVE YEAR, Pioneer Square was essentially declared an official No Fun Zone by city officials. Police permitted would-be revelers to enter and leave the three-block bar strip on First Avenue South, but not to linger on sidewalks or to make spectacles of themselves.
The above shot is the only “crowd” picture I could get. It was a close-up of the tiny stretch of sidewalk from the J&M to Larry’s Greenfront. Many PioSq bars were closed altogether; those that opened had little more than their regular lineup of “blooze” bands.
The “mandatory mellowness” attitude of the Seattle civic establishment never cared for rock n’ roll nor for festiveness. The 2001 Mardi Gras, a spontaneous and unplanned street party that begat several drunken fights and a fatal beating, only affirmed the anti-fun resolve. It will be up to We The People to take back the streets for revelry as well as for political speech. But it’d have to be thru an event that’s just organized enough as to prevent/discourage violence.
As I said after the ’01 debacle: Plan it, don’t ban it.
…City Light, City Dark, has been moved to the Nico Gallery, 619 Western Avenue, Second Floor (one door down from the previously advertised location). It still opens next Thursday evening, March 6, 6-8 p.m.
It just so happened that the big rally starting off Saturday’s peace march took place outside Fisher Pavilion (where the Flag Plaza used to be). Inside the pavilion was Festival Sundiata, an annual African American crafts and culture fair. That was the reason Philly’s Best, the black-owned cheesesteak house at 23rd & Union, brought its mobile van there that day.
Its delectable sandwiches happened to be the perfect peace-march meal—hearty, flavorful, made with person-to-person care by an independent business, and named for the birthplace of modern democracy.
The march attracted at least 30,000 people and possibly many more. The police kept to themselves. The marchers were remarkably upbeat. There was such a vibe of togetherness and optimism, one wishes the march had led to a closing rally-party in a park rather than merely to a dispersal point in front of the INS jailhouse.
The question remains: Did anybody in power pay attention to the thousands marching here, and the millions marching worldwide?
We can be reasonably certain the Bush goon squad has privately pooh-poohed all the protests as the impotent work of a few scattered ’60s relics who refuse to get with the proverbial program. The professional bigots on hate-talk radio and the Fox Fiction Channel are assuredly poring over their theasauri this afternoon, devising newer and meaner epithets to hurl against anybody who dares to question instead of obey.
But Saturday’s events prove more and more of us refuse to be cowed by the fearmongers.
We can stand up and resist. We can answer deliberate fear with compassionate love.
Even if the near-right Democrats are afraid to come along, we can let them know it’s in their best electoral interest to listen to us.
We can encourage individual Republican politicians to break off from the hate machine if they’re ever going to win another “swing district” election.
We close today with a line from the ineptly directed, but politically prescient, Attack of the Clones:
“The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it.”
THIS, MY FRIENDS, is an unretouched, un-Photoshopped snapshot of the south entrance to Northgate from behind a car windshield during today’s torrential downpour, which helped cause a half-dozen or more crashes along an I-5 that got backed up for about seven miles. But unlike most of our rainstorms, this one did its thang then went away, leaving sunny skies and 54-degree temps (warm enough to melt snow in the mountains, leading to big flood potentialities in the lowlands.)
EVERY YEAR SINCE 1949, the homeowners of NE Park Lane in Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood have turned their curving one-block street into “Candy Cane Lane.” Every house is spectacularly decorated, many according to an annual theme.
This year’s highly appropriate theme: “Peace on Earth.” Each house’s decorative tableau was accompanied by a sign reading PEACE in a different language.
I can think of no better message to express this season.
And unlike so many things wished for, peace never goes out of style.
It is my own wish for this troubled world, and my wish for all of you.
It’s been about a month and a half since we last had a new photo essay on the site. So let’s get caught up, starting with the ever-fiscally-important day after Thanksgiving. This particular day started in downtown Seattle the way most days start, with men waiting for the temporary main library to open. Some of these men are homeless, seeking a place to sit indoors while the shelters are closed. Others are simply retired or unemployed, seeking a morning’s worth of free entertainment and/or learning.
The “Buy Nothing Day” kids were out in force, denouncing squaresville commercialism without positing any positive alternatives. The sign depicted above was made, and then defaced, by a fan of Adbusters magazine pretending to be a conservative.
(Left-wing parodies of right-wing attitudes almost always get it wrong—nobody on the right ever speaks specifically for such lefty-insult terms as “commodification ” or “patriarchy.” Right-wing parodists are, natch, just as errant about lefty attitudes, wrongly imagining that anybody would speak in favor of such righty-insult terms as “special rights” or “takings.”)
Outside the Bon Marche, a busy crew was handing out free samples of Krispy Kreme donuts (I refuse to use the more formal “doughnut” for such an informal snack food). The chain, which in recent years has generated media hype far beyond its size (still fewer than 150 branches nationally, concentrated in the south) has been ringing Seattle’s far suburbs and will open its first in-town branch next year.
No snack product could live up to Krispy Kreme’s hype. But it is an impressive product. Its lightness, fresh aroma, and melt-in-your-mouth texture all belie the massive sugar rush that hits you after six bites.
One lady did offer a proactive alternative to the bigtime shopping mania, and didn’t need Photoshop to make it.
Among those who didn’t heed, or didn’t see, that lady’s message: The nearly 100 who camped out in anticipation of the Adidas Store’s moonlight sale.
THE NIGHT OF DEC. 7 featured hundreds of holiday parties around town. The one I went to was the opening of 13 Fridas, 13 Years, 13 Days, at muralist James Crespinel’s studio-gallery in Belltown.
Crespinel has been painting his own impressions of Frida Klaho over the years, and displayed some of them as a tie-in to the movie and the Seattle Art Museum’s current Mexican-impressionism exhibit.
The opening was a stupendous gala with authentic Mexi-snacks, singers (including our ol’ pal Yva Las Vegas, above), and dancers (below).
Later that same night, a somewhat different tribute to strength and beauty was offered at the nearby Rendezvous by the Burning Hearts burlesque troupe. This is one of the seven ladies who paraded around in whimsical mini-attire for a surly drunken Santa.
Other St. Nicks of all assorted sizes, shapes, and demeanors cavorted about the greater downtown area as part of the annual NIght of 1,000 Santas spectacle, enacted in cities across North America.
…or as I call it, “The World-O-Words LiteRama,” set up shop last weekend at one of Sand Point’s ex-naval air hangars (not, as I’d previously said here, the same hangar used for the Friends of the Library book sales).
News accounts said attendance was back up from last year’s event at the bland-modern Stadium Exhibition Center, and quoted several attendees as preferring the “funky old” atmosphere of the huge drafty structure originally built to house symbols of military power. Some of these quoted attendees said Bookfest belongs somewhere other than a standard sales-show hall, since books, after all, weren’t just another business.
Books, of course, have been treated for some time as just another business, by the intellectual-property oligopolists who run that business. And also by ambitious entrepreneurs selling specific info to niche markets; such as Heather & Co., the publisher of Eat Without Fear: Help for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
The relative remoteness of the Sand Point site, which doesn’t have direct bus service from downtown Seattle, did as much as the building’s “funkiness” to help the event’s goers believe themselves to be so darned special in that PBS-precious middlebrow way. Even the weather played its part, providing perfect tweed-sweater temperatures and waterfront grayout sightlines.
Book-biz realities, as I’ve monotonously said every year around Bookfest time, are a little different. There’s no separate subculture of book readers, just as there’s no separate subculture of CD listeners. There are now as many mega bookstores in Seattle as there are mega record stores.
There are subcultures (or niches) within the larger book biz. “Serious” literature is but one of those niches. What I like about Bookfest is the way it crowds so many of these niches into one room–the cookbook people, the travelogue people, the coffee-table-book people, the children’s-chapter-book people, the antiquarian-book people, the nature-poetry people, the self-help people, the mystery people, the sci-fi people, and at least some aspects of the serious-lit people.
(Still underrepresented at Bookfest: Comics, zines, romances, erotica, translated lit, and PoMo/experimental lit.)
And oh yeah–there’s another, locally quite popular, genre of “writing,” the tattoo. This new U-District parlor’s awning sign could easily represent not only what customers oughta seek in a tattoo parlor, but what some government/business leaders leaders seek for our local civic society.
…this past Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening along the usual downtown-Capitol Hill routes for such marches. This is expected activity during a time of hotheaded drumbeating for organized military peurility; particularly for a would-be war in which the U.S. would be the undisguised aggressor.
Two aspects made these marches particularly significant. They were among the best-attended of many such marches held across the country this week. (At least 10,000 attended the Sunday march.) And both were remarkably intelligent, respectful, life-affirming affairs, attended by a wide cross-section of the local populace.
We need a popular uprising against the election-stealers and coup-plotters in DC. And we’ll need everybody we can get to be in it–even your parents, people who look like your parents, and men who don’t have ponytails.
(I’ve been thinking of forming a group for guys who care for progressive politics but don’t care to sport abundant hair. Call it the “Green Shaven.”)
War-aggression propaganda, particularly the type practiced by post-Reagan Republicans, is a campaign by a ruling regime to pressure its own citizens into unthinking passive-aggressive obedience. It tries to turn individuals into a dumbed-down mass. Opponents of war-aggession can best counter this tactic by welcoming and respecting humans of all backgrounds as intelligent individuals.
One lifestyle-left poster in the post-WTO era bore the slogan “Live Without Dead Time;” implying that sanctimonious personal thrills should be a movement’s true main goal. But in any serious work, including work for important social causes, there’s a lot of “dead time,” a lot of time spent on the boring details, a lot of time when it seems all for naught.
The organizers of the Sunday and Wednesday marches spent that time wisely. They ran well-organized, peaceful, on-topic gatherings that gained positive media attention and reinforced an image of antiwar activists as sane and rational–a lot more sane and rational than the war promoters.
Contrary to the image promoted by Michael Moore, the American power elite and the White House war-wanters shouldn’t be caricatured as “Stupid White Men.” They’re not stupid, even if they wish everybody else was. They’re brutishly clever and ambitious, even the ones who aren’t (or like to pretend they aren’t) book-learned. They’re not all white; and they’re certainly not all men. They’re not “The Patriarchy” or “Straight White Male Society” as some of my Olympia friends like to imagine. Their current top leaders (with a few backward exceptions) no longer discriminate (at least not overtly) on such outmoded, inaccurate criteria as race and gender.
No, today’s powermongers (heart symbol) you if you’ve got money, power, and an eagerness to play the game the right-wing way. If you lack these qualifications, they’ll treat you as a potential foot-soldier in their domestic army of dumbed-down discipline. If you decline to get with the program, you’re the enemy.
We should welcome everyone, regardless of subculture or lifestyle, who’s tired of being defamed and insulted by the talk-radio demagogues. Who’s tired of being talked down to, of being endless cajoled into living in fear. Who’s tired of the peurile influence-peddling and naked corruption. Who wants a world of real spirituality, real statesmanship, and real governance. Who’d rather see less Mideast violence rather than more.
Peace. It’s not just for hummus eaters anymore.
…was celebrated all over town on Sunday. Hundreds of bibliophiles prepared for the long indoor season ahead at the semiannual Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale, held at a former Sand Point naval-air hangar. (This is also where Northwest Bookfest is moving next month.)
Nearby in Magnuson Park’s no-leash beach, local dog owners gave their pets one last vigorous round of wet exercise.
Also nearby, Magnuson’s public-art collection of military submarine diving-plane tails, arranged to resemble orca fins, might just help one remember the sacrifices incurred in past wars, and thus help one resolve to try to prevent future carnages.
But let’s return, for now, to celebrating the equinox. A fairly large crowd gathered at Gas Works Park to do so, under the auspices of Seattle Peace Concerts. Hundreds paid varying degrees of attention to an all-day lineup of “blooze” music (you know, that music that’s sorta like blues, only all-white and all-aggressive).
Hundreds of others sipped, chatted, and danced at the second Fremont Oktoberfest. Some of my favorite current local acts (Peter Parker, the Beehives) performed, along with an all-polka afternoon slate.
But serious autumnal responsibilities waited just outside the beer garden, with a street-poster reminder of the monumental tasks ahead of us.
(Thanx and a hat tip to loyal reader Stephen Cook for research help on this piece.)
Survivors of the hype. Survivors of the tears, real and crocodile. Survivors of the merchandising. Survivors of the self-serving politician pontifications.
And, so far, at least most of us are survivors of the war against freedom being conducted in freedom’s name.
Richard Nixon was often described as running an “imperial presidency.” The current thief of the presidency is running an imperial presidency that would lack only the imperial pomp and grey-flannel style of the Nixon era. He is a president who wants to be dictator, and who is trying to transform this nation into a dictatorship.
But it wouldn’t be the fascist dictatorship my anarchist pals always rant about. The U.S. Right-Wing Conspiracy (hereafter “RWC”) has a simpler style in mind–the Latin American dictatorship model, in which a hired stooge runs a brutally authoritarian regime on behalf of the 500 families that own everything in the country. One stooge can be replaced by another, but the underlying power structure remains.
I know someone who likes to explain the human condition as a struggle between a “love-based reality” and a “fear-based reality.” I would argue there are many other bases for people’s individual zeitgeists; but the “fear-based” concept works in this case. The RWC thrives on spreading fear, and “terrorism” is just about the most exploitable fear-object you can find.
So we’ve been inundated with piece-by-piece assaults on our rights and freedoms, and accusations of treason against anyone who dares question these assaults. You’ve got any number of pro-corporate, anti-environment, and anti-labor power plays promoted under the new excuses.
But you also have activists, webloggers, pundits, ordinary folk, and even a few politicians speaking out against the ongoing coup-in-process. This is the true resiliant, never-say-die Spirit of America. These, not the RWC demagogues, are the real patriots. If more of us can join this fight for real freedom, we can stand a decent chance of both defending our country and of having a country worth defending.
Talk-radio comic Pat Cashman, one of the airwaves’ last stalwarts of good ol’ Northwest Quirk humor, was fired from his third station. He’s shown above left, preparing greet a couple dozen of his loyal “Pat Pack” fans who stood outside the Tower Building on his last airshift today. (He’s accompanied by a frequent guest on his show, street musician Richard Peterson.) At least he’s being replaced by a local-news block, rather than by a syndicated bad boy or a right-wing demagogue.
This reminder of commercial radio’s ever-increasing vacuity, here and around the country, comes as the National Association of Broadcasters prepares to hold its big national convention in Seattle the week of Sept. 9-14. As you might expect, the anti-corporate folks are planning protests and counter-convention activities; you can learn about some of these at Reclaim the Media.org.
Certainly there’s much to complain about with the current radio-TV industry. Today’s hundreds of cable and broadcast TV channels are increasingly controlled by just a dozen big corporations. These firms, in turn, are increasingly obsessed wit. Broadcast news coverage has become an unquestioning lapdog for conservative and corporate views.
And the radio? Even worse. Even more tightly controlled by even fewer major players (led by the contemptable Clear Channel Communications, about whom we’ve previously ranted). Companies that care naught for local communities or for responsible broadcasting, and don’t even care much for drawing or entertaining audiences. Their obsessions are with further consolidating their stranglehold on the biz, with cross-division “synergies” and stock-price manipulations, with ruthless cost-cutting and centrally-planned station formats, with payola skimming, and with crushing any would-be challengers to their empires (such as independent Internet radio).
The result of all this manipulation? Not profits–Clear Channel’s bleeding cash, and the other giants (Viacom, Entercom, AOL Time Warner) aren’t doing much better.
No, it’s all about the big power grab, about the creation of an authoritarian, anti-freedom culture in which everyone will be isolated into advertiser-friendly sub-segments, all obediently viewing/reading/listening to their demographically-segmented branches of the same media combines.
It’s way past time to take back the airwaves, to bring locality and responsibility back to broadcasting. If not to make this country safe for democracy, at least to make it safe for the likes of Cashman.
