The Missing Peace

Everything pretty much blows.

by Dwayne Booth

Mr. Fish

[ rants ]

All this pretty significant crap happened last week.

First, on Sunday, there was the release of 92,000 secret military documents, some 200,000 pages from WikiLeaks detailing exactly why the war in Afghanistan might finally be classified, without controversy, as a huge-ass catastrophe of human suffering and an exercise in massive war criminality. Then, on Tuesday, as if the Capitol building itself, having grown bored with its own obsolescent infighting and shiftless partisanship, had traveled back in time to spend a long weekend at the Kremlin in 1979 in order to remember how unifying and invigorating totalitarianism can be, especially when used to target cartoonishly menacing sand negroes, there was the passage of a $59 billion war-funding bill that, among other inexcusable outrages, satisfied the president's request that an additional 30,000 troops be sent to Afghanistan.

"What the fuck for?" I asked my wife, who was busy sorting white Legos from a 32-year-old batch that my sister had recently dropped off to be used for my soon-to-be-7-year-old twin daughters' Lego-themed birthday party. Then I remembered the 200,000 pages leaked from WikiLeaks, relenting, a bit reluctantly, that 200,000 is really a shitload of paperwork. "Maybe by troops the president means typists," I said, just as my one and only set to work filling the kitchen sink with ferociously soapy water in the hopes of scrubbing my cruddy past from the blocks that she so wanted to bring gleaming into the 21st century.

Then came Wednesday morning where, sitting all alone in a sweltering café at Fourth and South streets with espresso in my beard and sweat dripping off my nose, I read the front-page headline in the Inquirer: "A Secretary of State and the Queen of Soul Make Music at the Mann," the story capping a photo of Condoleezza Rice, unconvincingly dressed as a pleasant person, standing on stage next to a triple-decker Aretha Franklin, both of them being lavished with flowers. And that's when it hit me: Everything pretty much blows.

How else to explain how little impact the publication of this generation's Pentagon Papers seems to be having on the American public? At least with the 1971 Daniel Ellsberg version — which was 193,000 pages shorter than WikiLeaks' Afghan War Diary — there existed an anti-war movement that was massive, mobilized, pissed off and understood the significance of such damning documentation.

What do we have now? An anti-war movement that is so gutless and so savagely unimaginative that rather than gaining purpose and momentum in the face of our government's ever-increasing disdain for peace in the Middle East it has proven itself to be too lazy, even too cowardly, to face down the very disease that it had concocted itself to cure. When did the American version of a bleeding-heart-radical-hell-raiser become the equivalent of a vegetarian between meals, no more likely to dedicate his life to the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. as a devotee of Twilight would be to drinking actual blood and living forever?

How can anybody possibly see today's peace movement as anything other than a completely harmless and wholly insular fan club tickled by 1960s nostalgia and terrified by any meaningful civic responsibility whatsoever? There certainly were no organizations in Philly — this city that ironically plays host to more statues honoring the virtues of free speech and the right of people to peaceably assemble to petition the government for a redress of grievances than any other city in the union — to make me think any different.

And then to have a war criminal, one of the major war criminals from the Bush administration — whose scowling and pitiless face had, for years, represented the sort of contempt for open government and participatory democracy that nightmares are made of — feel comfortable enough to be seen anywhere without a false mustache and sunglasses, let alone in performance at the Mann Center when the program was not a summer series spotlighting the second-banana charms of our most notorious war criminals, her set nestled thoughtfully in between Ehud Olmert playing spoons behind Tom Jones and Henry Kissinger opening his shirt and playing his stomach behind Celine Dion. ("Vats New, Pussycat?" indeed.)

"Am I the only one who still smells my mother's cigarette smoke on these?" I asked myself amid balloons and streamers at the end of the week, bringing a Lego brick to my nose. Apparently, I was, noticing how happy my daughters and all their friends were while constructing, brick by brick, what I could only see as temporary examples of genuine peace and joy.

(editorial@citypaper.net)