March in the Capital

Ken Rumble and I marched against the war in DC this past Saturday and, though national news coverage was fixated so exclusively on Hurricane Rita that you might not believe it, we were joined by some 100,000 others. A DC police spokesperson uttered that number to the press -- usually the DC police grossly underestimate their counts for such events. (The DC police did find time today, Monday, to arrest Cindy Sheehan for refusing to leave the front of the White House.)

Indeed, the city was packed. There was an IMF meeting in the same vicinity as the march, so IMF protesters were there too. The anti-IMF contingent is like the anti-World Bank contingent -- theatrical, noisy, well-informed, and really fucking pissed off. They wear black clothes and bandanas over their faces like outlaws, and beat drums and chant so you think that perhaps a World Cup soccer game is coming down the street. They made me feel like a protester-of-convenience.

I understand that reasonably equal coverage time was devoted to counter-protesters, but their numbers simply didn't merit this. There were maybe 200 scowling warmongers and freedom-ain't-free-ers behind two layers of barricade and one layer of shoulder-to-shoulder riot police in front of the FBI building along Constitution Avenue. I gave them the peace sign with the right hand and the bird with the left hand, and felt bad that the police -- who are calm and adept at handling protests -- were in my gestural line of fire. Shouldn't the cops have been facing the pro-war crowd instead of us?

For a while we marched with some admirable young people from Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn. One guy had a small loudspeaker balanced on his head and other kids took turns walking right behind him, chanting into the microphone. They even had several photocopied pages of chants. If they are the future of this country, then we should be fine.

At times, particularly in front of the White House, the crowd was so dense that we came to a complete stop and packed together. One time we were bottled up because the Bread and Puppet Theater folks were alongside, drumming awesome polyrhythms, dancing, and hoisting giant white dove puppets. At another point we bottled up because dumpy ponytailed men were hungrily photographing a group of naked protesters. I'm not certain what the connection was between the nudity and the no-more-war, as I was busy snapping a pic myself. Shame, Chris, shame.

One thing I noticed about the architecture of the White House where it faces Lafayette Park is the enormous blank pediment over the door. I don't know if it's Classical or Neoclassical or what, but there's supposed to be a relief there, some pictorial carving. Instead it is flat empty white. And the house was empty, of course -- Bush was thousands of miles away, safe inside the big red rectangle of Colorado.

At the end of the day, we all meandered to the Ellipse, which is the large grassy open hill from which the Washington Monument protrudes. Ken and I flopped amongst the 1900+ small white crosses that represent the USA dead, and watched marchers file past on their way to the giant stage on the far end of the park. Every kid that walked by with mom or dad made Ken and I feel bad that we didn't bring our daughters. Next time, I hope. We watched a group of women spangled gaudily in red and blue wigs and patriotic sleazy-showgirl garb set up shop a little ways away, their crotches adorned with cruise missile-dildos. Shortly after they started to dance, attracting another crowd of ponytailed male photographers, we noticed a woman walking purposefully toward them through the crosses. The woman wore a large picture of her son in his dress uniform, sandwich board style, with the dates of his birth and death at the bottom. She shouldered through the crowd to talk to the dancers, but we were too far away to see her or have any view of their interaction. Once she re-emerged I trotted over to her and told her I was sorry for her loss and she said thank you.

On the subway ride back into suburban Virginia, I sat by a Vermont couple whose son died early this year in combat in Iraq. It's hard to know how to write about them, as reportage doesn't capture the sadness and fear and anger and exhaustion that now is their lot. Not only can I not imagine what it must be like for my child to die, regardless of the cause of death; I find a strong resistance within myself to even allow myself to imagine it. I didn't sit by them for very long, as I gave my seat to someone else, and I have to admit a real relief at parting their company. But I'm forever in their debt for making war considerably less abstract for me, henceforth. War is about politics and killing people, and I won't forget it.