---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nina Moliver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Mar 21, 2006 7:01 PM
Subject: [NotMyPresident] "Bush has lost the war in Iraq. But he's won it at home."
To: NotMyPresident <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Pierre Tristam: 'The day democracy died in America's echo chamber'
Date: Tuesday, March 21 @ 10:03:43 EST
Topic: Laws, the Courts and the Legal System
Pierre Tristam, Daytona Beach News-Journal
On Friday I read the following Associated Press dispatch in the Moscow
Times: "The head of the Belarussian state security service warned on
Thursday that any protesters who took to the streets during elections this
Sunday could be charged with terrorism." The Belarussian security service,
incidentally, still goes by its Soviet-era brand: KGB.
The same day in The New York Times, I read the following: "In five internal
reports made public yesterday as part of a lawsuit, New York City police
commanders candidly discuss how they had successfully used 'proactive
arrests,' covert surveillance and psychological tactics at political
demonstrations in 2002, and recommend that those approaches be employed at
future gatherings." As we know from the 2004 National Republican Convention
in Manhattan, those tactics were used to great effect. The New York Police
Department, with $76 million to spend and 10,000 shields to use on four
days' work, presumed that every protester was a potential terrorist. It
borrowed from the playbook of the Miami police department, where
anti-globalism protesters were overwhelmed by police force in 2003. It
cuffed activism to side-streets and precinct houses (1,806 people were
arrested). It doctored videotape of the arrests, deleting evidence of
protesters cooperating with arresting officers. And all along the Republican
Party staged its lie-abiding Bush-capades at Madison Square Garden, with
Belarussian contempt for the noises of democracy it is preaching to the
world.
Compared to the violence of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in
1968, placid Manhattan looks, in retrospect, like the real breakdown of
civil, democratic society. It's where protest could be deemed dead and
buried, and with it the notion that political freedom is anything more than
the right to vent in an echo chamber. The weekend protests on the third
anniversary of the Iraq war were more like self-conscious funeral
processions: Just 200 people in Manhattan (compared with 100,000 two days
before the war started), 17 of whom were arrested. A few hundred in Boston,
7,000 in Chicago, 10,000 in Portland, Ore. (A Port Orange street-corner drew
about 50 activists on Sunday.) Those weren't demonstrations but gatherings
of defeat. More people will attend next week's baseball spring training
games than the sum total of weekend protesters across the country.
Yet half of Americans now think the war unjustified, and 60 percent think
it's getting worse. Vietnam was getting better marks in 1968, with more than
half of Americans thinking it was still worth the fight. But demonstrations
raged in the streets back then. Lyndon Johnson's approval rating stood at 36
percent in March 1968, exactly where President Bush's rating stands now,
with this difference: Johnson, for all the madness he ramped up in Vietnam,
would soon concede defeat by refusing to run again. He retreated to the
White House to wait out his term to the daily sound of protesters outside
("Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids will you kill today?"). He could have
banished them to distant zones. He didn't. He'd been a fool to think that
"we can turn the Mekong into a Tennessee Valley." He wasn't such a fool as
to think that he could turn the White House into a Red Square.
Bush has. Nothing illustrates the death of the First Amendment, when it
comes to political protest, better than Secret Service demonstration rules
routinely enforced wherever the president goes. Supporters are welcome.
Protesters are not allowed within a half mile of the president. They're
penned up in "protest zones," an oxymoron of democracy if there ever was
one, or parked behind rows of buses so neither the cameras nor the president
can see them. Fugitives who slip out and manage to flash the president with
the semblance of an opinion -- a shout, a critical T-shirt, a sign, a burst
of ribaldry, so well deserved these days -- is arrested. This is what we've
come to. The president shields himself in an echo chamber of his own, acts
like a Belarussian thug toward those who'd tell him different, and goes
around declaring the spread of freedom.
Bush has lost the war in Iraq. But he's won it at home. Repression and
distortion are accepted methods of presidential conduct. State and local
governments are only too happy to adopt the methods when protesters come
their way. "It took blood," the Village Voice reporter Steve Lerner wrote of
the violent Democratic National Convention protesters in 1968, "to prove to
the prime time viewers that Civil Rights, the right to dissent, the right to
assemble, the right to pass freely in the streets, the right to be tried
before being clubbed, were all okay as long as you didn't actually try to
use them." Now it just takes a "protest zone," though the prime-time viewer
is more likely to watch "American Idol" than to care about those dimming
murmurs of democracy.
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
© 2006 News-Journal Corporation
Source: Daytona Beach News-Journal
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/
Opinion/Columnists/Essays/colESSAY032106.htm
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