Cool!!!
I wonder if any of you have read this piece yet (excerpts below)...
Fog of War
By Dick J. Reavis, AlterNet.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21550/
"...The Fayetteville demonstration, more like an Americana July 4th picnic than any Days of Rage, was as placid and serene as the weather that day, temperatures in the low 60s, dry, cloudy skies. No one keened or got red in the face, nobody clashed with the fascists, and policemen's boots didn't lose their spit-shines. The protestors were clad in loose-fitting, informal garb, jeans, cotton windbreakers and sweatshirts, athletics shoes and baseball caps. More than 90 percent of them were white – "middle-class hippies" of all ages, one participant quipped....
...Americans, complain as they may, are never, ever, alone. Commerce accompanies us from conception to the far side of the Golden Gates. By the time that the marchers arrived, politically correct vendors had laid merchandise atop 40 tables on the east side of the speaker's kiosk. Merchants at this Green-Beret-city bazaar brought with them pins and buttons of 900 designs, and probably more books than escaped the looting and fires at libraries in Iraq.
Most of the merchants represented pastel peace groups and mild-mannered petition societies, but Trotsky's disciples – of a half-dozen stripes – brought tables too, laden with literature that scientifically proves that pacifists, peace Democrats and former comrades from the adjoining Trotsky table have all taken part in the Revolution Betrayed...
...But not even a Jefferson, a Frederick Douglas or Karl Marx can convey a life-changing message, nor present any significant analysis, in a 90-second span...
...Michael Hardt, an English professor at Duke University, is co-author with Italian Antonio Negri of two recent tomes on globalization and the perspectives of protest. Though he did not attend the Fayetteville action – he was on a plane in return from France – Hardt claims to know why the demonstrations were not bigger and better, everywhere.
"When movements grow is when they propose the agenda for change," he declares. "One of the effects of the war on terror is that all we are doing is reacting. The anti-war movement has become a failure because it has conceded the terrain of issues to the pro-war people."
Hardt's general argument is that oppositionists should struggle to implement their unredacted dreams, for a full vision of the lives they want to live, not for a list reforms, bargain items underlined in red."