"War is Terrorism with a Bigger Budget"

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GI27Aa01.html

'No Iraqis left me on a roof to die'


<snip>Here's just a modest sample of those that caught my eye, reflecting as they did humor, determination, and more than anything else, outrage: "Yeeha is not a foreign policy"; "Making a killing"; "Ex-Republican. Ask me why"; "Blind Faith in Bad Leadership is not Patriotism"; "Bush is a disaster!" (with the President's face in the eye of a hurricane); "He's a sick nut my Grandma says" (with a photo of an old woman in blue with halo-like rays emanating from her); "Osama bin Forgotten"; "Cindy speaks for me"; "Make levees not war"; "W's the Devil, One Degree of Separation"; "Dick Cheney Eats Kittens" (with a photo of five kittens); "Bush busy creating business for morticians worldwide"; "Liar, born liar, born-again liar"; "Dude - There's a War Criminal in My White House!!!"; "Motivated moderates against Bush"; "Bored with Empire"; "Pro Whose Life?"; "War is Terrorism with a Bigger Budget."

Because just about everybody had the urge to express him or herself, I largely followed the signs to my interviewees. People were unfailingly willing to talk (and no less unfailingly polite as I desperately tried to scribble down their words). The meetings were brief and, for me, remarkably moving, not least because Americans regularly turn out to be so articulate, even eloquent, and because so many people are thinking so hard about the complex political fix we find ourselves in today. I've done my level best to catch (sometimes in slightly telescoped form and hopefully without too many errors) just what people had to say and how open they were - the first-timers and the veterans of former demonstrations alike.

A day of walking and intensive talking still gave me only the smallest sampling of such a demonstration. To my amazement, on my way to the Metro heading back to New York at about 5:30 (almost seven hours after I first set out for the Mall), I was still passing people marching. So I can't claim that what follows are the voices of the Washington demonstration, just that they're the voices of my demonstration, some of the thirty-odd people to whom I managed to talk in the course of those hours. They are but a drop in the ocean of people who turned out in Washington, while the President was in absentia and the Democrats nowhere to be seen, to express in the most personal and yet collective way possible their upset over the path America has taken in the world. As far as I'm concerned, we seldom hear the voices of Americans in our media society very clearly. So I turn the rest of this dispatch over to those voices. Dip in wherever you want - as if you were at the march too.

Angry Graphic Designer: On the corner by the Metro, we meet Bill Cutter and a friend. Cutter is carrying a sign with a Bush image and enough words to drown a city. We stop to copy it down. It has a headline that asks, "What did you do on your summer vacation?" Inside a bubble is the President's reply: "Well, I rode my bike, killed some troops, killed even more Iraqis, raised lots of money for my friends, ignored a grieving mom and, for extra credit, I destroyed an American city!" Cutter, a forty-five year old Washingtonian with a tiny goatee, says simply enough, "I'm just an angry graphic designer with a printer." The previous day he made his sign and his friend's (an image of Bush over the question, "Intelligent design?"- and, on the back, Dick Cheney with quiz-like, check-off boxes that say, "Evil, Crazy, or Just Plain Mean, Pick any three!" We're all looking for the demonstration's initial gathering place, and so we fall in step and begin to chat. A sign-maker will prove an omen for this day - the march will be a Katrina, a cacophony, of handmade signs, waves and waves of them, expressing every bit of upset and pent-up frustration that the polls tell us a majority of Americans feel.