<font size=4>More than 57 Varieties of Bush Hatred
Joining the protesters.
<font size=3>Rich Lowry
NRO
New York, N.Y. — <font size=4>I marched yesterday. With a friend, I walked with the protesters from roughly 25th and 7th Avenue, past Madison Square Garden, where everyone booed and hissed (and the giant sign outside flashed <font color=green>"Thank you New York!"<font color=black> anyway), east on 34th Street, and then down to 5th Avenue to the march's conclusion at Union Square.
You have to admire the protesters' inventiveness — who knew how many ways there are to express your hatred of Bush and Cheney? Although some of the protesters are, for all their sloganeering, struck mute by the slightest opposition. A guy in a VFW hat was off on a sidewalk at one point, attacking Kerry and defending the U.S. military. A protest girl walked up close to him and just stuck out her middle finger at him for a long time with a self-satisfied look on her face, as though she had come up with the cleverest gesture ever.
Occasionally, there is a kind of charm to these people. There can be whimsy. A girl with the group <font color=blue>"axisofeve"<font color=black> was bouncing around in a buttock-baring get-up, then confessed to me and my friend she had had a really long day and was getting tired. But she chirped up again to tell us: <font color=blue>"There will be a panty flash at Battery Park — Tuesday or Wednesday, I forget which." <font color=black>
And there is the doggedness. An old guy was handing out flyers for a Yippie event. <font color=green>"I didn't know the Yippes still existed,"<font color=black> I said. My friend — a veteran of five decades worth of left-wing protests — said quite seriously, <font color=blue>"I think I recognize that guy from a protest in 1979 — it was a pot protest. Actually I think he was just smoking pot there."<font color=black>
Finally, there is the endearing cluelessness. We passed a group of counter-protesters from the group protestwarrior.com, who were holding up signs mocking the protesters: <font color=green>"World Workers Party...the last thing we do is work."<font color=black> A guy just ahead of us in the march was covered in green make-up to look like the statue of liberty and was wearing just a robe, with a skeletal, scary-looking set of teeth painted on his face and — for some reason — a little flower in his ear. By any standard, this guy was dressed like a freak. But he stopped us to ask, in scandalized and mystified tones, of the counter-protesters, <font color=blue>"Who were those people?"<font color=black>
Mostly, though, the whole thing seemed, as far as I could tell, to be motivated by an incoherent and sputtering animus toward Bush. Here is a brief recounting of my interactions with various marchers. They shouldn't necessarily be taken as representative. After each talk I had with someone my friend would say, <font color=green>"You know, there are reasonable people here too."<font color=black> Maybe. But it wasn't at all hard to find people who were not a great credit to the cause of peace and justice.
A kid was holding a sign, <font color=blue>"Stop the war on youth, from here to Najaf." <font color=green>
"So," <font color=black>I asked,<font color=green> "do you support al Sadr?" <font color=blue>
"I do as long as he's resisting U.S. imperialism."
<font color=green>
"OK, so you support Islamic fundamentalism?"
<font color=blue>
"No,"<font color=black> he said, walking away.
<font color=green>
"Well, he's an Islamic fundamentalist,"<font color=black> I said.
He came back up to me, <font color=blue>"Just because you support the youth doesn't mean you side with an extremist."
<font color=green>
"Sadr is an Islamic extremist, he's very clear about it."
<font color=blue>
"It's their mosque."
<font color=green>
"He seized the mosque by force!"
<font color=blue>
"You're wrong,"<font color=black> he said.<font color=blue> "He supports elections."
<font color=green>
"No, he doesn't! He opposes elections."
<font color=blue>
"Well," <font color=black>he said, walking away again, <font color=blue>"they are U.S.-supported elections. Of course he opposes U.S.-supported elections."
<font color=black>
Then, this goateed, cigarette-smoking little Chomsky walked off for good.
Next, there were the people holding mock American-flag-draped coffins made out of cardboard. I asked a couple of women <font color=blue>"pall-bearers"<font color=black> what they symbolized. They said it was an effort put together by an organization called 1,000coffins.org, and the coffins symbolized American and Iraqi deaths in Iraq and <font color=blue>"all the dead people in the world."
<font color=green>
"Do any of them symbolize victims of 9/11?" <font color=black>I asked, since they seemed to be casting a pretty wide net.
<font color=blue>
"I don't know," <font color=black>said one woman.
<font color=blue>
"You'd have to ask 1,000coffins.org," <font color=black>said another.
Further up the march route was a guy wearing a Yasser Arafat-style headdress and holding a sign reading, <font color=blue>"Poland 1939. Iraq 2003."
<font color=green>
"So," I asked him, "you think the invasion of Iraq was the same as Hitler's invasion of Poland?"
<font color=black>
He went into a spiel about how both invasions were launched under false pretenses. I asked if he saw any differences in the natures of the Polish and Iraqi governments. <font color=blue>"With any metaphor,"<font color=black> he explained, <font color=blue>"there are going to be imprecisions."<font color=black>
Oh, OK.
Onto the nice Asian lady holding a sign with pictures of Bush and Cheney on it, emblazoned with the word <font color=blue>"Traitors!"<font color=black>
I asked whether she thought they should be tried for treason: <font color=blue>"Completely. Of course. Its not even a question."<font color=black>
Should they be executed? <font color=blue>"No."
<font color=green>
"Well, why not? It's typically been a punishment for treason."<font color=black>
She said<font color=blue> "no"<font color=black> again, and I left it at that.
Near the end of the march there was a guy standing in the middle of the street doing brisk business in T-shirts with Bush officials' names spelled with Swastikas. <font color=green>"Do you really think Rumsfeld is a Nazi?"<font color=black> I asked, since he was wearing a Rumsfeld shirt with the S as a Swastika. <font color=blue>"Oh, yes,"<font color=black> he said,<font color=blue> "absolutely."<font color=black>
He was briefly distracted by someone asking for a small in one of the shirts — I didn't catch which — and he had to say, <font color=blue>"Sorry, that's all out in the baby-T."<font color=black> Then, he was ready to address my question again. He explained that Rumsfeld wasn't taking responsibility for Abu Ghraib, speaking to <font color=blue>"a type of arrogance that is fascist."
<font color=black>
He had shirts with Condoleezza's name spelled with two Swastikas. <font color=green>"Is Condoleezza a Nazi?"<font color=black> I asked. He thought for a moment: <font color=blue>"Condoleezza? Mmmmm. Not so much."<font color=black>
She is, I guess, only partly a Nazi, which is still enough to render her name in double Swastikas. And so it went at the peace march.<font size=3>
— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
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