Weblogger Ken Layne points out that more people watched the movie Kangaroo Jack than attended the marches.
>>Yeah, I've been getting those "Why won't you report the protest numbers?!" e-mails, too. What's this obsession with rally counts? So 150,000 or 250,000 people stomp around San Francisco complaining about Bush, capitalism, Jews, oil, beef, and (oh yeah) a likely little war to knock out Saddam. How is this news? It's freakin' San Francisco.
I've covered a lot of rallies: the welcome-home Gulf War parades, Albanian riots in Kosovo, plenty of scary (pro and con) abortion stand-offs, angry Slovaks against Prague, Take Back the Night college-girl marches (a good place to meet chicks, according to my pal Ben Sullivan), annoyed off-roaders in the Mojave, various million-whatever marches in D.C., and your usual WTO/anti-everything protests you get whenever any military/U.S. thing is happening -- remember the anti-Kosovo War marches, or the pro-East Timor marches? (The United States didn't take part in the latter action. Weirdly enough, that was the one war the hippies wanted.)
Anyway, the central theme of all protests is, "Look how many of us there are! We've gotta be right!"
So I'm going to be mean now. Here's the sort of "Perspective Buddy" I'd let loose on people who called the newspaper Monday morning, demanding to know why their "Dogs Are People Too" rally at the Glenwood Mall didn't make the front page:
The numbers are always hazy, of course. Organizers say 375,000 protested in New York City. The police say 100,000. Let's split the difference and say 262,500. In San Francisco, the second-biggest gathering (maybe), organizers say 250,000 and non-organizers say 150,000. Fine: 200,000. Numbers are much smaller for the rest of the country. Some good-sized cities had 500 protesters. Los Angeles had "thousands." Let's be generous and say a million people -- hell, let's make it 1.5 million -- protested this weekend across the United States. (And maybe 100,000 total marched in favor of action in Iraq, but we'll leave them out of it for now.)
* Without any publicity at all, about 50 million Americans showed up on Sunday to support the Christian god, Jesus, at church services across the nation.
* An estimated 30 million bought something to eat at McDonald's. (The global total is 46 million customers per day.)
* Meanwhile, some 6 million showed up to support a blind lawyer superhero -- and they paid about $8 each! The Top 12 weekend movies attracted around 15 million paying souls.
* Some 4 million went to the mountains to ski or snowboard.
* More than 200,000 people showed up for the Daytona race on Sunday, despite the rain. (29 million watched it on teevee.)
The car race and the war protest in New York had about the same turnout. I'd say the protest got more news coverage than Daytona, but that's okay. If nobody went to the car race, that would be big news. If 1.5 million people protest the U.S. position on Iraq, that's more worthy of coverage than 50 million people going to church, because the latter happens every week. But still, we're talking about half a percent of the U.S. population -- and that's using the very generous numbers -- attending rallies around the country. Impressive, sure, but "Daredevil" beat that by nearly 5 million people.
Or, to be a bit cruel, the protests attracted about as many people this weekend as the movie "Kangaroo Jack." I'm sorry, but it's true.
kenlayne.com |
