Yesterday, when I put up the post about the alleged "PC" handbag, the was a (festival? gathering? contrived military recruitment installation?) to "support the troops" going on across the street. Several military recruiters had tents set up… …
and there were (dozens of) balloons (if Halliburton contracted for the balons, it must have cost half a mil, at least)– and there were very few people. Without taking a real close look, I assumed it was some sort of recruiting event; I didn't realize it was a "support the troops" event until I read the local paper today. Across the street from the event, on the sidewalk across the square from where I sat, at my second favorite internet cafe in Santa Rosa, there was a group of protesters– which attracted more people than the event across the street. The protest became loud and vociferous, and at one time a very heated argument broke out between one of the protesters and a supporter of (the troops? the US? the war?). The main banner (which I had to read from the reverse, because it was facing away from me) implied that it was Israel that was behind the war.
A (very young) female aquaintence sitting across the table from me said that she was thinking of joining the protest. I suggested that a much more effective form of protest would have been to pass out informational leaflets to any unsuspecting youth that potentially might have been lured into enlisting into the war effort. The banner that I read suggested that the protesters were not necessarily more well-informed than the people who supported the war, and that the strident tone of the protest– which included someone bellowing slogans across the street with a bullhorn– wasn't going to change even a single person's opinion about the war, one way or another.
As for the actual reasons for the war, it got me working on a piece that I will be running in my noirish alter-ego Max LaCosse's blog, Media Vulture. To summarize the piece: the war was never about defeating terrorism– It had been in its planning stages since long before the current president was even appointed elected– it was, and is, about draining the United States treasury into the pockets of a handful of private individuals, and the privatization of the military, so that the ruling oligarchy can live securely inside their gated communities. Just like all those authoritarian military dictatorships we've all come to know & love that the CIA set up throughout the third world.
Stay tuned for more.
