Bongos of Hegemony

Much attention has been paid to this DailyKos post which offers advice to protesters who planned to attend the antiwar rally in Washington DC this past Saturday. Actually, 'attention' is a polite way of putting it, since the primary form of reaction from the conservative side of the crowd has been doubled-over laughter. This is because the post consists of earnest pleading against protest actions such as drum circles, the wearing of gas masks and spiraling dissertations about Palestine or the 9/11 conspiracy.

The idea was simply to keep the focus on the cause that united the folks who turned out - the urgency of ending the war in Iraq.

But these fixations, along with many others, made it into Saturday's protest march anyway (blog citations too numerous to mention). The crowd couldn't resist a kitchen-sink list of add-on causes, from gay rights to the crusade against Zionism to mermaid herstory. Participants might agree with several of them, but they were forced to order everything on the menu. I suspect a plurality of people agree that the war in Iraq is a bad idea, but if they went to DC to express this opinion they were forced to share the bus with the anarcho-vegan gentleman with the matted whiteboy dreadlocks - and no amount of patchouli will cover his level of stink.

Making a clearly dilineated, supportable argument is not very important for rabble rousers. Instead we have sweater-thread politics, where one pull elicits a string of collective causes. One-stop political shopping - plus a defensive stream of logical fallacies in the event they are challenged - this is a very comforting, self-affirming place for people to live, espcially those who won't bother to think for themselves.