Now that they are over, we can ask what were the anti-war
demonstrations in Washington last weekend for? Though the
demonstrators professed to want to meet with George W. Bush, they
cannot have had much of an expectation that they would or that, if
by some fluke they did, they would have stood the slightest chance
of changing his mind about the war. No, the point of their protest
was to make sure that they themselves were noticed. Like the “Not
in my name” protesters in London last year, they found it important
for some reason to tell the world that they dissociated themselves
not only from their leaders’ policies in Iraq but from their
leaders themselves. “Cindy [Sheehan] speaks for us — not George
Bush,” the London Daily Telegraph reported a demonstrator “bellowed.” Well who,
besides you, cares who speaks for you? Who are you, anyway, to
suppose that this is a matter of moment to the rest of the world
any more than whether or not you agree with President Bush about
the war? What difference does it make, since you have no standing
to influence events one way or the other?
Of course it would be a different matter if the demonstrations
were like those of the Vietnam War, their ranks swollen with
hundreds of thousands of frightened draft-aged youths and their
girlfriends to the point where the social and political fabric
seemed threatened. But these protesters hardly even seemed to
aspire to such revolutionary action. Remarkably pacific for
pacifists, they seemed content to pronounce their grand acts of
dissociation along with some viciously personal insults against the
President, perhaps get decorously arrested (as Cindy Sheehan
herself did) then immediately released, and go home feeling that
they had made their point. The unspoken assumption behind their
protests was that, merely by existing, the protesters had acquired
a right not only to speak up on the issues of the day but also to
be listened to — even though they have only slogans and no serious
geopolitical or strategic arguments to offer. At the protests, the
level of debate was typified by one of the Telegraph’s
other interviewees who said: “Bush is so uncool.”
It is not by coincidence that these sound like the words of some
air-headed celebrity. For the demonstrators expect us to listen to
them not as serious people but as celebrities are listened to —
that is, simply because the rest of us are interested in how they
identify themselves politically as we might be in how they dress or
whom they are dating. The protesters see themselves in the same way
that the contestants on reality TV shows do: namely, as candidates
for minor celebrity status. We should be interested in their point
of view on things for the same reason we are interested in that of
anybody who appears on TV. In fact, appearing on TV is itself a
validation of their right to be noticed and taken an interest in.
And TV, ever the democratizer of celebrity as it has been from its
beginnings, is happy to oblige by turning up at the protests and
promiscuously handing out its precious soundbites to those who can
be relied upon to mouth the TV point of view — that, say, Bush is
uncool.
When you think about it, something similar must be true about
the much-reported rediscovery of poverty after Hurricane Katrina.
“For the poor, sudden celebrity,” headlined the Washington Post last
week. The Post went so far as to say that “the celebrity
poor” were “a new subculture created by Hurricane Katrina,” but in
fact it was only the same celebrity subculture that has since been
on display at the antiwar demonstrations and that is always finding
new ways to celebrate victimhood. The poor — who are inevitably
seen as innocent victims — were simply seizing their moment in the
camera’s eye in the same way that Cindy Sheehan did. Nobody has any
very clear idea of what to do about poverty, but everybody
appears to share a passionate belief that the poor ought to be
noticed. They too deserved their soundbite moment on the television
when, for just a moment, the whole world would be witness to their
sense of grievance — whether against President Bush, Kathleen
Blanco, Ray Nagin or cruel fate. We may not be able to rescue them
from poverty, but at least we can pat them on the head and say,
“There, there. It’s all right. We notice you.”
In fact, I wonder whether we couldn’t go further and say that
the very idea of poverty in this land of plenty involves putting
near the top of the list of intolerable deprivations that of a lack
of access to the media. I have always been struck by a line in the
refrain of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” recently voted the
Greatest Song of All Time (no kidding!) by Rolling Stone
magazine, where the poet characterizes someone brought down from a
high social position to the lowest of the low as being “like a
complete unknown.” The phrase is of course taken from the publicity
industry. An “unknown,” let alone a complete unknown, is not
literally unknown. Like the girl in the song who was at least known
to Dylan and the others he sings about, the unknown may have quite
a large acquaintance yet remain an “unknown” in the sense of not
being a celebrity — not even (hence “complete”) a small one. That,
at one point in his career anyway, was just about the worst fate
that Bob Dylan could imagine befalling a person. As usual, he was
ahead of his time.
