"Live from the DNC"

OFFLINE ILLUMINATION

"Live from the DNC"
By Roy Lisker

Evening , Monday, July 26th : The newspapers had announced that Howard Zinn and Dennis Kucinach would be speaking at the Cambridge Multicultural Center as part of an exhibition opening between 7 and 9. The Center is located in an out-of-the-way location in Cambridge that is actually easy to get to, as it is right across the river from North Station. Although North Station has been closed for the convention, there are shuttle buses from Kendall Square going to nearby Lechmere.

The Cultural Center is something of a magnet for the Cambridge radical community. This has grown to sizable proportions since my previous stays and visits to Cambridge. Indeed the architecturally attractive 2-story building was packed with leftists, liberals, radicals of every age , stripe and persuasion.

The exhibition has been organized by Carl Resenstein and Patrick Dillon of Puffin Books.It consists of drawings by 10-year old Iraqi school children from the Al-Sail school in Baghdad. Dillon has organized similar projects in the past with school children in Kosovo. The Puffin Foundation supplied papers, crayons, magic markers and other materials.

The drawings are displayed in the upstairs gallery. One must keep in mind the context in which these drawings were made: one of them is a simple drawing of the river Tigris, colored red. Another shows a soldier's boot with blood-stained spikes and cleats. Pictures of dead civilians and soldiers with planes streaming overhead and tanks in the streets. A young girl cries in Arabic , "Where's my father"?

In the downstairs gallery the Center has provided crayons , paper, etc., for school-children ( or adults), to draw their reactions to the drawings exhibited upstairs. The undue influence of adult expectations is apparent in these drawings and there isn't much to say about them. However it's an interesting idea.

The program began at 8 in the upstairs auditorium. This is a fairly large room, with stage and seating for, I would estimate, 300. However the room was solidly packed and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that 600 people were present.

Introductions were made by Shelley Neill, a very muscular transsexual with platinum-white hair, black dress, red robe and a strong voice. She explained that although Kucinach had promised to try to come it was not likely that he would, given the traffic jams all over the city and the talk he was then giving at the Convention itself. Then she introduced Howard Zinn.

Zinn's delivery had steadily improved over the years. The reason is obvious-he's been a Ferment subscriber since the 80's! Whatever the reasons, he's mastered the art of bringing a left-sympathizing audience along with him without resorting to cliches or buzz words, with lots of humor between presentations of sobering facts. Here is a brief summary of his major points:

Zinn traces the idea of using children's drawings to communicate the horrors of war , to an exhibition created during the Vietnam war based on children's reactions to the bombing of the Plain of Jars in Laos. The idea came from an American aid worker who'd been in a Laotian village for 7 years and had witnessed the bombings along with the children.

Zinn explained that air force pilots themselves are not conscious of the destruction and pain they are inflicting. He himself was a bombadier in World War II. At 30,000 feet up in the air all that one sees are flashes of light. Its routine, even a bit boring. His own personal exposure to the real meaning of a bombardment to its victims came from his visit to Hanoi during the Vietnamese war when he had to go into an air-raid shelter and wait out an American raid on the city.

On February 15, 1991, during the first Gulf War, American bombs were dropped directly on an air-raid shelter in Baghdad. 500 people were incinerated. Normally the American government would issue some sort of apology. In this case however, the Pentagon stated that the air raid shelter had been deliberately targeted because it "might" have contained electronic equipment. Zinn presented this as evidenece of the inhuman mentality at work.

The human dimension , generally speaking, is absent from most news reports. These children's drawings help to fill up the vacuum. He then went on to talk about the myth of terrorism . He derided the very concept of a "war on terrorism", stating that war itself is a form of terrorism. As another example of the indifference of the military to human suffering, he cited the response of Colin Powell during the first Gulf War to a question posed by a reporter " Mr Powell, how many Iraqi casualties were there?" Reply: "That's not a matter I'm very concerned with."

War is always a war against children. There are always more civilians than soldiers injured. War corrupts everyone who engages in it. Even World War II, which he and many people deemed a just wat, corrupted its participants. Whet her the enemy is Hitler, Saddam Hussein or Noriega, our bombs are killing the VICTIMS of the tyrants we are claiming to want to get rid of.

"It pains me", Zinn mimicked deep pain for about 15 seconds, " to say that under the present circumstances we should vote for Kerry." Another gesture of being in pain, with laughter and applause from the audience. We gave him a standing ovation. Howard knew that I was in the audience through the prominence of my "Ferment" tee shirt, but he was surrounded by at least 50 people who wanted to talk further with him, and I was unable to see him to shake his hand.

I made my first visit to the so-called "Protestor's Zone" on Monday afternoon. In the same way as all persons deemed enemies of the US are now labelled "terrorists", the "demonstrators" at the convention are being called "protestors".

3 stations on the Green Line are out of service for the duration of the Convention. However it's still easy to get to North Station and the Convention area by a number of routes. I chose to walk along Boston Common to Bowdoin Street, past the state capital, then down Cambridge and the long winding streets descending to Congress and up to the Causeway. There were few persons on these streets outside of office personell and of course many dozens of cops of every stripe.

Overhanging the Causeway is a gigantic elevated track long out of service. What is called the "Free" or "Protected" Zone is along one side of this street. Separating the sidewalk from North Station and the Convention Center are two ranges of 8-foot high metal barriers in combination with metal wires and fences,all running parallel to and underneath the Elevated track. The street itself holds restaurants and shops, most of which are open for business.

For two blocks I saaw no political activity at all. Then I ran into a few college students handing out Lyndon Larouche propaganda. There were also Democratic Party colunteers in red shirts and convention volunteers in white shirts.

This changed dramatically at Canal Street, a wide thoroughfare of about two blocks perpendicular to the Causeway which is now blocked off to traffic. On this street there is lots of political theater. Some Republican students have designed six-foot high cardboard "shoe soles" which they call "flip-flops" to dramatize Kerry's waffling on issues.

Radical anarchists and Marxists were walking around wearing water soaked bandanas covering noses and mouths in anticipation of the tear gas attacks conjured up by their romantic imaginations. There was a Gandhian, about my age, holding a sign with quotations from Mahatma Gandhi, standing next to an 8 foot high puppet of George Bush. Black Tea anarchists were announcing events scheduled by them in Boston Common and Copley Square.

Going down Canal Street one approaches the entrance to the Green Line then turns to the left to enter the "Protest Zone". Virtually every registered political group (67 or more), has refused to use or even enter the pen. The groups one does find there are on the extreme fringe. On this day it was the Lyndon LaRouche bunch and a pro-life religious group called "Operation Witness". There is a kind of platform where someone was haranguing the "crowd" (no more than 10 people, although the "pen" is large enough to hold a thousand). He endlessly repeated the information that all the ideas of the Democratic Party were wrong( vis a vis abortion) , and it was wrong to vote for them.

Cops were everywhere, but there was no sense of tension or awaited violence. What's actually happened is that the political organizations are simply avoiding the Convention area for their demonstrations and are fanning out across the rest of the city. The arrant stupidity at all levels of government which led to the erection of the "Protestor's Pen" has turned out to be irrelevant, given the many excellent places throughout Boston for staging large demonstrations.

In the next installment (possibly today), I'll describe the exhibition at the Cambridge Multicultural Center and the superb talk given there by Howard Zinn.

*Ferment and Ferment Press
Dr. Roy Lisker
Ferment, Ferment Press
<http://www.fermentmagazine.org>
8 Liberty Street #306
Middletown, CT 06457

Previous Offline Illuminations
Live from the Democrat National Convention (July 26)
The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture
The US Secret Govt Rears Its Ugly Head in the Bush Cabal
The Book George Bush Doesn't Want You To Read
They Cast No Shadows
Illuminati Terrorists & the Cults of Death
Will the Real "Beneficiaries" Please Stand Up?
The Stealth Genocide Program
Apocalypse Culture II
Whitewashing CIA Mind Control Atrocities
The Curious Case of the Spooky Professor:
A Modest Revolution
The Limousine Liberal Manifesto
Spectacle: Age of Conspiracy
The Jesus Puzzle
Rulers of Evil
Sex and Rockets
Gen-X Chumps, I Mean, Spooks