Tonight I followed Michael's link to Flow, where I found an article entitled "Bring the War Home" by Aniko Bodroghkozy. The article neatly links FX's new series Over There, publicity for which claims it is the first TV series to portray fictional US soldiers in the same context in which their real-life counterparts are fighting and dying in a real-life war (M*A*S*H, you'll recall, was set in the Korean War and broadcast during Vietnam), and the media coverage of Cindy Sheehan.
The basic thrust of Bodroghkozy's article is that Over There and the Sheehan story allow the American public--those who oppose the war, at least--to feel as though they are engaging in the issue without, of course, doing anything about it. One might watch Over There with moralist approbation at the US's lack of casus belli or watch Sheehan bemoan the loss of her son, all without having to leave the safety of one's home. To 'bring the war home,' then, is to engage in something like passive resentment, which bears no likeness to active resistance.
But there is another meaning for the phrase 'bring the war home,' and Bodroghkozy is right not to mention it because it is completely absent from today's political landscape.
To get to that other meaning, we can look at Bodroghkozy's bibliography. It's telling that he references Todd Gitlin. A professor of journalism at Columbia U, Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic Society, the national New Left conglomeration of student activists, in the early 60s. Gitlin presided over SDS during its phase of nonviolent resistance, before the organization was overtaken by an internal sect calling itself The Weathermen.
The Weathermen abandoned SDS's methods of nonviolence, instead opting for a violent means of calling attention to the war in Vietnam. Their goal was to end the war by giving the American public a small taste of the experiences that the US was inflicting on Vietnam and its neighbors. For a little less than a decade, The Weathermen evaded FBI manhunts while bombing some dozens of public institutions that they felt symbolized imperial oppression. Their slogan was, simply, "Bring the War Home."
In the end, The Weathermen's methods for halting the war had no effect on public policy. They were handily marginalized as criminally insane miscreants, and their political objectives were largely overlooked by the mainstream media.
But the notion of truly 'bringing the war home,' of jarring the public into a profound understanding of how our foreign policy affects the Middle East, seems to carry some (at least theoretical) potential. Could a campaign to 'bring the war home' work today?
posted by wekkley @ 7:48 PM
4 Comments:
yo wekk,
maybe a "bring the war home" would be doomed to fail in a day like today. after all, we have a pre made framework ready to be slapped on to any acts of violence ("terror," the alert system color code, national security, etc.).
it seems like these days so much is always and already available to our emerging terrorism/nationalism vocabulary. I'm afraid that until there's a media revolution, violence on the street will be reframed and republished to the rest of the country as something other than what it aspires to be. Shit, just take a look at what got done with the LA riots. Nothing. and that's the worst part.
what do you think?
while i argued that whole pomo route earlier today about the meaning of terrorism, i think there's the important point that the objection should be to violence, not to the fact of unjustified targets or undemocratic agents of violence. at least that's the position i want to argue.
it can aspire to be a political statement or a political movement as al qaeda is doing--and it will assuredly work as well for them as it did for the PLO and HAMAS. but we need to be careful to confuse the strategy's expediency in other contexts with its justification. whether or not we misrecognize it as terrorism has nothing to do with whether or not victims of violence can claim their own violence as their due.
Michael's absolutely right that a 'bring the war home' campaign would immediately be assimilated into terrorism rhetoric. If that rhetoric had been strong enough back in the day of the Weathermen, it certainly would have been applied.
It's hard, though, to think of a suitable line of action that would have some effect. I mean, regardless of how many people protest the war this weekend in Washington, Dear Leader will resolutely stay the course. What kind of middle ground do we have between tired old protests and militant activism?
And as for Joel's comment, I didn't emphasize in the original post that the Weathermen's bombing campaign did not kill or injure a single person (except for three Weathermen who had a fatal accident while putting together a bomb).
So their project didn't really employ violence in the same sense that Vietnam was violence; it's violence against property, not against people.
You can argue with that by saying that a terror campaign is pschologically violent or whatever, but it's not quite the same. I respect Joel's point that we can't appropriate the methods of the agents we condemn, though, and that certainly adds to the difficulty that Michael brings up.
ok ok joel. point taken. violence IS bad. shame on me.
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