Revolutionary Moderation

Forgive me



I can't claim I've felt up to blogging very much in the last couple of days. The war is engaged, and no arguments, no protests now are going to have the American and British military fold up their tents and go out the way they came in: "Sorry, our bad."



But I attended a march in Calgary yesterday, because I think it's the continued protests of the people about the war which will force the hand of a reconstruction for the Iraqi people. I have said before that "No blood for oil" is a broad simplification that doesn't serve a useful purpose, but it does serve one: it makes the people who are in favour of the war want very much to prove the marchers wrong. Since I think the story at the end of the war is going to be, "of course we didn't find evidence of WMD... we blew it all up with smart bombs the second night," they're going to have to show us some seriously free Iraqi people instead. Whatever tendency people have to forget (Afghanistan? what dat?), I think people will want to know that Bush shattered the international order for something.



And the march was energising... it was nice to be in a group of people so vast I could not see the front or the back of the crowd at any time during the march, knowing all these people were against the war, and more, we're willing to say that out loud, were willing to travel downtown on a Saturday and take an entire afternoon to do it. I saw friends I haven't seen in months, found myself marching alongside them and then only suddenly realising I hadn't come there with them. I'm not alone, and that's comforting.



But it also made me sad. At the beginning of the march, there were a few pro-war antagonists (and really, are the antagonists making arguments like this? Or are they the types who say angrily but casually, without a thought, "nuke 'em all, turn the entire place to glass. Then we'll be safe"? I digress.). They flew American flags, which had a few ethnically Arab marchers around me scream "butchers, killers, nazis" and the like back at them. As near as I could see, they simply stood there and took it... how pacifist! That sadness had faded with the enthusiasm of the crowd as the march went on, but back at Olympic Plaza at the end, as speakers had their say, some too-enthusiastic teenagers gathered around an American flag, and trod upon it.



All of a sudden, I found myself confronting how far my anger at Americans goes. Carolyn Parrish says she hates those bastards, and I find myself knowing what brought that sentiment about. I'm frustrated with the ability of the United states to shatter international agreements --- not just around this war, but generally --- even when the rest of the world stands against them. But step on Old Glory? No. Half of the population of the United States do not approve of this war... and that half loves their flag as passionately as the other. As a Canadian, I have the advantage of a similar enough language and world-view that I can consume huge volumes of American culture without being colonised by it, and I do. Thank you, USA, for The Sopranos and 24 and (God help me) Survivor. Thank you for American Beauty and Fight Club. Thank you for Tori Amos and David Letterman and Jon Stewart and Matt Groening. How can I hate a culture that has given me such joy? How can I hate a people who have such minds among them? I can't, and I don't want to. I won't participate in their government's war, and I'm proud that the Prime Minister has reflected that in policy. Neither will I accept the arguments that Canada needs to sacrifice any of our decision-making sovereignty to appease the American government. But there's a very great distance between that, and active hate. Perhaps the teenagers I saw had very personal reasons for hating the United States. Perhaps they had lost family members to war or sanctions, or have lived under the bootheel of one of the American's friendly dictators at some point in the past. But it is nearly impossible to have a sensible political discussion at a protest, so there is a tendency to boil things down into the simplest terms. And what could be simpler, more visceral, more emotional than the flying of or destruction of a flag. The former, the pro-war antagonists, flew the flag as a display of "USA good". Not "Saddam destabilises the region", or "free the Iraqi people", just "USA good." The desecrators said, essentially, "USA evil". How is that conversation helpful? Naturally, it wasn't the thousands of Calgarians, but this fundamental and simple-to-understand difference of opinion that made for good news copy, in as much as any of it did.