Neutron Mom

(Pic via this site)

We’re winning...but the buildings are still standing.

What gives?

This from the Atomic Archive:

The Neutron Bomb
The neutron bomb is a small hydrogen bomb. The neutron bomb differs from standard nuclear weapons insofar as its primary lethal effects come from the radiation damage caused by the neutrons it emits. It is also known as an enhanced-radiation weapon (ERW).

The augmented radiation effects mean that blast and heat effects are reduced so that physical structures including houses and industrial installations, are less affected. Because neutron radiation effects drop off very rapidly with distance, there is a sharper distinction between areas of high lethality and areas with minimal radiation doses.

Around the blogfires you can hear the veterans of war movements past musing about the absence of a Walter Cronkite Tet Moment in Iraq. The lack of multi-hundred-thousand participant antiwar demonstrations. The lack of the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool as cardinal points in an ocean of fervent humanity.

Around the blogfires sometimes they can be heard singing, with genuine puzzlement, this plaintive ballad…

…
Where have all the Cronkites gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the Cronkites gone?
Gone for Blitzers every one…

When will Americans in their millions take to the streets? When will the Important Man declare the war unwinnable? And to them I say, be of good cheer my brothers and sisters. You’re fighting the last war. Don’t try to measure radiation with a barometer. Look at the situation again.

And no, I am not in any way denigrating the hard work of protestors around the country, or the good citizens who give tirelessly and endlessly to the Cause, or the volunteers who man Camp Casey’s around the nation, or to Mrs. Cindy Sheehan, who is as sparking an exemplar of old-fashioned citizenship as one could hope to find.

Quite the opposite.

Vigils and marches are useful for a whole variety of reasons, but vigils and marches are ultimately means and not ends.

Without Cindy, the poll numbers for Dubya’s Iraqi Debacle would be drifting generally southward, not plummeting, but the Oily Rag, Kerosene and Tinder-dry Stick Furniture Depot that is this Administration’s warehouse of Iraqi War Lies didn’t need much of a spark to set it ablaze.

It just needed the right spark.

If in the last three years, George Bush had ever been right about anything Iraq-related, or if there had ever been a single week where what the Administration had sworn was the undisputed truth of a Monday hadn’t been shown up to be a barefaced lie by Friday…maybe they could just tough it out. To continue to follow the single lesson of GW’s life; that he can fuck the family dog into stratosphere times after time after time…and that there will never be any consequences. That he doesn’t have to care about a single soul who is doesn’t have deep pockets or a particularly ass-friendly Gene Simmons Tongue, as long as his handlers can keep him spinning.

Dubya isn’t President because he wants to serve, or because he feels some particular, burning ambition to lead the nation anywhere. Dubya is, finally, nothing more that what we have always know him to be. A seat-filler. An empty suit with a designer label. The reason he gets to go to bednights at 8:00, never read a book and never has to spend a single moment in the Real World sullying his glossy Fake Cowboy boots walking the same dusty roads as mere mortals is that was the deal.

Isn’t it clear by now that Dubya doesn’t want to actually be the President? That he carries himself in every way as a man who thinks he is doing us all a very large favor by just showing up to work three days a week, and positively reeks of that particular rolling-paper-thin-skinned Diva petulance that spoiled chidren have when they feel they’re not sufficiently doted on and adored.

After all -- as we have all been told many times – Preznitin’ is Hard Work!

Isn’t it rather blindingly obvious by now that he in no way views his tenure in the White House as carrying on the legacy of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln or either Roosevelt, but as something akin to reluctantly agreeing to take the ugly chick to prom, but ONLY because her old man’s rich, and will let him drive his bitchin’ Porche?

The complete detachment from reality when reading ludicrous speeches on Iraq? The peevish-brat-grudgingly-reading-his-homework-by-rote when speaking about the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans? His bizarrely truculent unwillingness to break the strict routine of doing fuck all nothing whatsoever while in residence at the Drinking White House for anything whatsoever that doesn’t involve knobbing Randall Terry and James Dobson’s chubby Crosses of Gold?

That was the deal: he gets one week in four to fuck off and do whatever he wants, gets to make his buddies into Princes and put cigarettes out on his enemies. Never has to crack a book or worry about comprehending a fucking thing and, in exchange, he’ll read what’s put in front of him and sign what he’s told.

And this bold strategy of being a richly rewarded codpiece for the Right Wing has always worked exceedingly well because Poppy’s Pals will always be there to make sure that no blowback from his reckless, vicious blackout-drunk stupidity stuck to his $1,200 shit-kickers...

...but there is no Kennebunkport Rolodex Cavalry coming to the rescue this time. Those cards are long since played and played out.

This is the breach into which Cindy Sheehan has ridden. It is into this is the bit of Achilles' Heel exposed flesh that the Administration cannot completely cover up and can't make go away that Cindy has sunk her teeth and will not let go.

Iraq is exclusively and entirely Dubya’s Debacle, and people want answers. Specific answers. From him. And after five weeks of gamboling across the Plain of Little Brown Jugs and playing “Got Yer Nose” with the Secret Service out at Rancho Cuckoobananas, people expect some especially “crisp” answers from the Bicycle Chief.

One of our Great Cities is mortally wounded and spiraling into something out of Mad Max due to a hellbrew of bad luck, bad weather and outright criminal incompetence coming from a federal government in which every muscle except those used for spinning, lying and covering-up has obviously atrophied into tapioca pudding.

From the head of that government we expect and deserve clarity, wisdom and comfort.

Instead we get stale, half-eaten phrases from the bottom of Karl Rove’s high school lunchbox, stitched together with a shaky and careless hand and delivered with eye-rolling boredom or jawdroppingly inappropriate smirks and giggles...by a grumpy lout obviously pissed that calamity had eaten in to his vacation days.

When we had three networks and no internet, a Tet/Cronkite Moment was necessary. Before sophisticated databasing and organizing became a science, and getting a thousand people anywhere, anytime with pre-printed signs became the norm, filling the street with bodies made the news and made it into people’s living rooms.

There is still a vital place for those tools – nothing in war or politics will ever take the place of showing up in the flesh at the right time, well-prepared, and in large numbers -- but in the end, they too are means, and not ends.

Instead, what I’m getting at is the multiplying/lensing effect of 21st century technology on any mass movement. There’s a nifty, little Asimov story called “Franchise” from 1955 in which kind of makes a similar point in a whimsical, sidelong way. And when have I ever resisted the impulse to dip into the sci-fi bag?

In the story, instead of one-man-one-vote, sampling methods had gotten so sophisticate that one voter decides the outcome of elections (Insert Florida and Dieboldt joke here.) He is hooked up to a “Multivac” –

(this was only three years after Univac became the first computer to predict the outcome of an election. Univac got it dead-right, while the human commentators got it entirely wrong, and mocked and made fun of poor Univac...until the results came in.

It was then the Univac swore revenge on the smartass monkeys that had made sport of it on national teevee.

And that’s when the trouble started....) –

and asked a series of questions over the course of a few hours. Then the Multivac picked the winner.

Asimov asked the question, since voting was simply the means by which a government is chosen, if science can do a good enough job of predicting the outcome so as to be well within the margin of error, why not spare ourselves the fuss and expense?

Marching and televised Pronouncement are terrific, but in the end they are tools designed to change public opinion and public policy. But the Information Hegemony of the Three Networks is long dead, replaced by the wide open, lawless and loving it, live-by-your-wits Noosphere that smacks of our imagination’s ideas of the Klondike during the Gold Rush as filtered though Jack London. And in that wild landscape is embedded the most secretive, paranoid and tightly-scripted Administration in history, and in such a jungle, GOP rigidity and fanatical message discipline work only when you can keep everyone who controls access to information all obediently goose-stepping in the same direction.

This can work on things involving, say, math, because let’s face it, it seems pretty clear that most Republicans can’t count to twenty without taking their sock off. So however clearly Paul Krugman tries to warn them, they go right on voting that 2+2=22 and sincerely believe that it actually fucking matters whether what a 50%+1 majority thinks about mathematica truth. Not too many oarsmen in the ol’ Mental Armada among our Republican friends, and none of them pulling in the right direction.

But unlike budget matters, where you can hide your fuckups under dense spreadsheets and arcane bibblespeak, on subjects like War and Peace and Natural Disaster, when the Administration fucks up, mothers have to bury children. And they want answers.

And when the Administration lies about its fuckups, those mothers get very, very angry, but a generation ago they had no means of reaching out, of talking, of getting their governments attention...except by making it on to Television, in person or by proxy.

Which is why Marches and Pronouncements were so incredibly important. As means to that end.

Nowadays, ten minutes after the Bush Administration tries on a shiny new pair of Jogging Lies to see if they’ll give him better traction that the old pair... it's all over Left Blogistan. Crooks and Liars will have the video within minutes. Steve Gilliard will take a twenty-pound maul to it within a matter of hours. James Wolcott --- the undisputed Hattori Hanzo of Progressive Prose – will come swashbucklin’ in from the hottest clubs and coolest dives, working his wicked, monofilament-thin blade like a maestro’s baton (because it’s all in the wrist) effortlessly separating Wingnuts from their clammy epidermi, and then sprinkling them lightly with just a smidge of sea salt. Atrios will get a million hits wrapping it up and by the next day, Jon Stewart will be working it into The Big Show.

Bush's poll numbers are cratering. His enervating, I’d-rather-be-anywhere-but-here speeches are getting shredded by conservative papers. And even people deep in his own party are starting to look anxiously around for the Emergency Exit Doors as Iraq continues to fall out of the sky.
(I guess they weren’t paying attention during the takeoff when the flight attendants showed that little movie that warned them this is what would happen.)

And those are precisely the ends towards which any Movement to end this war and hold this President to account for his lies is working.

Which is why Cindy Sheehan is the Neutron Mom: through some weird alchemical combination of circumstance, technology and timing that simply would not have been possible 30-40 years ago (and which a grad student a decade from now will parse out and turn into a killer thesis) she has managed to catalyze the same effect as a Mass Movement and a Cronkite Moment, but without most of the more obvious and recognizably gaudy blasts and shockwaves.

So don't wait for Uncle Walter to show up and say it's all over. This time it's different.

This is the Information Age.

And Cronkite Don't Surf.