connecting*the*dots

Earth Day, 2007 by Mr. Fish.

In five days, it’ll be the four-year anniversary of “Mission accomplished.”

Unbelievable.

btw, Steven Connell is amazing.

I’m on the North side of Greensboro, watching Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War with 15 other engaged citizens. House parties like this were set up all across the nation by Free Press.

How simple was it? I received an email from my brother after he was made aware of the showing through their local action alert email newsletter.

In any event, it’s great to see so many concerned and engaged citizens — mostly strangers before tonight — coming together to ask tough questions. Actually, it’s much more hemming and hawing at the incompetence of our Fourth Estate than dialog between each other, but I’m sure that’ll come in a few minutes.

I’m furious watching this broadcast, but it’s nothing new in terms of knowledge. I’ve been blogging about this fucking mess before we invaded, while we invaded and throughout the occupation and opined about most of the concepts and players covered in this brilliant narrative by Moyers.

If you saw this documentary — or plan to catch it in the future — don’t waste your time getting mad with politicians making decisions based on self-interest and power plays. Instead, think about your personal relationship with the media, journalism and reporting and how it shapes your world view.

Kent Bye has been working on a project since the run up to war called, The Echo Chamber Project. Paraphrasing his thesis: he’s attempting to present a large number of perspectives about both the media coverage in the run up to war and interviews with professionals from a large variety of industries in a manner that can be contextualized, remixed and redistributed to the live web by world citizens.

Why is that important?

Because the current journalistic methodology of reporting and “coverage” from centralized business domains is responsible for pimping this war into fruition.

Maybe if we all have the ability to participate in a methodology that allows for easily stitching together unbundled clips of perspective, reporting, coverage, etc. and contextualize it with our own knowledge and narrative, we can make a real dent in the mainstream business as usual.

Maybe we can even replace TV as we know it today.

Kent and I rapped about a bunch of the possibilities last year. If you have some time, check out the interview.

Andy is going to post an audio file of the conversation we just had post-viewing (which was really interesting). I’ll link to it as soon as he posts it himself.

UPDATE: Andy just posted the post-viewing conversation.

(originally uploaded by philipn)

What is Man?
Mark Twain

“Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out… and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel…. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man” — with his mouth.”

(originally uploaded by counterclockwise)

Bloomington, Indiana

UPDATE: I just found a video clip of this work w/the artist’s description on WC:

From the Artist:

“This piece is part of a line of work I have been developing over the last year or so, which is called “Urban Impressionism”, in which represent 3D objects in 2-Dimensions through shadows. These shadows are created at a particular point of day, or night, and later stenciled and spray-painted in order to resemble real shadows. Through this process I am able to discuss light and form, in an unconventional way, placing it directly on the streets of the contemporary urban “cityscape” that surrounds us.

Ideally I hope to create a moment of magic or illusion in which the spectator or passer-by questions the space around him/her, through the shadows that are either naturally cast or artificially created. This particular piece incorporates text to politicize a very important issue for many of us today — the end of the war in many regions of our globalized world.

PS. I noticed that on the site, the piece had been mistakenly tagged as a “chalk” piece… The piece itself is was stenciled on the floor using a shadow cast by a light post at night, and later carefully sprayed with a ‘camouflage black’ can.”

(originally uploaded by Major Clanger)

(originally uploaded by Akcelik)

sponsored by…

(originally uploaded by annette 62)

In Newcastle, UK.

UPDATE: Sorry for the crappy image, but annette 62 seems to have left flickr, so the clean copy went with it. In its place is a scaled up version of a cashed thumbnail.

The text on the billboard reads:

EVER THOUGHT OF JOINING?
TALK TO SOMEONE WHO HAS
(added graf) LOST A SON IN IRAQ

Kate W., a reader from from St. Louis, MO, sent me this great find the other day. She took the picture last summer while on a trip to London.

Thanks, Kate!

Andy just put together a very compelling, personal account of his experience to DC and back last weekend.

Check it out.

Ruby Sinreich of lotusmedia reports on a successful Second Life war protest yesterday.

A bit too geeky for my tastes, but hey, the more the merrier!

flickr tag: j27sl

UPDATE: Another first person account of the event from Kevin Makice.

The above photo is of a 3′ x 3′ charcoal or rubber marking, found about 30 feet from the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. It was one of about five in the area, with the rest of the bunch all smaller and no more menacing than this particular marking.

I took the picture around 2pm, as my brother and I participated in and covered the anti-war protest.

Now, a number of conservative blogs — with large threads of clueless readers — are referring to this benign event as protesters vandalize Capitol building! In the posts, there are references of “spray paint” as the protester’s media of choice “to spray their dissent all over the steps of the U.S. Capitol building.”

Take a look at the picture above — it looks like someone busted out a rubber heel of a bar stool and rubbed the mark to fruition.

In any event, for the two hours we spent on the steps of the Capitol, as far as I can report, nothing worthwhile regarding violence or destruction occurred. At least nothing to dent the taxpayer’s wallet.

I can report, however, that there were some awkward, interesting, funny and stunning expressions of free speech just a few feet away from the steps of the Capitol:

The Soldier’s Wife

Man, this scene was rough.

This poor girl — she looked no older than 19 — just stood in place for an hour while completely releasing her frustrations regarding her husband’s deployment to Iraq.

It was great to see the wife of a soldier at the steps of the Capitol, releasing her pent up anger and frustrations, but man… I actually felt for the fuzz. When she finally left, after an hour of non-stop venting, the cops sort of looked at one another, took a deep breath, and stood at attention once again.

It’s too bad she can’t get 5 minutes on the floor of Congress — speaking directly to the people who can actually put an end to this madness — instead of spending an hour shouting into the wind directly outside.

To The Capitol! (Where’s The Capitol, Dude)

While the soldier’s wife vented, a huge group of punk rock kids walked over the grassy knoll to the right of the steps, chanting different things at different times — though I have to say the funniest was, “To the Capitol! To the Capitol! (followed by the guy in the lead with “Dude, where’s the Capitol?)”

We were standing right in front of it.

Various members of the group attempted to look menacing, but it was obvious that they were a bunch of students — a remnant of the 60’s radical organization, the SDS — who seemed to be looking for something to do on the fly.

They might have been the party guilty of tagging the pavement earlier in the afternoon (again, I don’t know for sure, but it seemed to fit their vibe), but by no means were they violent or radical.

The above picture isn’t showing a guy with a bullhorn working a crowd into a fist-raising frenzy; the leader of the pack simply asked the kids to raise fists if they wanted to join the “normal protesters in the march” or, and I quote, “just go do other stuff.”

They decided to join the marchers.

Dance, Dance, Revolution

This girl had me cracking up.

As the SDS broke off to meet up with the “normal” protesters, she moved directly in front of the officers guarding the steps and before you could say, “Michael Jackson,” she had already started to bust a move.

That was funny by itself — the bandanna covered revolutionist dancing her ass off — but as she continued to gyrate, she started a one-way conversation with the officers in front of her:

Come on, dance! Dance! It’s good for you! Dance! I see you smiling, come on, why can’t you dance?!…

That went on for at least 20 minutes. Somewhere in the midst of her bopping and prodding, someone screamed, “Dance! Dance! Revolution!” and as if on cue, she emulated the dance moves on the floor interface of the arcade game with the same name.

Too damn funny.

Tri-be: Performance Art

Identical triplets from tri-be performed all around Washington D.C. Each square inch of red cloth represented a specific number of casualties in the War on Terror.

• The businesswoman represents the victims of 9/11
• The soldier represents the fallen US service men and women
• The Muslim woman represents the fallen Iraqis and Afghani’s

From the silent execution of the performance to the details of the wardrobe to the absolutely compelling subtext of identical triplets as the participants, I was moved to my core.

Check out tri-be for yourself.

So Did The Protest Make The Slightest Dent In Policy?

I’m not sure if anti-war protests these days have the same teeth that they did back in the 60’s and 70’s. Quite honestly, law enforcement on the scene seemed pretty laid back, almost as if they were babysitting for the afternoon.

I’m not advocating chaos or violence as a vehicle for change, either.

On this day, the crowd was already diversified via organizational groups and each seemed to be focused more than a few degrees away from the next — one would be for the impeachment of Bush, the next for the liberation of Palestine, etc. Without a focused and consistent message — and a organized, regimented march — the message itself became diluted. So instead of delivering a powerful message through the action of tens of thousands of coordinated Americans, protesters, as a whole, opened themselves up to be reduced to “anarchists” and pegged as “anti-American.”

But there is a flip-side to such a perspective.

The internet in 2007 allows like-minded people to not only connect with one another, but to extend discourse beyond letters, meetings and protests — as anti-war activists were limited to 40 years ago.

These permanent hooks of discourse now live in the ether of the web, ripe for furthering conversations and introducing new realities to millions of Americans and global citizens each day.

Four years into the Iraq war, the representative arm of our government has heard the voice of the American public loud and clear and is beginning to at least challenge the administration’s policy. How long, and how many protests, did it take for a similar foothold to take place in the anti-Vietnam war era?

Much more than four years and a protest counter-culture needed to become established.

For numerous reasons, modern day American anti-war protests are an immature brand of past struggles — no centralized and respected leadership; no coordinated approach to physical movement; no single, simple message to sell to the other side — but the unpaved, decentralized streets of the internet just might be the flip to the script that makes the difference in the long-run.

For all our sakes, let’s hope that’s the case.