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Nancy Smith has posted a selection of her photos of the Art@!)Work show on her site artloversnewyork. That's the group-show-in-a-cube-farm where I kept "office hours" over several weeks in May. The top shot is me drawing and "drinking the Koolaid" at the opening, looking happier than any man in a cubicle has a right to be. Several people pointed out that my Wacom tablet--discreetly in shadow in the photo--wasn't "period" if I was truly trying to channel my art-at-work life circa 1995. I know, I know. But there were other discrepancies, the main one being I never tacked up anything visual in the cube in '95. It was all hidden.
Cindy Sheehan--destined to be Time's Person of the Year, or to borrow Lincoln's pre-women's rights phrase, the Little Woman Who Ended the Big War--just got arrested outside the White House. The opposed forces are becoming pretty clear: a huge corporate-based megastructure including everything from defense contractors to the news media, which backs Bush because he's "good for business" even though in the long run his foreign policy blunders are going to set everybody back, versus most Americans, who are finally seeing this meat grinder for what it is.
The current death rate of our troops in Iraq is entirely Bush's fault. His decision to flatten Fallujah after the 2004 election, out of spite, because of some dead mercenaries who aren't even American troops, began turning the whole of Iraq against us, starting with the disenfranchised Sunni Arabs who stepped up the insurgency attacks. There is no hope there now of "winning" and ordinary folks realize this.
The media doesn't seem capable of changing its script that Bush is a popular, tough-minded President and the only people opposed to his war are hippies. More arrests and marches will slowly alter it--Sheehan and everyone who marched this past weekend are heroes in my book--but I fear the only things that will stop the slaughter are a spectacular, strategically significant attack by insurgents or that the erratic, feeble minded Bush, rumored to be back on the bottle, will finally crack, as in a complete on-camera meltdown. Actually I don't fear the latter except it means the second incompetent in command, Dick "I'll have some more fries" Cheney, would become President.
UPDATE: Paul Craig Roberts, who served in the Reagan administration but has opposed Bush's war from the outset, describes what's wrong with laser-like clarity. He makes the excellent point that outsourcing and "global labor arbitrage" are greater dangers to US stability than terrorism. Also good: "With the exceptions of Reps. Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers, Democrats fled the scene of the Sept. 24 antiwar rally in Washington DC. The cynical Democrats are apparently owned by the same interest groups that own the Republicans and are refusing the mantle of majority party that the electorate is offering to the party that will end the war."
UPDATE 2: For the record. it wasn't just Sheehan; from the WaPo: "About 370 antiwar demonstrators were arrested yesterday after planting themselves on the sidewalk in front of the White House, a protest that stretched out for nearly five hours as police removed them in stages to avoid a backlog at a processing center." Yes!