[Mb-civic] Cindy Sheehan: Katrina Will Be Bush's Monica - Tom Disptach

[William Swiggard]

<>Katrina Will Be Bush's Monica
A Tomdispatch Interview with Cindy Sheehan

My brief immersion in the almost unimaginable life of Cindy Sheehan 
begins on the Friday before the massive antiwar march 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=24319> past the White House. 
I take a cab to an address somewhere at the edge of Washington DC -- a 
city I don't know well -- where I'm to have a quiet hour with her. 
Finding myself on a porch filled with peace signs and vases of roses 
(assumedly sent for Sheehan), I ring the doorbell, only to be greeted by 
two barking dogs but no human beings. Checking my cell phone, I discover 
a message back in New York from someone helping Sheehan out. Good 
Morning America has just called; plans have changed. Can I make it to 
Constitution and 15th by five? I rush to the nearest major street and, 
from a bus stop, fruitlessly attempt to hail a cab. The only empty one 
passes me by and a young black man next to me offers an apologetic 
commentary: "I hate to say this, but they probably think you're hailin! 
g it for me and they don't want to pick me up." On his recommendation, I 
board a bus, leaping off (twenty blocks of crawl later) at the sight of 
a hotel with a cab stand.

A few minutes before five, I'm finally standing under the Washington 
monument, beneath a cloud-dotted sky, in front of "Camp Casey," a white 
tent with a blazing red "Bring them home tour" banner. Behind the tent 
is a display of banged-up, empty soldiers' boots; and then, stretching 
almost as far as the eye can see or the heart can feel, a lawn of small 
white crosses, nearly two thousand of them, some with tiny American 
flags planted in the nearby ground. In front of the serried ranks of 
crosses is a battered looking metal map of the United States rising off 
a rusty base. Cut out of it are the letters, "America in Iraq, killed 
___, wounded ___." (It's wrenching to note that, on this strange 
sculpture with eternal letters of air, only the figures of 1,910 dead 
and 14,700 wounded seem ephemeral, written as they are in white chalk 
over a smeared chalk background, evidence of numerous erasures.)

This is, at the moment, Ground Zero for the singular movement of Cindy 
Sheehan, mother of Casey, who was killed in Sadr City, Baghdad on April 
4, 2004, only a few days after arriving in Iraq. Her movement began in 
the shadows and on the Internet, but burst out of a roadside ditch in 
Crawford, Texas, and, right now, actually seems capable of changing the 
political map of America. When I arrive, Sheehan is a distant figure, 
walking with a crew from Good Morning America amid the white crosses. 
I'm told by Jodie, a stalwart of Code Pink, the women's antiwar group, 
in a flamboyant pink-feathered hat, just to hang in there along with 
Joan Baez, assorted parents of soldiers, vets, admirers, tourists, press 
people, and who knows who else.

As Sheehan approaches, she's mobbed. She hugs some of her greeters, 
poses for photos with others, listens briefly while people tell her they 
came all the way from California or Colorado just to see her, and 
accepts the literal T-shirt off the back of a man, possibly a vet, with 
a bandana around his forehead, who wants to give her "the shirt off my 
back." She is brief and utterly patient. She offers a word to everyone 
and anyone. At one point, a man shoves a camera in my hand so that he 
and his family can have proof of this moment -- as if Cindy Sheehan were 
already some kind of national monument, which in a way she is.

But, of course, she's also one human being, even if she's on what the 
psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton would call a "survivor mission" for her 
son. Exhaustion visibly inhabits her face. (Later, she'll say to me, 
"Most people, if they came with me for a day, would be in a coma by 
eleven A.M.") She wears a tie-dyed, purple T-shirt with "Veterans for 
Peace" on the front and "waging peace" on the back. Her size surprises 
me. She's imposing, far taller than I expected, taller certainly than my 
modest five-foot, six inches. Perhaps I'm startled only because I'd 
filed her away -- despite every strong commentary I'd read by her - as a 
grieving mother and so, somehow, a diminished creature.

Click here to read more of this dispatch. 
<http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=25288>

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