It was unusually warm around 11 a.m. today in Orange and the spectacle was unusually jarring at Palm and Glassell: a dozen or fewer anti-war protesters, ranging from college age to their grandparents, wearing orange “No torture” buttons and politely hoisting signs like the one that read, “Thank Yoo for Torture!”
That's jarring because of the body count: a dozen or fewer anti-war protesters. Keep in mind this was outside a college campus (Chapman University) teeming
with media (yours truly et al.) to hear a controversial Bush
administration adviser (John Yoo) whose 15 minutes of infamy have been
extended indefinitely in recent days thanks to the timely/untimely (depending on your
world view) release of memos he John Hancocked greenlighting
torture (or advanced interrogation techniques if you don't buy that
waterboarding, bodyslamming and confining constitute torture).
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When a TV camera's red light went on, peaceniks positioned their
faces in front of the lens and quietly chanted something like, “Obama
says 'It's okay,' we say 'no way.'” It was so lazily rendered one did
not feel compelled to waste the ink writing exactly what they sang in
one's new notepad. But the reference was clearly to the president's
chief of staff indicating over the weekend the administration would not
seek prosecution of Yoo and other Bush lawyers–although the Chosen One
seemingly reversed that stance today.
With
the chant beginning to fade in the near distance, the sidewalk leading
to Memorial Hall, where Yoo and three Chapman School of Law professors
would be debating presidential power, was guarded by two sentrys in
orange jumpsuits with black shrouds covering their entire heads.
Seeming from a distance even more inappropriate than “colored” lawn
jockeys, the faux detainees continued to confound when, walking past
them, you heard the kind of inane small talk the fox and the hound
guarding the henhouse engaged in right after punching their timecards
in those old Looney Tunes cartoons.
Finally, before walking
up the steps to enter the hall, a couple old enough to have been around
when the Memorial was built beamed while posing for a snapshot, making
sure to point their orange “No torture” buttons at their photographer
friend.
What, pray heaven, happened to the anti-war movement?
This
crew would easily be outnumbered, out-energized and out-anarchized by
the typical Friday night peace demonstration opposite South Coast
Plaza. Do the violent air punchers only come out when a Republican war
president is in office? Are the torture/advanced interrogation
techniques still left intact now okay because we trust Obama will know
when to use them? Or does this goddamn economy have everyone working so
hard that they cannot break away from the grind for a little
mid-morning peacenikking?
There would be some slightly testy moments inside Memorial Hall
(which will be detailed in a later post), but there was not nearly as
much acrimony as one would expect. I mean, Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist
practically needs a chair in one hand and whip in the other to back out
of similar campus appearances. Yoo did not stick around long after his,
but he likely made it to his car without the need of his escort.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just, heck, what, pray heaven, happened to the anti-war movement around here?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.