Does that mean that if it's all over C-SPAN it's not a revolution anymore?
Both with Saturday's demo and with the previous one in Sept, I watched quite a bit of the rallies on C-SPAN--and with full captioning so I do not even have to interpret for deaf husband. (I saw clips of the counter rally too; boy did they look thin!) I have been quite impressed with the diversity of the speakers and the diversity of the rally attenders. Tie-dye and clothing encrusted with buttons is one thing but average folk in ordinary clothes--even if they come from The Gap--are a pretty convincing visual.
In both cases, even though people brought many flavors of pure rhetoric, in many cases they also brought real on-the-ground experience that gave me real information to filter the rhetoic through. I also really enjoyed hearing some speaker voices I was unfamiliar with, so unfamiliar that I do not currently remember their names.
In general, I think mass rallies are important, both for the sheer organizing experience of bringing diverse groups of people together and for the visual effect. Still, I have a certain visceral objection to expending a lot of fossil fuel to travel far away to protest a war meant to ensure someone's dominion over fossil fuel reserves. But part of that is geography. If one lives in NJ it's a lot more satisfying to get 30 buses to DC than to stand around the neighborhood post office. But for me, I had no desire even to go to San Francisco, so,probably for the first time in my life, I wound up at a rally locally in panythose and dress shoes.
(Hint: pantyhose can be surprisingly warm. Also I was splitting my time between rally and a local conference on the trafficking of women and children. If list members are interested I am happy to post writeups about the panels I attended. The conference was mostly no great shakes on the radical analysis front. For instance it almost completely omitted two entire continents, Africa and Latin America. But there was real data and gathered sometimes at stunning risk so it was definitely worth the time)
I do think it's terrific when news announcers have to say "blah hundred thousand in DC, along with rallies in San Francisco, Chicago, Berlin and 5000 people in Denny Park. But the question for today is whether Saddam Hussein is also supposed to be afraid of mass rallies like this.I think so, but....
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