James Wolcott, formerly a TV, book and pop culture reviewer for the Village Voice and now a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, felt compelled Sunday to voice his feelings about the previous day's antiwar demonstration in Washington, based, I suppose, on his background as a TV and culture critic.

In order, however, to get in touch with those feelings Wolcott first leads us along a meandering path in which we ponder the current clash of the Shiites before taking a pause to consider the import of Fourth-Generation war. And before you can say "anarchy" he brings us abruptly to nothing less than "a crisis of legitimacy of the state" as described by William Lind, military analyst and director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism—

That is just what Fourth Generation opponents strive for, a systemic breakdown in their state adversary. The danger sign in America is not a hot national debate over the war in Iraq and its course, but precisely the absence of such a debate – which, as former Senator Gary Hart has pointed out, is largely due to a lack of courage on the part of the Democrats....

The primum mobile of Fourth Generation war is a crisis of legitimacy of the state. If the absence of a loyal opposition and alternative courses of action further delegitimizes the American state in the eye of the public, the forces of the Fourth Generation will have won a victory of far greater proportions than anything that could happen on the ground in Iraq. The Soviet Union's defeat in Afghanistan played a central role in the collapse of the Soviet state. Could the American defeat in Iraq have similar consequences here? The chance is far greater than Washington elites can imagine.

It is only at this auspicious moment that Wolcott is able to relate what was really on his mind—the previous day's antiwar demonstration.

The absence of debate is undeniably a sign of shame and cowardice, yet I can't blame high-profile Democrats from absenting themselves from yesterday's antiwar demo and march in DC. Steve Gilliard confessed that he watched about an hour of the rally and was so p.o.'d that he wanted to do an Elvis to his TV screen. I'm a less patient hothead than Steve. I only lasted about ten minutes watching the rally on C-SPAN....

Wolcott then writes a TV review as though C-SPAN were a commercial network and the antiwar march was a new offering in its fall lineup. I'll quote the bulk of it—

Here are the problems with mass rallies and marches on TV.

1) They all look alike. They're interchangeable pedestrian jams. If you didn't know what year it was, you wouldn't have known whether this demo was taking place in 2003 or 2004 or spring of 2005, because apart from Cindy Sheehan and a few others, it was the same cast of characters you always get at these protest smorgasbords, which remind me of WBAI at its most doctrinaire PC, where every faction and caucus has to be represented and heard no matter how boring or splintery or tangential to the event they are. What you get is an event that seems to have been exhumed from a time capsule buried in some aging ponytailed radical's back yard....

The right never makes that mistake. They enforce a message discipline.
....

2) The scale is all wrong for TV.

To be heard before thousands of gatherers, speakers feel they have to shout into the mike and every every phrase sound STENTORIAN. But for the larger audience at home, it's like being harangued, and who wants to be harangued, especially by speakers pounding you with played-out slogans? And no matter how large the crowd, on TV it looks like congested clutter, a sea of tiny, ugly billboards. It really doesn't help that so many of the signs are homemade and hackneyed. As the camera panned over the crowd yesterday, I saw placards featuring Mumia and Malcolm X, and I thought, What have they got to do with what's happening now in Iraq? The placards looked as dated as punk Mohawks in the East Village, and watching protesters wave them around as if they were in the studio audience trying to get Monty Hall's attention on Let's Make a Deal didn't help.

With her vigil near the Crawford ranch, Cindy Sheehan carved out an original protest space. The magnitude of yesterday's protest miniaturized her. It was as if she was swallowed up inside a whale aslosh with flotsam. I don't know what the answer is to the lack of adversarial energy against this accursed war, but what I do know is that yesterday's flea circus wasn't it.

It would seem, as the saying goes, that with friends like Wolcott the antiwar movement hardly needs enemies. It isn't that I don't agree, in the abstract, with much that he says; it is that much that he says is simply irrelevant.

So far as media coverage is concerned, the purpose of a march is not to get beginning-to-end coverage on C-SPAN, which is only provided so that your family and friends may have a chance to see you on national television. The American public is not watching demonstrations on C-SPAN; the public will get wind of the march through a brief segment on the nightly news or perhaps an article in the local paper.

The first objective must be to field as many bodies as possible as visibly as possible, in part to counter the media bias for the pro-war forces. Visibility is achieved through (1) advance promotion, (2) turnout, (3) fame of the speakers and performers and (4) locale. In that regard Saturday's march did an excellent job of meeting 3 of the 4 requirements. Big-name Democratic politicians of course would have guaranteed more coverage—and a great deal of grief for themselves. If any had attended, the purpose of the march would have been lost in the howls that would have followed on the talk shows.

At least since the time of the Vietnam antiwar demonstrations, coverage of pro-war demonstrations is always greatly disproportionate to the turnout. The media go for "balance." The Washington Post, for instance, allowed that there were as many as 150,000 attending the antiwar event, but they estimated only 400 at Sunday's pro-war rally. That is a ratio of 375 to 1. The ratio of the lengths of the WaPo coverage of the two events was less than 1.5 to 1, and since a part of the antiwar story was concerned with the counter-demonstrators, it really was pretty much 50-50.

Wolcott is quite ready to criticize those who attended—for their diversity, appearance, slogans and the less-than-professional appearance of their placards. But since he's a media critic he should be the first to recognize that if 100,000 people had shown up in business attire but one person had shown up wearing face paint, it would be the person with the face paint who would be shown on the news that night.

But if we are to take Wolcott's criticism seriously (which we shouldn't), we must ask if the purpose of a demonstration is for the TV coverage. To some extent of course it is. It reinforces the message to the folks back home that there is a large and growing contingent of the public opposed to the war. But the politicians in Washington are the true audience, and you may be sure that to some degree the march mattered—not the signs, slogans, speakers but the fact of the event itself.

Along with the attempt to frighten the politicians, the other purpose of a protest is to "rally the troops"—to reassure like-minded people that they are not alone. Toward that goal the march seemed a success.

Of course the nominal purpose of the protest is to stop the war. But that is a goal that I doubt will be achieved by protest. In fact, it's an outcome likely to be achieved only by the Iraqi resistance.

Wolcott quotes from Robert Dreyfuss' "Badr vs. Sadr" in which Dreyfuss sees the internal conflict between Shiite forces as a possible catastrophic end to the U.S. position—

The battle, which might flare into a Shiite-Shiite civil war in advance of the October 15 referendum on Iraq’s divisive, rigged constitution, could put the final nail in the coffin of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

Whether that turns out to be the case or not, I feel that Dreyfuss has correctly put his finger on what is likely to be the U.S.'s final exit strategy—

... not the one in which U.S. forces declare victory and withdraw in orderly fashion, but the one in which we get our butts kicked out of Iraq forthwith.

Wolcott has military historian Martin van Creveld articulate a somewhat similar idea—

.... To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however, advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if U.S troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did. Namely, with the last US troops fleeing the country while hanging on to their helicopters’ skids."

Related post
Where's the antiwar movement? (7/6/05)
No. Not some troops; all troops (9/25/05)