VARLEY MARCHES FOR PEACE WITH MARTIN SHEEN

March 18, 2006 - Hollywood & Vine

Well, Lee and I didn't actually march, and there were a few other people ... say four or five thousand, but he was there ...

We'd been at the corner of Hollywood and Vine for maybe half an hour, checking out the scene, when I spotted this little guy in a windbreaker wandering around.

Could that be ...?

But he doesn't have an entourage ...

Nobody's talking to him ...

Yes, it is him. President Josiah Bartlet himself, without his Secret Service escort. I pointed him out to Lee and she maneuvered around and got a few pictures. I realized I was the first one in the crowd to spot him. He'd arrived without fanfare and displayed no signs of looking for it, but of course it soon found him. Within a few minutes he was surrounded by reporters and other curious people. So we let him alone.

Lee had heard that morning there was to be a march against the war in Iraq. All she had was a location: Hollywood and Vine. It was a little disturbing that that was all we knew; Lee is pretty plugged into things like that, and we should have known far earlier. But we went anyway. Traffic was a bitch, as it always is when they close off streets around here, but we lucked into a parking spot only about four blocks away.

It was an odd happening. At times it seemed there were more organizers than troops, and yet they couldn't seem to get anything accomplished. People were shouting contradictory things from bullhorns at various places, and competing with other bullhorn-toters shouting the ever-popular chants. (I always wonder who writes these chants, as they are usually very, very lame. But then, I wonder who makes and prints up the protest placards they're handing out, too. They usually aren't a tenth as witty as the home-made ones. ) If you've been to enough of these things you develop likes and dislikes, like different schools of rap music. I don't like the Hey-hey posse:
 

I prefer the usually blunter approach of the 2-4-6-8 crew:

That was the only good chant I heard.

When we arrived there didn't seem to be all that many people there. The area around the subway station at Hollywood and Argyle had lots of tables with people pushing their various causes. Other people were holding up the big signs of various affinity groups. People were happy, mostly, in a festive mood. Leaflets were being handed out faster than I could turn them down.

(Only one leaflet interested me. It was a newspaper, actually, and it said Los Angeles Free Press. No, you've got to be kidding! That's long extinct, right? But it really was the same counter-culture rag that Chris Kingsley and I used to sell on Sunset Boulevard in 1968. You could pick up a handful at a deep discount at the ratty little office and hawk them at full price to people in cars stopped at the light on Sunset and Crescent Heights. And they sold pretty good, back then, to people in Mercedes and Jags and Rolls-Royces as well as to hippies in clunkers. That, plus tips, kept us in chow and smokes. But this stooped, ancient fellow handing them out wasn't your ordinary hippie. No, sir, it was Art Kunkin himself, founder and publisher of what may have been the first underground newspaper. It was hugely influential. The Freep used to publish a column by Harlan Ellison called "The Glass Teat" which was some of the best writing about television I've ever read. Sadly, there's not much left of it, and a lot of that seems old-fashioned or downright crazy. But it's still there.)

Lee heard the march was supposed to start at 12:30 and go to Highland, where there would be speeches. Neither of us are much into speeches, or marching, but we do like to observe. We wandered. There was a big flatbed truck with the head honchos on the back, exhorting the crowd about one thing or another. 12:30 came and went. Mostly we stayed out front of where the marchers would be going so Lee could get some good shots. Our position wasn't the best to hear what all the long-winded people were talking about, but I heard someone announcing her solidarity with the lesbians of Iraq, in a passionate, squeaky voice. And that was one of the more relevant speakers. At least she was talking about Iraq. For the next 45 minutes they went through the liberal litany of grievances, which is one of the reason I don't march. Sure, indigenous people have gotten a bum rap and farmworkers are still screwed. No question, we need an immigration policy. But it began to seem that nobody was actually talking about the war, which was supposed to be why we were there.

There are so many splinter groups. Everybody has a grievance. I may agree with some of them, but some of them are just plain wacko, like the woman holding the sign warning us of the evils of "chemtrails," which is a vast conspiracy whereby the government is either altering the weather, conducting biological experiments on us, poisoning crops, or maybe just playing tic-tac-toe in the sky. I am not likely to ever actually march in a protest again, because I might be rubbing shoulders with somebody wearing a coat with Che Guevara on the back.

... and on and on and on, each speaker more boringly outraged and ego-driven than the one before. Typically, there are 20 or more organizations loosely connected to a shindig like this, and every one has to have a chance to ride the hobby horse of protest for a few minutes.

And that's one of the problems with liberals. Goddam it, they can't seem to focus on anything. No matter what the meeting is about, we have to hear from the indigenous peoples, the farmworkers, the greens, the socialists, the communists, the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered community ... and on and on and on ... Lee wanted to grab the mike and shout "Why don't we shut the fuck up and march?"

They finally did, at 1:15PM. The truck pulled out, moved twenty feet ... and stopped. The police ahead of them knew the drill, too. They stopped and waited. People were stringing yellow ropes for some reason I can't fathom. More shouting through bullhorns. Another five minutes, another five yards, and finally, ponderously, it began in earnest. First about 50 cops, then a huge crowd of photographers walking backwards, then a line of people holding hands with Martin Sheen, Mike Farrell, and some attractive female possible celebrity I didn't recognize. (But if she's a celebrity, shouldn't I have recognized her? She was blonde, so she couldn't have been Janeane Garofalo.)

Now that it began to stretch out it seems there were more people than we'd realized. The head of the parade was over two blocks away and people still kept coming. Koreans, Mexicans, lesbians, grandmothers, "legal observers," and cops, cops, cops, and more cops. There must have been over a hundred cops just in the bicycle brigade paralleling the march on the sidewalks. For the first time I actually started feeling some anti-war spirit. The organizers never seem to understand this. People want to march, they don't want to stand around holding signs. At the end of the march, you should have a dance, not more speeches. We all know why we're here, we all agree on ... well, one thing, and that is that going to war with Iraq was a stupid idea. And I'm sure everyone there wanted Bush impeached. Why not just keep it to those two issues?

And I'll tell you something else. The only American flags in evidence were the ones wrapped around 100 cardboard coffins representing the 2300 (so far) dead soldiers. I got no problem with that, that was good ... but why can't a liberal wave a flag? I know, I know, the creeps on the right have co-opted it, to the point that wearing a flag pin or carrying a flag at a function like this would get you some real nasty stares. But so many Americans hate protesters like these because they don't see them as patriots, they see them as America-haters. (And hell, some of them are.) My feeling is that the people who want the troops home and Bush and the Rethuglicans out of office are the real patriots. I'll give them this: nobody I've heard has called American soldiers baby-killers in this war (though, of course, babies have been killed; good old collateral damage), nobody has expressed hostility to the grunts on the ground. The only signs I saw concerning the troops expressed concern, as in "Bring 'em home!" But why can't you wave a flag? Why can't you sing "The Star-Spangled Banner"?

Oh, well. That idea will never go over.

Then, something special. Bringing up the very tail end of the parade was a group who must have been protesting the war, though they carried no signs, but at least had some class in how they did it. It was a dozen or so Indians, all in flashy dress with jingle-jangles on their ankles. They were drumming and dancing up a storm! Man, they were great to watch. I almost wanted to march just to keep up with them.

ê ê ê

So ... I'm no good at these things, but I estimated maybe three, maybe five thousand people. A good percentage of them were, frankly, weirdoes, but many were ordinary people. How does this compare to Vietnam?

The last time I marched was in San Francisco. It began at City Hall and went to the Presidio, which was a military base at the time. It went up Van Ness and across Lombard, a distance of three miles. The tail end of the parade was leaving City Hall just about the time the vanguard was reaching the Presidio ... the Chronicle estimated 250,000 people.

We are living in a fat and comfortable age, my friends.

You want another perspective? The very next day the Los Angeles Marathon was run. 25,000 people ran in it (two died), and another 20,000 participated in wheelchairs and in a separate bike race.

Sigh.