He gave a litany of how we need to learn who our congress people really are; what makes them tick; who their relatives and friends are; who they spend time with; who their dentists and mechanics are; and to figure out what it is that can make them change their war-friendly habits -- how to make them see we are corruptly spending ourselves into a long-term disaster. He also said people needed to sniff out who had money friendly to the anti-war movement and, then, to figure out how to use that money to stop the wars -- since money made everything happen.
Hedges, a war correspondent with a Harvard divinity degree, had a less pragmatic, more fire-and-brimstone approach. He saw the nation headed for an apocalypse and the necessity for citizens to wake up before it's too late, to throw themselves into the gears to stop the machine.
"War is a sin," Hedges told the crowd.
Hedges was the next to last speaker before those listening were to decide to get arrested or to avoid the hassle. He ended by talking about the forces of life and death, which he sums up in his great book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning as the psychological/mythical forces of Eros and Thanatos, respectively the positive, generative life-giving force and the negative, destructive death-wish. The US is now, he argues, locked in a tragic obsession with Thanatos.
"Those who plan to get arrested at the White House this afternoon are expressing a reverent choice for life," he said.
How the two distinct approaches to our national disaster amalgamated in the minds of the many hundreds of listeners in the park is impossible to assess. Certainly, in these numbing times, as Hedges does, there is a major need to define and recognize the moral outrage of our too-quick response to problems with F-16 bombers and lethal drones. But, at the same time, so is there a great need for the slow, hard-slogging, less-sexy politicking that Nader spoke of so urgently.
For his part, Daniel Ellsberg, who 40 years ago leaked the Pentagon Papers, focused on Bradley Manning, the young PFC Ellsberg has taken on as a moral protege. Manning allegedly passed secret material to WikiLeaks which released it to newspapers like The New York Times. He is being held in undignified conditions involving a humiliating stripping regimen at Quantico Marine Brig in Virginia. As discussed here earlier, this kind of procedure amounts to what is called "slow torture," which is used to break down resistance and destroy a person's mind over time.
Following his arrest with the other 112, Ellsberg led a rally in support of Manning the next day outside Quantico. Such public recognition of Manning's plight is intended to protect him from further US military abuse before he is brought to trial. He has been charged with "aiding the enemy."
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