This weekend a conclave of Pentagon brass, military-industrial-Congressional complex officials, and State Department hawks swooped down on the Sheraton convention center in Tacoma, Washington to confer on the latest wrinkles on their strategy for global domination and the militarization of space.
Saturday, March 11: A band of 100-some protestors showed up that chilly but sunny day, to draw attention to the issues of human rights inherent in the illegal U.S.-run gulag and the oppression of Third World peoples inherent in the vampire-capitalist model of global business (backed by the armed might of the U.S. whenever deemed necessary). Starting from the brand-new, privately-operated INS Northwest Detention Center on East J Street, the protestors marched on the Sheraton, accompanied by some 50 cops on bicycles, motorcycles, and cruisers.
At the vanguard, four giant puppets of the Bread & Puppet Theater (visiting town from Glover, Vermont) shuffled along -- 7-foot Arab women with white flesh and all-white robes, each carrying a dead child puppet, blackened, mutilated and limp, in her arms. The bereaved women puppets were followed by a contingent of mourners in black, with expressive papier-mache masks, who kicked up a ruckus of wailing, weeping, and hysterical cries of grief at every main intersection, and indeed wherever we encountered a knot of spectators.
Following the mourners came the main block of people with protest signs. And behind them, the Raging Grannies (considered so subversive they are under investigation by the FBI) marched, singing witty ditties satirizing the Bush Administration's push for full spectrum dominance. Then more banners and signs, and the motorcycle and police cruiser which followed the march.
Our route lay through a vaguely post-apocalyptic looking industrial section of Tacoma, the "City of Destiny," and across the high drawbridge on the site where the Wobblies held off police and Pinkerton cops for some 90 days in an early 20th-century strike. Then into downtown Tacoma, down Pacific Ave and up the hill to a park directly across from the Sheraton, where a heavy police presence ringed the defensive perimeter about the conferees. Had any of the delegates looked out the window or listened in to our rally from a balcony, they would have heard polite invitations to join us and dialogue with the protestors; but none did. We had an excellent rally with inspiring and articulate speeches from (among others) a French professor at Pacific Lutheran University, a student organizer from the local community college, and a woman who had visited Iran repeatedly with the Fellowship for Reconciliation. Next Tacoma protest will be Sunday March 19 in the Hilltop.
Around 2, some of us scooped up our protest literature and headed back to Seattle, gradually defrosting in the cars as we spun up the Interstate for 45 minutes. Our destination: Consolidated Works, the cutting-edge contemporary art center which is hosting a week's stand by Bread & Puppet, performing a puppet play based on the experience of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old activist from Olympia, Washington, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to protect her host family's house from demolition in 2003. At 3 p.m., Rachel's parents, Craig and Cindy Corrie, gave a presentation about their activism around Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking since the tragic killing of their younger daughter. Within days of Rachel's death, Craig was granted a leave of absence from his job as an insurance man in North Carolina, and found his life spinning off in a very different direction.
Once comfortable middle-class liberals, Cindy and Craig have embraced activism with increasing fervor since that dreadful day in March 2003, hours before the launching of the Iraq invasion, as their search for accountability has unwound. They have encountered guarded and conditional helpfulness from the State Department, outright stonewalling from the Israeli government and military, and amazing solidarity and support from the activist community as they seek to determine the facts around Rachel's murder and elicit some accountability from the Israelis.
More, they have plunged into the search for justice for the Palestinian people and peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians with a dedication their daughter most likely would have admired. They have visited Palestine and Israel a number of times and gotten to know many of the key people involved in opposition to oppression, to the expropriation of Palestinian land, the building of the apartheid walls throughout the region, and the economic strangulation of those whose land is next on Israel's hit list.
Through the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, they are staging the Peace Works Conference in Olympia this April. The conference lineup includes Arun Gandhi and a galaxy of talent from the world of social justice advocacy in the Middle East.
Throughout the Corries' presentation, the humanity, intelligence, and compassion of their daughter Rachel was an overarching presence. A person of great intelligence, articulate speech, and passion, Rachel Corrie seemingly had no difficulty connecting with the humanity of the Palestinians she encountered. She loved children and had taught herself Arabic; her writings are filled with affection for the people who received her so warmly and whose lives were such a horror show of daily shellings, obstructions, demolitions. She admired their dignity and ability to carry on with daily life activities in the most trying of circumstanceswith children being shot and slain, farm animals being arbitrarily killed, homes and lands being suddenly and inexplicably taken away with no restitution. The Palestinians who emerge from her diaries are 180 degrees removed from the stereotype of the fanatical suicide bomber so common in the U.S. media. And the underlying reasons why some resort to terrorist tactics are revealed as well (though, of course, this writer does not condone such tactics). The root of the enduring, intractable Arab-Israeli conflict stand revealed as the attitude of denying the other's fundamental humanity, his/her common human dignity, by regarding him as an "enemy combatant." The transparent efforts of our own government to promote endless conflict rely on the same denial of "the enemy's" humanity, and will likely yield the same results: an endless cycle of raids and reprisals, strokes and counterstrokesa self-reinforcing pattern from which there is no escape. Locking us into this pattern is clearly a top agenda item for the U.S. military-industrial-Congressional complex headed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; the daily violence serving as a smokescreen for their war profiteering and efforts to dominate global markets through military force and alliances with dictatorial regimes every bit as brutal as Saddam Hussein's (e.g., Uzbekistan).
The oppression of the Palestinians was the real theme of the Bread & Puppet's Daughter Courage, whose final performance I attended later that night. There was an SRO crowd, as there had been all week; this time including Craig and Cindy Corrie in the house. Emcee Ed Mast introduced the piece, and soon the stage was filled with a herd of human "deer" in crude but beautiful costumes.
Upstage center stood a "house" made of scrims (flats with transparent fabric coverings) suspended from the loft, and with a large "window" to see the puppets within (the same all-white women that were in the march), and a curtain to draw across between the episodes of daily life shown. Above the home two gigantic cut-out feet were flown from a girder, and to the side there stood a bass drum with two boots to kick a pedal to boom the drum. Two actors, a man and a younger woman, performed a ritual/routine between episodes, with the woman reading touching passages from Rachel Corrie's e-mails to her mother. Then the male actor would open and hook back the curtain and the Palestinian people puppets would enact an episode from daily life: washing clothes, grieving for a killed family member, slaughtering a sheep. At the climax of each episode, the drums boom (shelling?) and the feet step up and down, gradually stomping the people into the dust.
Rachel's own demise is a puppet show within the puppet show, enacted on the table top inside the "Palestinians'" home. A tiny puppet Rachel, holding up a "NO" sign, is run over by a child's toy truck (accompanied by threatening engine-revving sound effects). After that, the truck backs and fills while the tiny puppet house gradually disappears through a hole in the tabletop. The smallness of the action places Rachel's killing (horrific as it is) in perspective as one incident in an unending campaign of war and oppression which continues after she is gone.
The Bread and Puppet Theater brought out its puppets and a nucleus of players and puppeteers. Local volunteers were recruited to flesh out the cast completely. There were three dance episodes featuring the "Local chapter of the Anti-Fear Dancers," counteracting the "Federal Fear Implementation Program." CODE PINK, are you listening? There were several other episodic bits of stage business, of varying effectiveness. Bread and Puppet Theater is recognized as a national leader in the sort of guerrilla theater they pioneered out in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Masterminded by Peter Schumann, who was first exposed to this sort of thing at folk festivals in his native Germany in the Forties, Bread and Puppet relies on deliberately crude costumes and props, simply made from recycled cardboard and plywood, tree twigs, and bits of fabric. I should qualify that statement by saying it is deliberately crude, but effective. This is artistry of a high order, and many of the images from the performance are still swimming in my mind some time later. Not all of the pieces of the play worked equally well for me, but over all it had a strong message.
In a Q&A session following the performances, the Corries addressed the issue of their daughter's being appropriated as a symbol and martyr by the Left. Cindy Corrie pointed out that they had already been wounded as deeply as possible by having their daughter taken from them in so untimely a manner, and that it was not harmful that Rachel is strongly identified with the cause she died for. Modestly discounting her posthumous fame, Craig Corrie mentioned (with names prompted by his wife) 3 other human rights observers who were killed or wounded by the IDF in the same area around the same time (while the outbreak of the Iraq War was crowding Palestine news off the front pages), and the devoted peace workers courageously risking their lives in Iraq as well. As the play implied, Rachel's death was but one incident in a larger drama; one which she herself fit into and appreciated with her quick wit and compassionate heart.
Throughout the weekend, the Corries comported themselves with dignity, thoughtfulness, and humor, humanizing our martyr with stories of Rachel's many accomplishments, musical and artistic talent, and impulsive enthusiasm.
As the evening progressed, ConWorks filled with partygoers out to celebrate the center's 8th anniversary with an all-night bash (but unfortunately the bar ran out of beer around 9:30). This wonderful institution will be the setting for the Art of Resistance Conference, October 21-22 (q.v.)
PB
For more information about the Rachel Corrie Foundation and the Peace Works Conference, visit www.rachelsfoundation.org For more information on Art of Resistance, visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aor-core For more on ConWorks Art Center, visit www.conworks.org And for more on Bread & Puppet, see www.breadandpuppet.org.