Posted on 08/30/2005 10:16:44 PM PDT by goldstategop
When Bill Shakespeare observed that life is but a shadow strutting and fretting its hour upon the stage, he must have been imagining Crawford, Texas, circa August 2005.
Indeed, recent events surrounding the war protest led by Cindy Sheehan have added a new dimension to the definition of tragicomedy. Not just tragic, not just comedic, but also ridiculous. The theater of the absurd has found pay dirt in East Texas.
Of course, there's nothing amusing about war, or loss of life, or a mother's pain. But those noble human concerns become something else once the red eye of the television camera finds its mark.
Once a cause becomes a cause celebre, original intent gets lost. Once celebrities attach themselves to tragedy - and the tragic figure herself becomes a celebrity - then authenticity becomes subordinate to calculation. Sorrow's spontaneity evaporates in the media haze and everything thereafter is street theater.
When Cindy Sheehan knelt to place flowers on her son's grave, alone with her pain, she was a sympathetic character whose loss would break a million hearts. When Cindy Sheehan knelt to place flowers next to a stage-prop cross erected for Nikons and networks in Crawford, she was an actress studiously performing for an audience that may easily find other places for their sympathies to repose.
Her supporting cast did her no favors by layering cliches onto what already was becoming a tired script, beginning with - fire up your bongs - Joan Baez.
Having Baez show up for a war protest is like having Oprah show up at a Weight Watchers meeting. You get instant bona fides along with your gratification. With Baez, you get to bask in the real thing - a been-there, done-that star straight from the annals of anger. Speaking to a crowd of about 500, Baez said: "It was the final tear for the overflow and you can't stop running water. Cindy's was the final tear."
Whatever that means. I think something sad and poignant. In any case, Baez's folk singerese seems an improvement over her declamations at a concert last year in Charlottesville, Va., where Baez revealed that she has "multiple personalities," including a 15-year-old poor black girl named Alice from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas.
As reported by Ronald Bailey in Reason magazine, Baez performed what was essentially a minstrel show without the blackface. Young Alice said things like "I'se g'win ta' do this and that, and commented on President George W. Bush.
"De prezident, he be a racist," she said, and, "De prezident, he got a bug fer killin'."
Moving right along, we next come to Al Sharpton and Martin Sheen, both on the short list for supporting actors whenever a protest bubbles up. Sharpton's qualifications seem to be that he's a black man in full plight as well as an activist-at-large. He's also, as Monday's Washington Post noted, "the civil rights activist and former presidential candidate."
No mention that he once also served as mouthpiece for another 15-year-old black girl named Tawana Brawley - one of his other personalities? - who claimed to have been raped by, oh, two to six white men. The story turned out to be a hoax, but not before Sharpton had helped nearly ruin a few lives.
But that was yesterday, and the cameras move on.
To Sheen, who apparently showed up in Crawford because he plays the president of the United States on TV. If the real president won't meet with Cindy Sheehan, the pretend president will. Perhaps in recognition of the bishop, Fulton J. Sheen, upon whom he based his screen name, Sheen gave Cindy Sheehan a crucifix in honor of her Catholic son.
In giving an impression both of a president and a priest, Sheen brought a double scoop of gravitas to the show, sponsored poetically by Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. Wait, make that a triple. Sheen also played a leading role in the Vietnam film "Apocalypse Now."
At a war protest led by the bereaved mother of a Catholic son in media America, one can hardly do better than an actor stage-named for a priest, who plays a popular Democratic president on the heels of a youthful role as a soldier confronted with the insanity of an ill-conceived war.
That would seem to be a wrap, and so it is.
Sheehan leaves Crawford Wednesday, headed for a busy calendar of speaking engagements and a new season of protests, while her audience disperses and the camera's red eye seeks new targets. Me? I'm with Baez's alter ego, Alice, who in another context sagely said: "Seems lak haf' the country be plumb crazy."
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Yeah, but a little comic relief kinda helps with the reality of the last 72 hours.
Like the German Schutzstaffel SS. They both have something against the Jews. I guess I could put together a nice graphic, for posting, of the SS insignia with "Sheehan and Sharpton" as part of the patch, but it might get pulled?
Interlopers beware. Sharpton might cause you to be killed with his big fat mouth. Run for it before he eats you.
"At a war protest led by the bereaved mother of a Catholic son in media America, one can hardly do better than an actor stage-named for a priest, who plays a popular Democratic president on the heels of a youthful role as a soldier confronted with the insanity of an ill-conceived war. "
This is the BEST description I've read yet!
It is so irresponsible, seditious, really, for the MSM to give this unstable, anti-American creature a giant megaphone during wartime. That is why the NPR incident is so interesting.
NPR's Neil Conan had the courage and the intellectual honesty to pierce the mourning veil. His penetrating questions took her off message and confirmed what we suspected all along: Cindy Sheehan ain't too bright.
I was struck by her overweening, suffocating arrogance. This foul-mouthed creature, who is putting the soldiers--and this country--AT INCREASED RISK, actually thinks she can call the shots. Delusions of grandeur in real time. It isn't pretty. She has even reserved her place in the history books. A first, I do believe.
After the Washington Post poll yesterday, and her own blown cover, I suspect her 15 minutes of fame is just about over. Soon not even Sharpton will find her a suitable photo-op prop and not even Rather (if he had a job) would touch her scatological, anti-Bush screeds. (By the way, has anyone else noticed that Cindy Sheehan has a very limited, very rigidly structured repertoire of non sequiturs?) A one(off-key) -note Cindy, if you will.
The question Conan only obliquely alluded to:
How does an anti-American left-wing crazy--or worse, a standard-issue lying leftist manipulator with megalomaniacal tendencies--or perhaps even both--spawn a hero who twice volunteered to fight for his country? How does one reconcile the Cindy-Casey dissonance?
Surely Cindy Sheehan must have asked herself the very same questions. And her recent behavior reveals what her answer must have been, namely, that her paranoic, anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-national-security radical left-wing ideology and behavior likely pushed her son in precisely the opposite direction; her lethally dangerous, vile and seditious non sequiturs likely provoked Casey Sheehan to re-enlist after the start of the war.
And hence the guilt, which she is dumping by the fetid truckload onto the president, and onto the country. She is one dispicable creature.
DEBUNKING CINDY SHEEHAN
HEAR ABE LINCOLN/JOHNNY CASH + PBS' NEIL CONAN
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