Mothers and Others

I'd like to say just a few more words as an addendum to Jennifer's excellent posts, here and at WIMN's Voices.

Women, to a great extent, are judged not by themselves or their own work, but by the quality of their personal relationships. Cindy Sheehan's authority came, not from her own words, but from her position as a grieving mother. She was no political genius: what she had was that careworn face, those sad, sad eyes, like the subjects of the photographs of Dorothea Lange: a wordless, sublime ache, a void left by the loss of everything worth living for. There is nothing more empty, more heartbreaking, than a mother grieving a child. It is a potent force, and unless you're Ann Coulter, one of the most moving things one can ever encounter.

Grief is exhausting. Thinking about your dead, trying to figure out what you could have done differently, what they could have done differently, what we all could have done differently, to make the grief go away, the loss go away, is also exhausting. Sometimes, the answer is "nothing." Sometimes it isn't. Cindy Sheehan thought it wasn't, and threw herself heart and soul into  a movement designed to prevent her void from becoming someone else's.

The most offensive response to her grief, of course, were the execrable words of Kristinn "Spare Consonants" Taylor, the Freepi queen,  who thought that Sheehan's anger was "used" by the Left in an attempt to discredit President Bush and the war. This being a rather politer blog than those upon which I usually post, I won't state as clearly as I ordinarily would what I think of Taylor's "oh, I'm so glad the poor dear has moved to another stage of acceptance" coming from that corner, in which Sheehan was repeatedly referred to by some of the most offensive names available. They are evil, pure and simple (and they have archives, so you can put yourself through it if you wish to do so).

My point is that when Sheehan came forward as a public face, in 2005, that kind of raw emotion, her loss, was the most potent weapon we had available to us as anti-war activists, and we embraced her accordingly. She was doing something to fill the void left by her son's death, and she was an essential, a potent symbol, of the cost of the war on real lives.

Our opposition, however, must be based on broader principles than the grief of one mother. I realized how far we had moved this spring, when Mary and Kevin Tillman testified before Congress about the cover-up and propaganda campaign surrounding the death of Patrick Tillman. It struck me then that Sheehan seemed to be demanding a personal justice she was never going to get from the sociopath inhabiting the White House, who has been content to watch others die for his ideology for going on 40 years. But the Tillmans went at it somewhat differently, collecting information and reports from all over in order to expose the "fraud... deliberate and calculated lies" which followed hard upon Patrick's death.

Cindy Sheehan's grief was a marketing nightmare for the Administration; the Tillmans testimony revealed just how much depended on that marketing, what they were to do to make it stick. It's the beginning of looking at the marketing of war in general, how our press, in Bill Moyers' words, got it "so wrong." In order to end the drumbeat of bellicose fervor, to start thinking rationally about how we got in and how we can get out, that's the conversation we should be having. (Because, you know, if they hadn't painted themselves into a rhetorical corner with the leaving = losing meme, we might be out already.) My point is that this has become much larger than one person's grief, no matter how profound.

And so I wish Cindy Sheehan peace, not Kristinn Taylor's "suck it up" peace, but the peace of knowing that she did an incredible amount to change the conversation in this country and made it possible for us to move to another level of critique. Thank you.

NYMary
crossposted at WhiskeyFire

Comments

[ql in ny]

There's nothing left to say.

[geor3ge]

Indeed. Spectacular post.