Our Imploding President
Antiwar.com, CA Tom Engelhardt interviews Cindy Sheehan Tom Dispatch
My brief immersion in the almost unimaginable life of Cindy Sheehan begins on the Friday before the massive antiwar march past the White House. I take a cab to an address somewhere at the edge of Washington, D.C. – a city I don’t know well – where I’m to have a quiet hour with her. Finding myself on a porch filled with peace signs and vases of roses (assumedly sent for Sheehan), I ring the doorbell, only to be greeted by two barking dogs but no human beings. Checking my cell phone, I discover a message back in New York from someone helping Sheehan out. Good Morning America has just called; plans have changed. Can I make it to Constitution and 15th by five? I rush to the nearest major street and, from a bus stop, fruitlessly attempt to hail a cab. The only empty one passes me by and a young black man next to me offers an apologetic commentary: “I hate to say this, but they probably think you’re hailing it for me and they don’t want to pick me up.” On his recommendation, I board a bus, leaping off (20 blocks of crawl later) at the sight of a hotel with a cab stand.
A few minutes before five, I’m finally standing under the Washington monument, beneath a cloud-dotted sky, in front of “Camp Casey,” a white tent with a blazing red “Bring them home tour” banner. Behind the tent is a display of banged-up, empty soldiers’ boots; and then, stretching almost as far as the eye can see or the heart can feel, a lawn of small white crosses, nearly 2,000 of them, some with tiny American flags planted in the nearby ground. In front of the serried ranks of crosses is a battered-looking metal map of the United States rising off a rusty base. Cut out of it are the letters, “America in Iraq, killed ___, wounded ___.” (It’s wrenching to note that, on this strange sculpture with eternal letters of air, only the figures of 1,910 dead and 14,700 wounded seem ephemeral, written as they are in white chalk over a smeared chalk background, evidence of numerous erasures.)
This is, at the moment, Ground Zero for the singular movement of Cindy Sheehan, mother of Casey, who was killed in Sadr City, Baghdad, on April 4, 2004, only a few days after arriving in Iraq. Her movement began in the shadows and on the Internet, but burst out of a roadside ditch in Crawford, Texas, and, right now, actually seems capable of changing the political map of America. When I arrive, Sheehan is a distant figure, walking with a crew from Good Morning America amid the white crosses. I’m told by Jodie, a stalwart of Code Pink, the women’s antiwar group, in a flamboyant pink-feathered hat, just to hang in there along with Joan Baez, assorted parents of soldiers, vets, admirers, tourists, press people, and who knows who else. [more]