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7th Reading of Names at Senators Collin's and Snow's Offices by Michael Uhl This past Wednesday, January 11th, fifty antiwar activists, including eight members of Veterans For Peace, divided their forces and simultaneously occupied the Portland, Maine offices of Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both Republicans. My partner and I went to Collins’ office, and it is that event I will briefly refer to here. But the experience in Snowe’s office was apparently quite the same. There were thirty of us who entered Collins’ office en masse at 11 a.m., announcing our purpose to occupy the space and stay there until we had read the lists in our possession that named the war dead in Iraq. We seated ourselves on the floor encircling the room along the office walls, then commenced to read, alternating between the name of a U.S. or coalition force fatality, and that of an Iraqi victim, who, given the preponderance of women, the young and the aged, was almost always unquestionably a non-combatant. With each reading two members from the group, on a rotating basis, would inscribe an X with a grease pencil on an unfolding shroud of muslin cloth, four feet wide and perhaps fifteen feet in length that was spread on the floor before them: a red X for Iraqis, a black X for the fallen soldiers. Someone else would chime a pair of Tibetan bells after each name was read. On occasion, when hearing a reading like, "Mr. So & So, an Iraqi male of middle age, and seventeen members of his family," both the inscriber and the bell ringer would attempt to improvise a response—a quick flourish of markings on the cloth, a rapid succession of chimes—that would give recognition to these compressed entries of anonymous, collective deaths, without failing to record or chime the next name in line. For the most part, when not engaged in one of these revolving tasks, we mostly sat in silence around the room. In the background, Collins’ staffers attempted to go on with business as usual. The effect of these incompatible, but parallel, activities cast the staffers’ movements in the realm of the surreal as the they tip-toed around us, at the same time straining to ignore our presence. None of the organizers knew how this action would play out. Several weeks back, a similar event in Snowe’s Bangor office led to the arrest of nineteen activists. Whereas yesterday it appeared that neither Senator wanted a repeat of that outcome. Weighing the political costs, they may have reasoned that any arrests would lend more moral force to our action, and perhaps intensify the media’s interest in linking the two Senators to their unambiguous support for the war. It became clear after five-thirty in the afternoon, when Collins’ office would normally have closed, and when the activists might have been invited to leave, and risked arrest had they refused, that the word had come down from D.C. to wait us out. When Susan and I left at 5:45, others remained behind to finish the readings. While we have had no news on the exact outcome, the brief report the following morning on MPR news made no mention of arrests. It is legitimate to ask what such actions as these occupations and incantations of the names of the dead are capable of achieving in terms of political objectives. We were not just making the maximal demand that the U.S. occupation of Iraq be ended, and all the troops brought home NOW, but that both Senators immediately agree to hold Town Meetings to allow our fellow Mainers to publicly air their own doubts and concerns about the war. Both Collins and Snowe have refused to call for, or attend, such a meeting, preferring, they say, to meet with constituents on an individual basis. One would only need to recall a similar Town Meeting hosted by Maine Congressman Mike Michaud, a Democrat, in late December in Bangor to understand the reluctance on the part of the two Republican senators, who are wedded to the Bush administration’s position on Iraq. In Michaud’s meeting, despite the manipulation of the Q&A exchanges to project a balance between pro and anti-war views, it was abundantly clear that the vast majority of those in attendance - as was fairly reported in the state and local media - was soundly opposed to the war. Facing what would almost certainly be a similar public response, Collins and Snowe would prefer to ignore the voices of the people, and by-pass any democratic participation at the grassroots, in order to keep faith with their party bosses and the special interests who strongly influence our government’s policy of aggression against Iraq. On the way home the night of our sit-in, Susan and I discussed what we had both registered as a revelation, that the American GIs killed in action were substantially in the same age range as our own two sons, early to mid-twenties. Of course, this should have come as no surprise. But it added to the emotional burden we both felt after the day’s intense emersion in the representational carnage of this war, transmitted by the simple act of reading and recording the names of the dead. For me, this was the most immediate accomplishment of our day long protest, an increased consciousness, not required to buttress my own self-satisfied view of the war’s fundamental wrongness, but of the mounting weight of evidence in blood and bone we have in our possession to sway the public to increasingly concrete expressions of its own mounting opposition. It is the struggle to give that public the voice it is denied by the indifference of our media and our many elected representatives, that confronts our movement now. |
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