I’m so sick of stupid protesters.

I say this as a radical.

Walking on campus, I see signs protesting against the war. That’s well and good. I’m glad to see people expressing themselves, using their American civil rights whether I agree or not. But next to these signs are other signs. Signs supporting Arab culture and against discrimination of Arabs make sense, showing a broadened understanding of the roots and culture of war.

But then I see signs expressing support of homosexuals. I agree with this, but it has nothing to do with stopping war. Does Saddam Hussein support homosexual rights? I see signs supporting legalizing marijuana. The implication apparently being that Saddam Hussein supports marijuana usage. I see signs supporting women’s rights in the stupidest, reductionistic manner. What does this have to do with the war? Isn’t it men who would primarily be fighting and dying? Wouldn’t that run directly against seeing the war as counter to women’s rights? Wouldn’t liberating Iraq mean greater, not less, rights for homosexuals and women? Of course, there are the obligatory signs supporting the freedom of Mumia Abul Jamal, popularly labeled an American political prisoner but in fact a man who killed a cop.

Then I see the kicker: a large stand with a large banner: “Support people’s revolutions everywhere!” Come on. Only the most ill-informed and naïve people think that people, much less revolutionaries, who have suffered innately support others who have suffered. The first thing most “people’s revolutions” do when they gain power is execute and oppress the various parties and ethnic groups that did not support them.

No contradiction between one sign and the next is noticed. No irony receives notice.

This is not just dumb college students. In fact, it’s now routine. In the January 2003 protests on the war in Washington, black leaders stood at the podium and said that, after stopping the war, the crowd must band together to support slavery reparations.

I’ve talked with a number of people who were at the anti-globalism protests in Seattle. I’ve always had a problem with the anti-globalism movement: while global corporations pollute and explot, use their money to influence regional politics in bad ways, and have supported armed thugs and revolutionaries, the low wages they pay are often are fine if not exceptional in local terms, and globalization had demonstrably led to better technology, civil rights, and quality of life around the world. Those interviewed at the enormous protests in Seattle had no coherent idea what they were protesting, rattling off a litany of social causes much like the students at my university who I described earlier. Asked to explain just what they were protesting, those present with whom I’ve talked couldn’t give a coherent answer. The impression is very much that these college students and young liberals took to the streets for various causes, hearing lots of jargonistic talk that appealed to their liberal sensibilities, doing very little resembling real thinking.

This is the dumbest sort of party banding. It’s like how the civil rights movement - about black civil rights - found that banding together with feminists and homosexuals strengthened their power. The rhetoric about rights for minorities remains the same, and great emphasis is laid upon a united front. Obviously, this makes no sense. Blacks have historically been the victims of slavery and lynchings and poll taxes. Women have historically been, well, protected at the cost of male lives and supported by their working husbands: a few broads -- and a man -- in Salem two centuries ago does not approximate lynchings, nor being expected to scrub a floor occasionally slavery.

There’s a kind of pathetic patting on the back and supporting each other’s causes going on here, all of which is intellectually and morally bankrupt. A lot is said about civil rights, about stopping war, about people’s revolutions and slavery reparations, but no actual thought goes into this on the popular level. Our protests and social causes are dominated not by considered thought but by this sort of power block mentality. The sort of unexamined assumption is that all of these concerns go together along the lines of basic humanitarianism, or -- as it is more likely to be stated, basic sympathy for people everywhere.

These are people in favor of dope-smoking but not cigarette-smoking. In some liberal areas, I’ve seen people smoking joints pass cops and populated building entrances without notice while cigarettes cannot be smoked within large radii around those entrances or in most restaurants and some bars. Meanwhile, carcinogenic car pollution goes all but unchecked as even social radicals drive around in their SUVs.

This humanitarianism is only skin deep at best. It’s like lumping holocaust survivors with victims of perscription drug side-effects. Obviously, civil rights does not extend to unborn children. Obviously, concern for people everywhere does not extend to those living under oppressive regimes like Saddam Hussein’s or the victims of “people’s revolutions.” The fact that people in Afghanistan were -- and are -- eating grass due to starvation can’t compare to the fact that women there were forced to wear veils or weren’t being educated in a nation with an educational system internationally designated as being in a state of utter collapse.

In fact, the West -- not “people’s revolutions everywhere” -- has been the great champion of civil rights. Yes, we have problems, and we must admit them. But pretending that history is other than it is, or that all supposedly left-leaning causes -- a designation derived more by political accident than anything else -- are intellectually or morally compatible, helps no one. And pointing this out is perhaps the first problem we must admit.

This bankruptcy in the left has as much to do with why Republicans swept the 2002 elections as the patriotic effect generated by terrorism and talk of war. The right also has inconsistencies, such as believing in a smaller and less powerful government unless it affects abortion or their own programs that need funding, not the least of which is war. But the right has personae able to articulate the overall coherence of their politics, generating a semblance of core beliefs, and the left is all over the place, supporting affirmative action if not slavery reparations to catch the blacks, courting radical abortion groups to stroke the feminist supporters, and generally bouncing from narrow issue to narrow issue, all sense of vision lost in the now-obligatory maintenance of a coalition of diverse and unconnected, even conflicting, interests. Such a theory of politics may help special interest groups pool their powers and fein their concerns are larger than they are, but such rhetoric does not inspire a populace.

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