Church, Protest, War.

2002-12-13 - 12:31 a.m.

Pookie cannot become a priest. It's a good thing his interests were more secular than that, because in a precedented (I want to say "unprecedented" but after you support nazis and encourage genocide via crusades, a little matter of indoctrinized homophobia is small potatoes) move the Vatican has decided that homosexuals cannot be ordained.

What would Jesus do?

In other news, the book on politics and protest is far more interesting than I was expecting. It's only dated in the sense that it's about a different time (with eerie similarities to today). It reads well and has interesting insights into the activist movements and the government's/authorities' responses in the late 60s.

The basics of the book are that some group decided to do a full study on violence and protests, in the hopes of finding solutions to what, at the time, seemed to be tearing civil society apart. The study first realized that even by how they asked the question they were biasing the answer, and so the book is written from that awareness.

Then they wrote a history of movements in the US. Now, in Bowling for Columbine, Mike Moore asserts that US history is no more violent than any other nation, and I'm betting he's pretty much spot on there, but this book illuminates the various uprisings, protests, civil wars and disobediences in the American past in the hopes of showing that social protest is not even close to an anomaly in US history. If I had brought the book with me, I'd detail some of the finer points. Sorry about that, folks.

Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff, including realizations that large-scale protests are almost never the product of well-organised groups or conspiracies, that while there are groups with well-defined plans and ideals involved (communist groups, social democrats, etc) these groups are often at the fringes, and the most successful events tend to be loosely organised and contain a wide variety of beliefs and people covering all manner of demographic points. I think that this probably applies to the protests of today.

Another finding was that violence was almost -never- planned by the protestors and almost always arose because of conflicts between protestors and authorities, that the authorities were just as much, if not more, to blame for any violence that occured.

And another neat thing they found out in 1969 was that while many protests were violent, about 86% of them were not, but that the media over-reported the violent ones.

The most surprising thing about this book is that, so far, there are few surprises. But, I'm also learning a bit about the reasons behind the anti-war protest (Oo! Funniest thing on the news yesterday...I'll get to it later) as well as the civil liberties battles of that era. Yay!

Okay, funniest thing on the news: They were talking about the North Korean delivery of Scud missiles and what that meant for Bush's war on Iraq. The anchor, possibly trying to pull things together, asked her interviewee, "So, do you think that maybe this will give the anti-war lobby some more weight, by saying that Bush should be going after Korea and not Iraq?"

I believe, Ms. Anchor Lady, that the anti war people are against war, no matter where it happens.

Cheers,

The Magus

PS - Yeah, I know, a really dry and boring entry. I'll write something spectacular for the next one.

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