"Mother's protest ups the stakes" (LA Times)

[ailsagirl]

Mother's protest ups the stakes
Sunday, August 14, 2005
By Edwin Chen and Dana Calvo, Los Angeles Times

CRAWFORD, Texas -- For more than a year, a modest bungalow known as "Peace House," located a few miles from President Bush's ranch, has served as a headquarters for antiwar activists. It is lonely work, with little more than a skeleton crew on hand much of the time. But then Cindy Sheehan hit town.

The 48-year-old mother of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was killed in an ambush in Baghdad last year, is consumed by the kind of grief that turns into a furious determination to do something -- in her case, to confront the president and force him to explain why her son died.

Now, in the space of just a few days, what started out as a seemingly quixotic personal mission has become something of a phenomenon --

=snip=

"I don't believe his phony excuses for the war," she said of Bush in an interview with a CBS reporter for the network's Northern California affiliates. "I want him to tell me why my son died. If he gave the real answer, people in this country would be outraged -- if he told people it was to make his buddies rich, that it was about oil."

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05226/553220.stm

[Bumblebee]

1. Excellent article!

I like Edwin Chen. He always asks good questions at the WH briefings.

[ailsagirl]

2. Glad you liked it-- there are so many articles floating around about

Cindy, I can't keep up!!

:)

[Bumblebee]

3. Great that it's in a major newspaper on Sunday -- have not seen

any yet in tomorrow's NYT or WP. This one will get reprinted in other papers.

[renate]

4. great article

Another one I saw ended with a snarky comment from some poli sci professor saying Cindy's influence would peter out.
I guess once you get tenure you don't have to worry about being correct any more.

[teryang]

5. This is a great opportunity for Democratic leadership-

-wasted thus far.

The patriotic imagery of a mother and her dead warrior son transcends time and nations. This mythical image is one deeply and unconciously ingrained in the minds of citizens.

Cindy has presented herself as the symbol of the archetypal myth at Crawford. The war mongers have established a pattern of ignoring the sacrifices of our mother's sons in Iraq by a deliberate policy of censorship. Cindy, as the mythical icon personified, has brillantly outmaneuvered the image peddlers and beaten them at their own game.

The manipulation of patriotrism by the right has been significantly undermined and one mother has taken possession of the myth for her own righteous cause. Where is the Democratic leadership? Out to lunch? On vacation? Ignoring the this spontaneous turn of events?