Of The Sideshow and the Main Ring:

Man, remember the good ol' days of the circus? Remember when we could look at the freaks in the sideshow and feel really good about ourselves? The fat lady so fuckin' fat, gorging herself on a hamhock, let fat fucks walkin' by her stall feel like, "Hey, maybe I'm not such a fat fuck. Well, at least I'm not that fuckin' fat, now let's go get an elephant ear." Or we could watch the geek, scratching at himself, shitting on his hay, and then biting the head off a live chicken. Holy shit, all of a sudden Uncle Jesse sure seemed a whole lot more sane - all he did was sit in the basement, cussin' at those got-damn Japs comin' to get him. Ahh, the sideshow, when it wasn't ironic, when it was just pure human greed that allowed us to exploit the suffering of others for fun and profit. Sure, Ang and Chang may have been treated like a pair of kings in a sticky poker hand, but no one would have given a rat's ass about 'em if they hadn't been joined at the hip. The freaks were so cool, sometimes people didn't even give a shit about the main circus. Oh, yeah, it takes great skill, years of practice, and the possibility of death to be a Flying Wallenda, up there on the tightrope or the trapeze, but who gives a damn about some fairy in tights jumpin' on a wire when there's a guy with hideous psoriasis they're callin' the Alligator Man?



We've been engaged in watching the freaks the last week or so of this election season. We should be appalled over the grotesque sight of people squabbling over when Times New Roman was invented and if the gals in the pool typed this memo or that. We're not gonna deal with the whole fuckin' memo pissing match here. Except to say this: people who believe the issue about George Bush's tenure in the Air National Guard comes down to whether or not CBS was hoodwinked over a couple of scraps of paper are the same people who would slow down to see blood at a car wreck, the same people who would rather watch a chicken get its head bitten off than watch the acrobats. The memos do not fuckin' matter. Pretending that they do matter makes you look like an idiot. This ain't about CBS's credibility. This ain't about "liberal media" bias. None of that utter and complete and fetid bullshit. The intention of the CBS report was to answer questions that the Bush administration has steadfastly refused to answer. That, in itself, is an honorable pursuit.



Bottom line on this sideshow: Would those who say that Dan Rather should not be trusted, now that he seems to have used forged memos in a portion of a single report, ever say the same thing about George Bush when he led us to war based on "misleading" information about WMDs, including, well, forged documents? Howzabout a trade? We won't trust Rather anymore if you don't trust Bush. Deal? No? Then go fuck yourself with your memos.



But sometimes the things that are seemingly sideshows really are the main events, the tightrope where life and death can occur in a blindingly fast moment. Take the much discussed story of Sue Niederer. Niederer is a New Jersey woman whose son, Lt. Seth Dvorin, was killed in Iraq. Wearing a t-shirt that said, "President Bush You Killed My Son," Niederer attended a campaign speech by Laura Bush, another mother, as we are constantly, nauseatingly reminded. At the firehouse in Hopewell Township, New Jersey (is there a firehouse in America not visited by some random Bush or Cheney?), Niederer demanded to know why Bush doesn't send her daughters, both of military age, to go fight in Iraq. She was, as we know by now, arrested for trespassing, even though she had a ticket to the event. Consigned to the category of "protester" by the media, Niederer's plaintive cry for justice is now equal to people who strip off their clothes for AIDS funding or puppeteers for peace. Republican New Jersey Assemblyman Bill Baroni commented, "She really ought to find something to do with her time."



Maybe what she can do with her time is try to put back together the gory jigsaw puzzle that is now her son's corpse. See, Seth Dvorin died trying to defuse a homemade bomb, which went off and ripped through his body, sending pieces of it in several different directions. There's a good chance his hands were torn into dozens of bits. There's a good chance the bomb was packed with metal shards, nails, what have you, each of which that went through him would have taken a piece of him with it before it landed on the ground. Seth's father, Richard, has also taken it upon himself to protest, in a letter to President Bush. Perhaps his 25 year-old widow has protested, too. But it is his mother who has made the most public outcry, to another mother, about the deaths of children.



During the "Dirty War" in Argentina, from 1976-1983, a military junta disappeared tens of thousands of so-called "rebels" and others. Every week, on Thursday afternoons, since 1977, in the Plaza de Mayo, the main square of Buenos Aires, a group of mothers have appeared to demand answers on what has happened to their children. In often silent protest, the very presence of these women, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, creates a living memorial, a way for the disappered to never be forgotten. Some of the members themselves were disappeared, but their numbers grew to thousands, an empowering moment in the early 1980s when the people themselves were blatantly disempowered. And many of the mothers did learn what happened to their children (although thousands remain unaccounted for). And the junta fell, but the mothers remain.



Perhaps it's time, perhaps it's time, again, at last, in this nation, for Sue Niederer to be another Rosa Parks, for movements of mothers to come together and not allow their children to be disappeared into the vast abyss of memory where all soldiers seem to have been told they die for good and noble causes, where all parents are supposed to be proud of the sacrifice.