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April 29, 2006
Divisive Mail from the North
One of the benefits of having a progressive-leaning father who still lives back up in my home state of Connecticut is that he makes it a point to collect issues of the New Haven Advocate -- the altweekly I grew up reading while hanging out in and around Yale and New Haven during my younger years -- and mail them to me. My dad has sent me other publications, too, over the years (Z Magazine comes to mind) in hopes, I'm guessing, that some of his politics would rub off on me. Though I'm now quite comfortable with my slightly right-of-center, proudly independent perspective, I appreciate the thought nonetheless. The Advocate has always been of interest to me because, well, it contains news about Connecticut and because there is, more often than not, something worthy of discussion within its pages.
Chief atop the dicussion-worthy list in the batch of papers I received today was Advocate Managing Editor Tom Gogola's March 23 piece, "War of the Antiwar". In the piece, Gogola (whom I had the pleasure of meeting at last year's AAN East conference in D.C.) offers the conclusion that the "the question of connectivity between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Iraq War" is at "the heart of what's wrong with the antiwar movement today."
Gogola, a sympathetic antiwar liberal himself, attended two antiwar rallies -- one in New Haven and one in Hartford -- and grew increasingly incensed with much of the cliquey, competitive and counterproductive rhetoric. He saved a big chunk of his ire for the "9/11 Was An Inside Job" crowd who were handing out DVDs arguing their case. Gogola not-so-nicely refused a copy and devoted some column space to the "longhaired bozo" that tried to give him one.
"Your point of view is disrespectful in the extreme to the thousands of people who died on 9/11. Your paranoia mocks those innocents, and the 'inside job' nonsense is exactly why movement activists are so often tarred with the 'wacko' brush in the national media.Can we at least all agree that this is one segment of the antiwar movement that deserves to have a wall built around it? Throw in some rubber padding, too."
Though I don't think the national media is as quick to paint the "wacko" brush as Gogola does (I think they're actually sympathetic to the "wackos" more often than not), in light of my recent thoughts about the remaining effectiveness of the now-cliched marching/chanting/sign-carrying protest model still widely popular across the globe, Gogola's column was a timely read.
Skimming through the stack of Advocates, I also learned that indie darlings Mates of State now reside in East Haven. Weird. I didn't peg them as Camaro-driving Italians. Read David Morton's review of their latest album here.
Media | By colrus | 04:50 PM
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