Stateside With Rosalea: Brassed Off

It’s been a bizarre week in DC, no more so than the day I went to the general strike rally on Tuesday. Two guys turned up there wearing tinfoil hats; I’m not sure if they were seriously trying to avoid being taken over by some CIA thought control experiment or if they were making fun of the participants. The female half of a middle-aged couple who did several laps walking around Lafayette Park while the rally speakers were on stage opined, “They don’t believe that Elvis died.” And as Dr. O! pounded out their anthem “Go **** yourself Mr Cheney” another lunchtime stroller said to the Secret Service Policeman standing on a nearby street corner, “I don’t notice you singing along.”

Much of what the TV channels have been singing along with has been “Iraq, ‘tis of thee”. Monday, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker testified to House committees; Tuesday, they testified to Senate committees; Wednesday, they were holding a press conference in the National Press Building… all leading up to tonight’s 18-minute speech by President George W. Bush.

Which had been entirely prefaced by the major TV network White House correspondents early in the afternoon, as they had been asked to lunch with the President so he could give them a heads up on what’s going down. I didn’t so much watch the speech as tune it out; Bush’s delivery is sooo threadbare-blanket. There’s no warmth in his voice, no comfort in what he has to say, and nothing in the speech was designed to make people feel secure. Quite the opposite.

Although Bush’s address was on all the major networks and cable stations, I happened to be watching it on a PBS station that had programmed a tourism video about DC’s memorials immediately beforehand. Since all of the memorials commemorate war or a branch of the military or lionize someone who led the US in wartime, that program was a particularly depressing foreword to a particularly ineffective playbook.

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