Author: jameswagner

You could consult this morning’s NYTimes for a report on Paul Wolfowitz’s appearance yesterday at the New School. If you have the print edition, you would see an image of me holding my unfolded sign while I stood in front of the architect of our world war, himself sitting on the stage with his publicist, Jeffrey Goldberg.
The text of the news article would only begin to give you an idea of what it was like to be in that room yesterday. For that kind of an account you could not improve on the wonderful writing of my friend Choire published on The Morning News site, where the event is referred to as “the now-infamous Wolfowitz riots.” [it’s located about halfway down the page under “Sunday,” but if you hurry there you’ll miss some delicious fun with his visits to the rest of the New Yorker Festival projects]

1:26 p.m. Outside the New School Auditorium there is a giant yellow New Yorker balloon with the words ‘Sponsored by Kate Spade.’ The wind picks up and the balloon assaults some people. Interns spend the next 30 minutes hilariously attempting to deflate it. A passer-by asks ‘What’s going on here?’ The cute Young Republican in front of me in line says ‘Wolfowitz.’ ‘Oh,’ says the passer-by, ‘What’s he doing?’ ‘Spreading evil,’ I butt in.

I have a few more thoughts of my own today.
In my first post I made no attempt to describe what Wolfowitz or his straw man Goldberg said. I think it was because I was still recovering from the boredom of their conversation, believing that there was no real news in their statements, and feeling unequal to the task of outlining every lie and contradiction I had heard.
Still, there are a few bits which should be aired, and some of them have yet to see print.
I believe the words “Afghan” or “Afganistan” were not uttered, and “Palestine” only after it was lodged from the floor a number of times.
When asked why containment was rejected as a policy toward Hussein’s Iraq, Wolfowitz explained that it had cost us billions, and American lives had been lost in the process. Yes, he really said that.
The reasons we destroyed Iraq were threefold: WMDs, Al Qaeda, human rights.
He did not address Africa, or respond to shouts from the audience which referenced the human rights needs, including AIDS relief, on parts of that continent.
Wolfowitz said theocracy would never be chosen by a democratic Iraq, since half of the voters are women, who would always reject theocracy. He both assumes an opportunity for totally free choice and ignores the desperate history of all paternalistic societies, where women must resort to religion to gain any control – at least in their own homes. As for the men, he personally is friends with many of them, and they would reject theocracy.
He repeatedly asserted that 9/11 had changed everything. I only wish that I could have told him that the destruction of 9/11 did not change me. What has forever changed me, the rest of the country and even the world, was this regime’s violence since that day, or more fundamentally, its destruction of the 2000 presidential election.
Yesterday and still today I have difficulty in describing my reaction to the yelling in the auditorium (I mean that from those on the floor, not the stage, where there were microphones and yelling was unnecessary).
How do you deal with a government whose spokespeople just make things up? What if the media never calls them on it? What if millions of demonstrators in streets here and around the world cannot provoke a response? Finally given the appearance of access, some people will shout their opposition with relative restraint, and some will yell, really yell, possibly even indulging in some hyperbole.
What’s rude here? What’s appropriate in a revolutionary situation?
We did not appoint Wolfowitz, we did not appoint his boss, Rumsfeld, and we did not appoint Rumsfeld’s boss Bush. Wolfowitz, and to some extent his associate Goldberg, are not operating according to the rules . Power and military force are their preferred tools, but they will use the rhetoric of the Constitution and civil rights if it works as well.
Is it rude to yell at a dictarorship? Is it still appropriate to talk about threats to the exercise of free speech if we are talking about a regime which has been imposed upon a great people, and when that regime has rewritten the rules which govern democracy and civil rights?
How are we to be heard above the roar of their violence?

they didn’t want her to stay
I didn’t want to be there. They made me go. That is, the clearly perverse creators of the New Yorker Festival made an offer I could not refuse. The New School, storied for most of a century as a refuge for artists and thinkers fleeing prejudice and persecution, was asked to be host today to an obviously rehearsed Q & A session between Jeffrey Goldberg and Paul Wolfowitz. The former is a writer who has served as an important propagandist for the current regime in Washington, and the latter is the chief architect of and spokesman for that regime’s policy of diplomacy by military might alone.
We note that this is supposed to be a “cultural fest, celebrating the finest in the arts, music, fiction, poetry, journalism, and humor.” I didn’t read anything on their site about agents of newspeak or architects of world hegemony, but what do I know about American culture?
It was a miserable three hours, door-to-door-to-door. After arriving we stood patiently in line while security searched each of the 500-some members of the audience individually, even emptying their bags. Somewhat less diverting was the period actually spent sitting through the undistinguished guests’ extraordinarily banal exchange of the same words repeated over and over again. Even the opportunity presented by the soliciting of questions from an overwhelmingly unsympathetic audience failed to enliven the afternoon.
Only the drama of many, many extraordinarily angry interruptions from the floor, beginning at the moment the speakers were introduced, managed to raise the day’s political theater above the level of insufferable cant.
Those who spoke out during the presentation were summarily removed from the auditorium by a very beefed-up security, sometimes quite physically. My favorite impatient protester was the woman who laid out her sound bite halfway through the program – very effectively – and then announced that she was ready to go. I envied her, but I felt I had to stay.
During the last few minutes of the afternoon, while Goldberg and Wolfowitz were summing up their humbug but had already announced that questions from the floor were ended, I stood up from my seat and held high the folding sign I had improvised earlier in the afternoon and hidden in a small shoulder bag. I said nothing, and no one lifted a hand against me. The hand-printed messages, one on each side, read:

ON TRIAL!
NOT
ON STAGE!
LIKE GOEBBELS
AND LORD HAW HAW

It seemed like half an hour passed while I stood there, but actually it was over in a few minutes. In that interval I saw hundreds of camera flashes, and I never turned around. The cameras were ravenous by this time. Later I was told that mine was the only sign in the room, although inside the auditorium we could all hear the whistles and shouts from the protestors outside on 12th Street.
The most profound impression I took away from what should have been an unnecessary experience for almost all of us in Joseph Urban’s beautiful room today was how uninteresting, how extraordinaryily incompetent, these two men were. It’s not the proximity to arguable wrongheadedness or evil works, greed or the grasping for fame or power, but rather the confrontation with such stupidity in high places that haunts me this evening.

Does freedom of speech mean that distinguished institutions of higher education are required to invite nuts and war criminals in order to support a commercially-organized event described as New Yorker magazine’s “three-day cultural fest, celebrating the finest in the arts, music, fiction, poetry, journalism, and humor”?
Jeffrey Goldberg will interview Paul Wolfowitz in the New School’s Tishman Auditorium at 3 pm tomorrow, Sunday, afternoon.
The possibilities of this piece de theatre sound even more delicious than that presented by the holy visit of the old lama in our own secular and public Central Park tomorrow at roughly the same time.* Numbers count, whether huge or manageable, so a disturbance near either altar might attract some attention. Creative signage can be very effective.
In any event, it seems that kind of disturbance would be very appropriate at each venue.
The West 12th Street event is certainly timely, since Goldberg is one of the most important sponsors of the fiction of Saddam Hussein’s ties to September 11, Wolfowitz was one of the key architects of our invasion of Iraq, and just this week Bush has finally had to deny the connection authored by Goldberg, a connection which made the Wolfowitz-championed invasion acceptable to a frightened and gullible American public.
There will be no representation on that stage of those who either knew the truth, or who opposed our massive destruction of an entire nation – except of course for the protesters in the audience and outside the theatre. All such are welcome, at the very least to save the honor of the New School.
*
From the lama’s website:

Backpacks, large purses, briefcases, bags, cameras and recording equipment will not be permitted in the Park [my emphasis]. All articles are subject to search upon entry.