“There he goes again,” as former President Ronald Reagan liked to say to his opponent, Jimmy Carter. Yet again, the current white house resident has posted a selfie in costume, this time posing as the demented Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s darkly insane Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now. Remember him? Played by Robert Duvall, he’s the character who said, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” and then proceeded to blow up whole villages from his helicopter.
Thinking he is sending a warning to Chicago, the oval office decorator writes, over his dress-up picture, “Chipocalypse Now”, which is curiously apt, since the film, itself, is about the lunacy of war and the craziness of the people charged with its conduct. Not having the vaguest clue about difficult concepts, like irony, he blithely posts, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”
Thinking of the Windy City immediately brought to mind one of its newly famous sons, Pope Leo XIV, and I began to joyfully fantasize about what might happen if he stepped into the situation. He was born in Chicago to immigrants from Italy and France. His mother, an educator and librarian, was born into a mixed-race Black Creole family. He is not only our first American Pope, but a US Navy vet. His father commanded a landing craft at Normandy. He has already shown himself to be a strong, moral and authoritative voice for peace. In other words—please bring this perfect enemy to slap down the newly rebranded Department of War and its off-the-rails president.
In my mind, I see the Pope in blinding white vestments, rolling his Popemobile off the Papal plane and being driven, with pomp and circumstance, directly into the spaces in front of the masked, illegal, and faceless troops who are trying to look tough with nothing to do. Slowly, he is driven in review of the toy soldiers, bestowing a solemn blessing on each. He then speaks to the world from an ancient balcony somewhere in his home town, delivering a stirring Papal message on how wrong it is to wage war, especially against your own people. Viva il Papa!
Sit-in to Stand Up
Two very different sit-ins made the news last week: On Friday, September 5th, the Democratic members of the Missouri House of Representatives began a 100-hour sit-in, and refused to leave the Floor of the House until they could have a full discussion of the grossly slanted gerrymandering re-districting bill proposed by Missouri House Republicans.
And, on Sunday, September 7th, the current regime ordered the destruction and scattering of a peace vigil that has provided a continuous “sit-in”, across from the white house, for more than forty years. Calling it an encampment, and claiming it was a danger to the white house and infested with rats, the order removed the current volunteers who were carrying on a decades-long protest of acts of war and weapons of destruction. The only rat to be found, of course, was the one cowering inside the white house after declaring war on the District of Columbia.
I began to think about the sit-ins of the 60s and 70s. Universities. Federal buildings. State offices. City streets. We sat everywhere to gum up whatever works we could. We trained on ways to make ourselves as heavy and unremovable as possible, giving no help to those who were trying to haul us away. “Hey,” I thought, “it’s time for massive sit-ins again.” Everywhere. In front of troops. In front of ICE. In front of the white house.
Sit-ins are powerful. From the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in of 1960, to the Jackson, Mississippi Woolworth’s sit-in in 1963, to Rosa Parks, who simply sat on a bus, to students in administration buildings protesting the Vietnam War, to US Rep. John Lewis and other Democrats staging a sit-in in the House against gun violence in June of 2016, the sit-in has been an effective way to say, “Enough.” And, in the words of the popular spiritual, “Like a tree that’s standing by the water, We shall not be moved.” Let’s give it a try. Sit down to stand up. We can do this.
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