Around town here

So okay, George Packer was here in Charlottesville today. I had lunch with him. Also miriam cooke. I had a good talk over coffee with her this afternoon.
I hadn’t met miriam before, though she and I have scads of friends in common. We swapped various tales about Oxford, Beirut in the “good old days”, Lebanese former husbands, etc etc.
And yesterday, on the peace demo, I met a new couple who’ve just moved to town. The male portion there is David Swanson. (He wrote about the peace demo here. Nice signs, huh? David’s right in what he writes there: we did get some great honking– again!– yesterday, including from some trash hauliers, several city buses, and a police cruiser…)
So okay, at the lunch today, it’s true that someone talked about “You know, the war that some people call the Civil War and some people call the War Between the States.” It’s true that one of the fellow lunchers was the former Inspector General of the CIA.
But in my book, all these things make the city a really interesting place to live.

10 thoughts on “Around town here”

  2. The coolest city in the country, eh!
    But why don’t you put your placards on sticks? Use one-inch square pine, four to five feet long. If you need to stiffen the placard use a backing of “grey chip” packaging cardboard (very cheap). You need a light staple gun (mine’s a Stanley, made in USA) and an ordinary stapler to fix the poster to the backing round the edge.
    It’s torture trying to hold up a placard with two hands for more than a few minutes. On a stick, resting on your shoulder, you can show off two placards (front and back) much better and without strain.

  4. Hi John C,
    The thing about placards is that they can be done very quick. In my opinion they should be as few words as possible. The one on my web site right now is: NO SOCIALISM WITHOUT WOMEN.
    A slogan like that can be written on an A1-size poster (sorry, I don’t know what that is called in the USA, but roughly 32 inches by 24 inches) with a one-inch marker pen in letters about four inches high. It should be legible from a hundred yards away, by someone in a moving car. If it gets into a TV shot, it must be immediately legible.
    In the case of the above slogan it would be four lines. If the words are shorter you can have more of them, if you want.
    Grammar is not important.
    FREE THE CPT would be good. But then you’ve got more than one placard and you can have several slogans.
    People must get the message in an instant, if at all possible. A glance at the crow, a glance at the pacards, and away. That’s what you’ve got to work with.

  8. You’ve no reason to be shy, Dominic. There’s some really interesting material there and it looks very well organized.
    Re types of placards, their mounting, etc… The placards in that photo of David’s are part of a fairly large but very well-used collection that we take down to the peace-demo site every week– and also use for other occasions, too. In my opinion, portability is a non-trivial factor; and this argues against having sticks on them. (Also in certain circs here in the US, such a stick is considered a “weapon”, and banned.)
    Several of the veteran peace-niks in our group have a handy piece of string with what the Brits call a bull-dog clip at each end (forget what the Yanks call it)… they attach each clip to one side of the top of a placard and hang it round their neck… Or, they make like a sandwich-board w/ two placards. One of our demonstrators, now well in her 80s, had until recently a truly veteran sign saying something fairly generic like “Oppose all war!” that she had used for every war since the Korean War…

  9. Hi Helena.
    I’ve drawn forth the voice of experience! It’s is a wonderful thing.
    It’s true that sticks make the placards a bit more cumbersome to transport.
    For the Anti-Apartheid demos in London we used to get a man who had a big van to help us, for years. He was an exile called Sammu Pillay, now passed away. But that more because we had many. Nowadays I see from photos that Londoners bring their own placards to peace demos, in an amazing variety.
    Also, there is the question of a placard being construed as a weapon. Like you I’ve thought of that at times, but I have never heard of an actual arrest on that pretext.
    Generally speaking I think street demos are a very splendid art form, aimed at the general public, but also having a strong meaning for the performers.
    One of the reasons I love JWN is because it is well rooted in this great popular culture.

  10. Regarding sticks being construed as weapons — I’ve never heard of arrests on that ground either, but when my wife and I went to some of the big protests in New York City in the lead-up to the Iraq war, we were stopped by police and forbidden to proceed until we removed and discarded the broom handle I had used to construct a placard. We spoke to some more experienced activists afterwards and found out that this was standard for protests in New York — you can’t carry anything heavier than foamcore, apparently.

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