On Monday evening, the police arrested a local resident who had used a truck to mow down about half of the 500 small wooden crosses hammered into the roadside dirt. The crosses were put back in place by Sheehan’s supporters on Tuesday as flowers continued to arrive at the site from around the United States.

“What happened last night is very disturbing to all of us, and it should be really disturbing to America,” Sheehan said. “Because no matter what you think about the war, we should all honor the sacrifice of the ones who have fallen. And to me it’s so ironic that I’m accused of dishonoring my son’s memory, by doing what I’m doing, by the other side, and then somebody comes and does this.” ~The International Herald-Tribune

It is a bit counter-intuitive for me to find something awry with Mrs. Sheehan’s protest, since I certainly share her desire to see the pointless war in Iraq speedily brought to an end. If she has any success in this regard, we will all owe her a debt of gratitude, but the very abnormality of the entire spectacle almost ensures that it will further harden war supporters in their irrational defense of continued occupation and further marginalise the anti-war position as that of the crude, raving and hysterical. Mrs. Sheehan has happened to hit the mark many times with her criticism (then again, with a target like Mr. Bush, missing the mark with criticism is very difficult). What perplexes me is why anyone would seek to find solace in political activism, however much that activism is based in personal experience.

We live in an atmosphere of faux patriotism in which it is legitimate to send soldiers to pointless deaths and engage in saccharine tributes to the “fallen” when their lives have been thrown away, but it is unacceptable to criticise the policies that led to those deaths. (Some such faux patriot felt obliged to run over crosses planted in honour of fallen soldiers, and he represents the other face of activism in this case.) It is thus apparently unavoidable that a dead soldier’s mother is the only critic of the war who can even briefly silence the braying hounds of the War Party. She is the only one, as Maureen Dowd would have it, who has sufficient unimpeachable moral authority. Such is the strange, hyperfeminised society in which the wailing of a grieving woman commands respect and attention while rational discourse and learning count for little or nothing.

As an opponent of the war from the beginning, I ought to be heartened that someone has filled the void of active, public opposition, but instead I find it to be unfortunate and a perfect example of the bizarre priorities liberal societies inculcate in their people. Even before she attracted a small following and extensive national media attention there had to be something amiss for a wife and mother to place such intense emphasis on a political outlet for her grief. It is telling that, in a marriage already understandably deeply devastated by the death of her son, Mrs. Sheehan evidently believed it was more important to harangue the President than to work to preserve her marriage, which is now going to end in divorce. That seems to be an abnormal reaction, at least in most sane societies. Other members of Mrs. Sheehan’s extended family are understandably embarrassed by the politicisation of the death of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan. That many Americans do not regard it as the least bit strange, but perhaps even admirable, is a sure sign of further cultural decay.

It is a sign of what America has become that many believe that activism brings solace and meaning, as if frenetic political activity could provide fulfillment more readily than attempting to keep one’s family intact in the wake of such a terrible loss. Her other son’s apparent desire to join the Army, though surely foolhardy in many ways, is a far more natural response, even if this natural reaction to honour his brother’s memory comes in the service of the ultimate denatured and abnormal elite. It is a further sign of how unreal and artificial life has become in America that the conflict between the protesters and Mr. Bush’s neighbours is being cast in the language of dueling civil rights claims.

Before she went to Crawford, she spoke to the Veterans for Peace Convention. Her speech has been pulled apart by various War Party flunkeys to make the most out of the genuinely bizarre digressions and and non sequiturs that litter her litany. James Taranto, always ready to demonise, is happy to misinterpret willfully some of her remarks. When she said, “You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine,” Mr. Taranto naturally takes this to be a call for Israel’s destruction (but then for Mr. Taranto probably anything short of full endorsement of the expulsion of all Palestinians from ‘Samaria’ and ‘Judea’ would be a call for Israel’s destruction). But the parallelism is just strange–what has Palestine to do with Iraq or Mrs. Sheehan? Her invocations of Thoreau, her endorsement of the deserter Camilo Mejia, and her vow not to pay income tax are all really rather strange and misguided; her incitement to civil disobedience is not a sane reaction. With opponents like these at home leading the way, the war in Iraq might well never end.