Cindy Sheehan’s 16^th Minute of Fame


Janet Kuypers


    Casey Sheehan joined the army in 2000, and was killed in battle April 4, 2004. After his death, his mother Cindy decided to protest the war, actually meeting with President Bush once before deciding to camp at his Crawford, TX vacation home for a month to protest the war.
    I had to check the dates her son was in battle, because she only started her protest after his death. He wasn’t drafted, but if he had just gone to battle, I might understand the promptness for her protest to the war. But she didn’t protest the war, or her son choosing to fight for his country, for four years. It was only after he died that she decided to vocally protest the war.
    Now, she may have not wanted to protest a war her son was currently fighting in, because she wanted to lend moral support to him while he was alive and fighting. But it’s funny, if she wanted to keep people alive who were in this war unjustly, wouldn’t you have heard any comments from her before her son died, while she still had a chance to save him from possibly dying?
    Her protests and questions started with a meeting with the President. But when leftist organizations joined her (hoping for more media attention and more of a battle cry), it quickly turned into her crisscrossing the country protesting the war, and eventually being in a White House protest, where Sheehan and others chose to ignore requests from the police (like, you can’t take up space sitting on the sidewalk in front of the White House), probably with the hopes of being arrested, to get more media attention.
    I wonder if this was Sheehan’s 16th minute of fame, though, after learning that her bus that she drives around to protest in, carries PR professional, make up artists and hair stylists. Now, you may see her on camera during protests wearing wrinkled or town clothes, or her hair may look tousled or disheveled, but people have seen her in the van moments before, getting “prepared” to look this way — like a grass-roots protester.
    If this were true, how could she have the money to pay for these people, and this transportation? Well, liberal activist Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s) has been spending lots of money to help Cindy become the poster child — sorry, the poster mom — for all those grieving about an unjust war.
    And you wonder why I say this is her 16th minute of fame... Well, she has even recently sided with International Answer and United for Peace to call for an end to all war — not just in the middle east (that war she was protesting to begin with), but, to quote Erick (from peace.redstate.org), “she also wants us to end the military occupation of New Orleans”. Yes, she has sided with liberals, who want out of the war, and now she’s complaining about the Government’s help in New Orleans (which is all the liberals screamed for when Katrina first hit).
    Erick also noted that “ANSWER... (is) a front organization for the Communist Party,” which seems to go against anything this country has ever stood for. Seems strange, that Cindy Sheehan has decided to be bedfellows with the type of people her son chose to battle to defeat.
    Wow, opinions are getting mixed with her now. WHO does she support? WHAT is her message? It must be confusing for her, trying to jump on the appropriate bandwagon for her spotlight. But if she keeps it up, the people who ran to her support and brought her to the edge of the envelope will wonder why she jumped...

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    P.S.: I heard Roe Conn on WLS 890AM radio on 09/28/05 say that people said that Cindy Sheehan looked like convicted murderer Norman Porter. And this is funny on many levels to me, because the “once escaped” Norman Porter lived for over 15 years (hiding from the law, but not the world), under the fake name J. J. Jameson, and was a poet right here in Chicago. J. J. read regularly where I do performance art shows, and people actually liked his poetry. People also didn’t mind the fact that he was a loud mouthed, arrogant man. I intentionally kept my distance from him.
    When he was captured (after C J Laity made him “poet of the month” at www.chicagopoetry.com), news teams rushed to where I read poetry, and everyone there said the usual “I can’t believe this about him. I never would have expected it...” If only I wasn’t late, knowing his personality, I would have told them this doesn’t surprise me at all about him...




 

 



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