We'll Fight Them on the Boulevards

Here's a thesis to try out on friends: The anti-war movement, in its current form, is an unwitting complement to US government policy, not an opposition to it. It will enable a cowardly premature withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, an event that will be a horrendous betrayal of the Iraqis we promised to "liberate" and a complete failure of political imagination, and which both the Bush administration and the anti-war movement will claim as a victory.

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This thought occurred to me well before I joined up for Saturday's antiwar protest outside the American Embassy on the Via Veneto, but nothing I see there does much to change it. We're a decent-sized contingent leaving the academy, including staff members who've been living as expatriates for years, along with visiting artists and scholars and their families. The kids range in age from seven to eleven. We crowd onto the number 44 bus and, after wandering past the Temple of Juno and the Mouth of Truth ("I want to see la boca di verità today," says one eight year old), we change buses and go past the column of Marcus Aurelius and up the Corso. ("They used to have horse races here," says the librarian. "Goethe lived here," her husband adds.) Soon we're in the wide boulevard of the Via Veneto, with its luxury hotels, doormen in sweeping Napoleonic greatcoats, glass-enclosed sidewalk cafés like luxury train cars of a bygone era, and elegant lingerie shops. Across from a thermal spa sits the embassy, ringed by Carabinieri.

We've arrived early to hang a banner from two oak trees opposite the embassy, and the Carabinieri are still forming up, uncertain what to expect. A troop of ten march past, with what I hope are tear-gas grenades tucked prominently into special hooks at the top of their vests. No riot gear in evidence, they only wear soft berets. This isn't Genoa, and they must have been told to be nice. They roll their shoulders, tuck their thumbs into their belts, and ogle the TV woman setting up with her crew. At this stage, the police and the reporters seem to outnumber the protesters. A few times I think someone is part of the crowd, only to see them whip out a notebook or a Blackberry and start asking questions. The woman from La Stampa looks like an American college student, with sneakers, track pants, and hair pulled sensibly back in a ponytail. A fellow reporter seems dressed for a night out at a grunge club; she's got one of those vests worn by fishermen, cameramen, and John Burns, but she doesn't appear to be wearing anything underneath it. Her notebook seems to emerge from her cleavage as she shakes her dark hair and fixes her interviewees with dark eyes made even darker by elegant mascara. Both the TV correspondent and the roving reporter are wearing haute-couture takes on desert combat boots with three-inch heels.

Not much happens until the leader of US Citizens for Peace and Justice in Rome shows up. She's accompanied by a bull of a guy in a designer black suit, aviator sunglasses perched on top of his shaved head and a small wooden crucifix around his black turtleneck. I never figure out who he is, but he has the look of command. He tells people where to walk and warns us that we can't hang another sign from the thermal spa building, which is private property after all. The banner goes up between the trees, but the message is slightly obscured by a lamppost with a billboard ad for Armani featuring AC Milan's flamboyant defender, Kaká. Someone must have forgotten about it when they scouted out the location.

At last a band of Italians arrive. Dressed in bright orange t-shirts bearing a quote I can't make out and a figure I don't recognize, they noisily begin to set up orange banners and wave flags. They all seem to be between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five and turn out to belong to something called "Il Partito Umanista." I assume they're either an ex-Communist reformed organization or linked to the Catholic Church, but I never figure it out on site. When I ask one of the flag carriers in my faltering Italian, he draws himself up to enter soapbox mode. "Il Par-ti-to U-man-ist-a," he begins, enunciating every syllable in a manner that signifies "political discourse" before launching into a spiel about the group's interest in human rights, their founding in Argentina in the 1970s, and his internet radio show: "Vau, vau, vau, partitoumanista.it." I'm given some fliers and finally succeed in asking if they have any representatives in parliament. They don't. When I look at their website afterwards, I read the Secretary General's speech and am torn between bemused admiration and cynical disdain. I've just read Franklin Foer's wonderful piece in the TNR Online about the dirty tricks College Republicans practice on each other, and the Partito Umanista, whatever they are, seem like the party of joyous naievete:

"Il Partito Umanista ha un grande passato, fatto di persone volontarie che non si sono mai arrese all'apparente destino di una politica violenta, menzognera e ingannatrice, ma, al contrario, hanno sempre creduto nella possibilitý di un suo riscatto a favore dell'essere umano."

"The Humanist Party has a glorious past, made of volunteers who have never surrendered to the apparent destiny of a politics of violence, lies, and fraud, but, to the contrary, have always believed in the possibility of its redemption in favor of the human being."