Cracking Code Pink

Murphy cataloged the "legitimate" work the group does behind the scenes (which, I had to admit, I had failed to recognize in my blindness from the glare of their prom dresses). Code Pink, Murphy insisted, worked with Congress to help Iraqi women visit the U.S. to participate in Code Pink's 2006 Iraqi Women's Delegation war protests. They organized lobby days, wrote "Pink Papers" on the condition of women under occupation and U.S. military reparations for Iraqis, and gathered information for groups involved in the larger peace movement. Murphy told me that Code Pink opened an occupation watch center in Baghdad (as part of United for Peace and Justice -- a group whose accomplishments Code Pink seems to feel comfortable occasionally taking credit for without direct acknowledgment).

"Our visibility, our pink, our street theater, is to get [the message] into the media that there is opposition, that there is an antiwar movement," said Murphy, sounding a little desperate. The problem -- the same as that of the military -- seems mainly to be one of recruitment: Even groups like MoveOn.org have enormous trouble getting people out to protest. "There's a huge gap between being against the war and doing something about it as a citizen," Murphy added.

The strategy of loud pinkness, useful in terms of visibility, must evolve, said Murphy. "Yes, it's good to be on Jon Stewart or 'Saturday Night Live.' But we're being trivialized. That isn't all of what the antiwar movement is, or all of what we are. If it's not working anymore, if it's served its purpose, we need to nimbly and quickly move on to something that is effective." Murphy described a new Code Pink effort to educate city mayors on how the war was draining local coffers.

Medea Benjamin strode into the house, creating a flurry of excitement. A co-founder of Code Pink, Benjamin is a small, wry and wiry woman who looks more like a member of Congress than someone who shouts at them in the halls. She speaks five languages and has two postgraduate degrees (one master's in public health from Columbia University; another in economics from the New School of Social Research).

"I'm a very serious person!" she insisted. "I used to work for the United Nations. I have lived and worked in refugee camps around the world. Did I ever think that at 56 years old I'd be wearing tiaras and going to Congress and holding up signs?"

I asked about the difficulty of "waging peace" -- how, after all, is one proactively peaceful? She gave me an ironic smile; her eyes -- naturally sad, downturned at the outside corners -- flashed a bit flinty.

"One goes to Congress every day and one takes one's head and hits it against the wall," she said. "You know that saying, 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results'? Because we believe in democracy, we think if we do the same thing over and over -- demand that our elected representatives actually represent us -- they will. But it's hard to be peacemakers when we're almost treated like terrorists. We keep getting arrested, thrown in jail, threatened. And we're treated like that by Democrats."

Like Murphy, Benjamin was an unceasing font of well-articulated and atrocious facts, relayed in an almost breathless run-on monologue. "The Democrats -- who are supposed to be our friends! -- are as bad as the Republicans. That latest $165 billion for war is just astounding. Not a peep from the public; the media almost buried the story. We were in Congress that day in the tunnels, going after every congressperson we could find, saying, 'Don't do it!' Ready to throw bloody money onto the floor of the gallery when they voted. Not covered by the media at all. We were thinking, 'Well, I hope history at least records that there were some people there who tried.'"

Lack of media coverage and its result -- an inability to get exhausted working people off the couch to fight an invisible battle -- has endlessly frustrated and discouraged Code Pink. "We have had eight demonstrations of over 100,000 people -- some much larger -- that got virtually no attention, no response from the White House," Benjamin said. "C-SPAN is the only mainstream media that isn't censored. We get cut out of everything else."

Benjamin has been vocal on the subject of Iraqi refugees; she has been to Syria and Jordan to meet with them. "The U.S. is doing nothing to help these millions of people whose lives we destroyed," she said. Despite trying, Code Pink has failed to draw mainstream attention to the refugees' plight. "We called a very serious press conference [with an Iraqi] refugee whose husband had been killed because he worked for the U.S. government -- we had one Japanese reporter that showed up, that was it," Benjamin said. "That same day, a group in Berkeley was doing a witch's exorcism of the Marine recruiting station. The media was all over that. That's the climate that we live in."

This was a bit hard to digest in light of the recent arrest of a Code Pink member at the same Marine recruiting station in Berkeley, who happened to be topless -- but I understood her frustration. Code Pink finds that it can't be taken seriously when it wants to be taken seriously, even though its legitimate work is substantial and deserves to be taken seriously. Such is the sharp double-edge of the glitter tiara.

Benjamin reserved her most evident bitterness for progressive Democrats. "Have you seen them join us in a sit-in at the White House? No. They did civil disobedience around apartheid in South Africa -- they did civil disobedience for Darfur. Sixteen of them got arrested; we went to them, and we said, 'Fabulous. Now can we do that around Iraq? Join us, do a dignified sit-in in front of the White House.' They hemmed and hawed. We couldn't even get Barbara Lee to do it."

I found it easy to admire Benjamin's quixotic pluck and grasp of the issues. Although I didn't say it, it occurred to me that apartheid and Darfur were issues that were comfortable to Congress -- and to mainstream media -- because of their high-level celebrity endorsements: Darfur had Bono, apartheid had Springsteen, AIDS had Elizabeth Taylor. It was mainstream media stars -- and the mainstream media that built them -- that ultimately allowed these issues to get enough momentum for serious support.

Again, though, Code Pink seems at least partly to blame for its own lack of political support. Benjamin seems to expect congress members to attend Code Pink proceedings, and bring their limelight with them, because she's morally right. But her demands begged the question -- in terms of security, let alone political image -- why would Nancy Pelosi support a movement that has been parked outside of her house, denouncing her publicly for two years? Why should the Democrats, for whom Benjamin reserves such special loathing, come over to her side of the iron tutu and do her the favor of legitimizing Code Pink?

Benjamin, slumping in her patio chair, shot me a weary expression. "Look, the most heinous thing that George Bush has done is the war in Iraq. The Democrats have not only given George Bush what he asked for, they gave him more than he asked for because they didn't want to deal with the war issue in October, right before an election. Here we are, on the eve of an election for president, with Bush using diplomacy to cut a deal with North Korea and the Democrats pushing a war policy with Iran."

What was her pet theory about this? "All [the Democrats] care about is power," she said. "They want the war to be George Bush's problem, not theirs. They could be doing so much more to get other Democrats to vote against the war, and to build this movement with us, to gather a million people out on the street. The people have been so snookered by Democrats and Republicans -- so blind to the fact that neither party is working in the interest of the general public -- that it's been virtually impossible to build a strong movement."

Benjamin and Murphy admitted that Code Pink's approach needed revamping, but both seem addicted to the theatrics. Both were more than hot to discuss their upcoming action -- a "blockade" of Rep. Gary Ackerman's office to protest his resolution calling for a blockade of Iran. "We've seen this before," Benjamin said. "Sanctions resulted in 500,000 Iraqi children being killed! What are we gonna do? Sit by and say, 'Oh, let's write another paper about this? Let's take three months out and write a book?' We have to speak out immediately." Benjamin paused. "Gary Ackerman is the only member of Congress who is also a friend of my family," she said with a grin.

Benjamin and Murphy seemed to share a compulsive germ: this rowdy game of dress-up and protest, an obsession as chronic and irresistible as canvas to painters, or beaches to surfers. Devotees and enthusiasts don't measure success the same way as non-fanatics; as my mother, the incredibly broke jazz pianist once said, "You're a successful artist if you get to keep doing it."

I confessed to both women that I never would have known about Code Pink if they didn't disrupt congressional proceedings in pink tiaras. "That's right," said Benjamin. "Without the tiaras, you wouldn't be here. You know: 'If it bleeds it leads.' Code Pink is a manifestation of crisis, of a lack of democratic vehicles through which we can express ourselves. We're a manifestation of a broken system. You might not like the way we manifest it, but we'd like people to reflect on how broken the system is."

I was beginning to feel a bit like a big-mouth bass: Lured by a bright pink artificial fly, doing the hula on the surface. It struck me how necessary pink tiaras were in the informational black hole that enables the inscrutable machinations of Washington to move forward without public scrutiny. A successful movement depends on a media that will grant it public legitimacy. Without it, the peace movement is left to masochistic zealots like Benjamin and Murphy: They crash Congress every day and destroy their own dignity for just the tiniest effect -- a nearly inaudible yelp from the dust speck of peaceful Whoville.

I came away from the Code Pink house believing that guerrilla theater is more critical than ever. For activists, Benjamin and Murphy represent the thin pink line separating the American peace movement from muteness, invisibility and depression unto disbandment. "We are committed to being a direct action movement," said Benjamin. "We shed light through theater, through disruptions. We're going to keep doing that as long as it serves."

Code Pink may have lost a little heart, temporarily, but the ladies haven't lost their way, or their flair: I was touched that Benjamin went out of her way to compliment my fishnet stockings.

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