Cracking Code Pink

Why does the peace movement have to dress and act like an irritating children's birthday party?

By Cintra Wilson

Read more: Cintra Wilson, Politics, News, Protests, Iraq War

AP Photo/Dave Martin

Medea Benjamin puts tape across her mouth after talking to reporters outside the Fleet Center in Boston.

July 17, 2008 | Saturday, June 28, was a swampy 92 degrees in Washington; the sidewalks on Pennsylvania Avenue were frying. Flamboyant activist group Code Pink was scheduled to kick off a tent-city vigil for peace and democracy in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. "Let's bring this world-changing form of protest back to our nation's Capitol!" shouted the Code Pink Web Site.

Code Pink welcomes anybody "willing to be outrageous for peace." But despite its emphasis on "joy and humor," its ruckus-raising techniques often cause me and my liberal community, who tend to agree with its politics, to regard them with distaste and embarrassment. Why did these shrieking middle-aged women in pink novelty hats believe this manner of protest was going to be effective in Congress, let alone in an almost completely co-opted media climate that seems hellbent on ignoring them?

In Lafayette Park, across the street the White House was there, mute and elegant in the shade behind its black iron gate on its dark, immaculate lawn. But it was already 3 p.m. and Code Pink was not here, nor were there tents. There were a few hardcore peaceniks straggling about; several people in wheelchairs with hand-scrawled signs; a guy wandering around wearing an OPEC sheik costume.

A hunger striker -- a small, intense man with Rasputin-blue eyes who calls himself "Start Loving" -- sat cross-legged in view of the White House with a handmade sign: Wage Love Vigil Day # 132. Start Loving, who has the words "wage love" tattooed across his nose in blue letters, wore a pink scarf to show solidarity with Code Pink. He was concerned about their absence: "They're the only group that I know that is worth a damn in this," said Start Loving. "Everyone else you can ignore. One [Code Pink member] told me the other day that she was getting discouraged. I immediately started to cry because if those guys give up, we have no hope. They're the only game in town."

"Code Pink does a hell of a lot. Code Pink has the power," agreed Christine DeFontenay, a beatific looking older lady. "The people who protest torture and abuses of the Constitution are us old guys! I've been keeping a vigil across from Cheney's [residence] every Wednesday now for eight months, every week. Other people are joining me, I am getting lots less abuse. I'm gonna save Cheney's soul. On the weekends, he's changed the route he takes home so he doesn't have to see my signs -- 'America's Shame' and 'Torture Is Terrorism.'"

Changing Cheney's route, if not his mind, I agreed, was something. "It is!" said DeFontenay. "Every little bit helps."

I watched the Torture Abolition and Survivor's Support Coalition, a small group of torture survivors from Central America, Africa and the Middle East, launch their "Peace Train" -- a row of cardboard boxes covered with tempera paint redolent of grade-school murals; images of brown people hugging, interracial hands shaking over wobbly lettering: It's OK for Both of Us to Win.

On a bandstand, a middle-aged woman exhorted onlookers to "hop on board" the Peace Train. "It's not OK to fight and do torture and violence. The peace train does not run on hate!" A group of earnest middle-aged people picked up the "Peace Train" and began dutifully trotting it around the bandstand to the Cat Stevens song. "The rainbow of love is our caboose! Now we're going chugga-chugga-chug."

I thought: I love peace, but why would any adult human who ever owned a nice belt want to be seen with this eyesore? Why does the peace movement have to dress and act like an irritating children's birthday party? More to the point, how was this peace demonstration supposed to convert the hearts and minds of the executive powers across the street, when the main event -- the tent city, and Code Pink, its most vital supporters -- didn't even bother to show up?

Two days later, I dropped by the Code Pink house in Washington. In the spirit of Princess Diana (who often wore dresses evocative of the flag of the countries she visited), I threw on a pink silk Lily Pulitzer thing from my Republican Slut collection to put the women at ease, hoping it wouldn't come off like a Trojan Dress.

Located in a brick row house on Capitol Hill, the Code Pink house is its rallying point for Washington actions. It serves as a base for activists from Code Pink's 250 local chapters around the globe. Inside, the atmosphere resembled a grubby, renegade sorority installation at FAO Schwartz -- the underground headquarters of Barbie's rebellion. The basement is where pink happens: stacked to the low ceiling beams with crates of pink garments, tubes of glitter, glue, colored pens, cardboard signs, oversize papier-mâché heads of Bush, Condoleezza and a sneering Cheney. Upstairs, coltish young interns in shorts and tie-dye T-shirts sat around on pink couches, typing furiously on laptops. A lone young man was stuffing manicotti in the kitchen.

In the parlor, Code Pink executive committee member Gael Murphy sat cross-legged on one of the couches. Murphy, who also works with United for Peace and Justice, was a warmly robust, welcoming and intelligent presence with a firm handshake. She quickly dismissed Code Pink's absence from Lafayette Park. "That wasn't our protest," she said. "We were just going to come out and support it, but the main organizers decided not to go through with it."

Murphy seemed tough enough to address my skepticism about Code Pink head-on, so I was obvious about it. Do the group's self-admittedly obnoxious tactics, like those employed by other militant ideologues like PETA and ACT UP, actually win over as many converts to their cause as they alienate people who are their natural allies? Given a mainstream media climate that almost entirely ignores peace demonstrations, are such demonstrations actually demonstrating anything, if nobody is watching?

Murphy didn't flinch. She launched into an articulate, sound and uninterruptible tirade on the issues consuming Code Pink. True: While Code Pink Members are regularly getting arrested, they -- and the larger peace movement as a whole -- still can't get arrested, so to speak, when it comes to getting commensurate media coverage for the antiwar movement.

She was particularly urgent on the subject of the Democrat-controlled Congress, which had just ushered in another $165 billion in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I got the impression that as a member of the press just sitting there, listening, I was giving Ms. Murphy an almost medical form of relief for her inflamed buildup of talking points, prepared for a distant and disinterested media that doesn't generally ask for them.

"We've arrived at a point where it obviously didn't work," she said of Code Pink's disruptions in Congress. "We didn't stop the Iraq war funding; we haven't gotten the Democrats to change policy. We're feeling our tiaras have lost their glow, and that our predictable attention-getting and disruption has run its course."

Next page: "I'm a very serious person!"