Twenty years ago, student activists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison organized a protest against Dow Chemical, which was on campus recruiting new cogs for the wheels of the war machine. Over the intervening decades Dow's fame with respect to VietNam has come mainly because of Agent Orange, but at the time, the students were more concerned with napalm. (Who wouldn't be?)
Today, student activists at UW-Madison will be protesting the arrival on campus of recruiters from Halliburton. The students are making the deliberate connection to the seminal 60s protest: some will carry signs that say, "Curly Off Campus", a reference to one of the original Dow recruiters, William "Curly" Hendershot. (So, you heard it here first: warmongering, war-profiteering recruiters are henceforth to be known as "Curlies".)
The protest is being organized by members of The Campus Antiwar Network. Their website includes a link to last Saturday's NPR interview with one of the organizers (which i tried to include, but the diary wouldn't publish until i deleted it).
To my surprise, though one of Madison's two daily papers does have a story on this, it is not one of the "headline" links at www.madison.com, the site shared by the two papers. You have to drill down to find it.
This time around, the students' main complaints revolve around the malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance of former Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root. Having spun off KBR a while back, Halliburton's representatives respond to the students with smug contempt, per Halliburton paid professional dissembler, Melissa Norcross:
"We've come to expect this type of spectacle, just as we've come to expect that the allegations will yet again be misinformed and incorrect," Norcross said. "We continue to support individuals' right to voice their opinions, even when they have the facts completely wrong."
Can you not imagine Darth Cheney's sneering visage hovering over the woman's shoulder? (No? I guess you have much yet to learn about the ways of the Force ...)
The students response is that Halliburton was the owner (and the profiter) when miscellaneous crimes -- such as overcharging -- were committed by the warpigs at KBR. (Apart from that, of course, Halliburton continues to profit from anything that causes oil production infrastructure to get blown up, since Halliburton almost invariably gets the contracts to rebuild it ...
The 1967 protest became a flashpoint in the 60s antiwar movement, largely (according to conventional wisdom) because of the absurd overreaction of the police. (See the documentary, The War at Home, for extraordinary footage of nice midwestern cops beating the bejeezus out of future Madison mayor, Paul Soglin.) That's unlikely to happen again. Though, the university has announced that, astonishingly, "it will not tolerate chanting or intimidation". Intimidation I get, but chanting?
Nonetheless, it's a hopeful sign that kids these days are once more being stirred out of their perfectly normal obsessions with their own navels. I don't mean hopeful in the sense that, "Hey, finally the damned kids are doing something," I mean hopeful in the sense that, "Hey, looks like the movement is picking up some steam."