Cindy in Crawford

For the third week, a “watch of the world” is going on for the third week near the Texas ranch of President Bush in Crawford - the opponents of the war in Iraq set up the camp, requiring the immediate return of American soldiers home. The leader of the protesters, the 48-year-old mother of the soldier Sinda Shihan, who died in Iraq, accuses the president of lies and believes that it was he who almost killed her son himself.

In former times, the Soviet press would inflate history to universal proportions. The current Russian is mostly silent: there is nothing to popularize soldiers' mothers, even with American ones. But those few publications that nevertheless appeared, create, to put it mildly, a perpetual image of the event and his main character.

One gets the impression that the tent camp near the ranch grew like a “initiative from below” - in response to the spontaneous and emotional actions of the murdered mother of the mother. This is not entirely true. If Cindy’s act was a reaction to the death of her son, she would rush to Crawford or Washington immediately after receiving the funeral. But her son died almost a year and a half ago.

She grew up in a family of pious Catholics, married her first school love and first worked on a voluntary basis, and then for a salary in the church - carried the word of God to the young generation. One by one, four children were born. The family lived well. The childhood of the eldest son, Casey, also passed in the bosom of the church - he was an altar service. Parents read to him the field of the priest. For this reason, he remained a virgin. After school, he entered the Community College - a cheap two -year school giving secondary specialized education: he studied at the theater department and wrote a review of the performances in the student newspaper.

In 2000, Casey unexpectedly signed up for everyone in the army. According to Cindy, the recruiter promised her son that he would be an assistant to Capellan and that he would never send him to battle. But in the end, it was determined not by the spiritual part, but by technical - a mechanic in the first armored division. In March 2004, Casey Shihan voluntarily went to Iraq and died on the fifth day - his patrol ran into an ambush, out of 20 soldiers, seven laid their heads.

Cindy was inconsolable. Having buried her son, she began to participate in endless mourning vigils, moving from city to city. She grieved so much that she lost her job. Cindy became a member of the community of the same as her soldiers' mothers and the fathers of America.

In June last year, the Shihan spouses, along with 16 other families of the victims, received an invitation to a personal meeting with President Bush at the Fort Lyuis military base, Washington, the president came there to cheer up the soldier. Today, Cindy says that she did not like the meeting, that the commander in chief was not at all interested in her child and was evading questions about what this war was needed for. But the text of her interview with a local newspaper was preserved, in which she said that she and her husband were discussing for a long time what they would talk about with the president, and in the end they decided to behave as, in their opinion, Kasei would like them. “Now I know,” the soldier’s mother said in that interview, “that the president sincerely wants to bring freedom to the Iraqis. I know he is mourning about our loss. I also know that this is a really religious person.”

At what point and for what reason did metamorphosis occur? It is difficult to judge with confidence, but it seems that from the mournful mother in Nemesis Cindy Shihan turned not without the help of PR professionals. In November, she began to publish revealing open letters to the President and Vice President Cheney, calling them easily "George" and "Dick". And in January, along with other comrades in misfortune, she founded the public organization of the "Family of Golden Stars for Peace". (The Golden Star - a sign that in the US Armed Forces attach to the flag covering the coffin of the deceased soldier. The organization with a similar name - “Mother of the Golden Stars of America” - was founded back in 1928; she recently placed on her website that Cindy Shihan has nothing to do with the campaign and does not engage in politics at all.)

In April, Ms. Shihan publicly called George Bush "the world's largest terrorist." On August 5, she performed at the annual congress of the organization "Veterans for Peace" in Dallas. This time, the country's president was awarded such definitions as the Lying Bastard and the Maniac. Inflated by hatred, the speakers demanded from the president to “get America from Iraq and Israel from Palestine,” threatened him with impeachment and refused to pay taxes.

On the same day, she got into a regular bus and went to Crawford to seek a meeting with the president who holds her vacation to the ranch. But the "bastard", of course, did not want to undergo physical insults in addition to verbal insults. Cindy Shihan reached the checkpoint, from which the regime zone begins. Here she was politely listened to, but they refused to skip further. Steven Hadley adviser to the uninvited visitor, the presidential adviser to National Security President. Cindy called the conversation with him "meaningless" and remained to spend the night in a clean field in the tent. At the scene - of course, quite by accident - turned out to be a crowd of journalists.

Since then, the tent town on Texas country has grown. It is called the Casey Camp (here is the bad irony of fate: the name of the general, the commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, is also Casey). The world's case turned out to be in good hands. Cindy Shihan now has his own website, as many as two press secretaries. Video clips of her appeals to the president are shown by dozens of television channels throughout the country; Those who refuse to show, the team of peacekeepers is bent to a shameful pillar. The life of the Protestants is established. From Crawford to tents and a bus goes back. Organized three meals a day. On the lawn, a semblance of a cemetery is arranged: 1874 of the grave cross is dug to the land according to the number of soldiers who died in Iraq. But here, however, a nuisance came out: the father of one of the soldiers specially came to Crowford to tear out the cross with the name of his son. And he explained that he did not want his son to posthumously participate in the political show. No one dared to hinder him.

So the whole country lives on two camps. Each Pacifist mother immediately answers the mother-patriot: they say, I don’t know how yours, and my son died for a just cause. There are families in which two sons died: apparently, their opinion should be considered for two votes. One local resident dangled at night in the air from the gun to calm the annoying demonstrators - he took his cousin and gave them a piece of his own land; Maybe relatives have an old enmity, who knows. On Saturday, the president rode a bicycle with a seven -time winner of Tour de France Lance Armstrong. On Sunday, in the Casey camp, Joan Baes sang, famous for performances against the Vietnamese War. A sad joke: a huge tent in which the camp headquarters is located was rented by President Bush for some of his events. The town is tiny, there is no need to choose a distributor.

As long as Cindy rally in Texas, her husband Patrick filed for divorce. Last week, her mother fell down with a heart attack. Cindy spent several days at the Odra and returned to her watch on Wednesday. It is very difficult to condemn it. She survived a terrible tragedy. Nevertheless, a moral defect is seen in her actions. She made a profession out of her burning. Professional widows. Professional soldiers' mothers. Professional victims of terror. That's what we got to. This is called "all for sale." She cannot help but understand that dozens are fed with her trouble, if not hundreds sticks. Yes, and she herself is not alive with the Holy Spirit. There was a banal commercialization of the tragedy.

There is such a play by Bertolt Brecht - "Mother Courage and her children." We were taught to perceive it as an anti -war satire (although there are not enough funny in it, as, indeed, in every political satire). As an illustration of the Marxist-Leninist reasoning about how the war destroys those who thought to earn on it. But this is a very superficial look. In the era, about which the play tells, - during the thirty -year war - from the unconscious population the choice was small: either to crumble, or to try to survive the trading; Marauded that their own, that foreign army is the same. But the poor marquitant did not trade the death of her children.

For a boring balance, it should be said that from the crackling rhetoric of professional patriots, it turns no less than from irresponsible demagogy of professional world fighters. There is nothing in the gaze of a politician who calls for the people to show civilian valor. “In a good country,” says the mother’s courage on this occasion, “virtues are useless, there you can be ordinary people, not very smart and, for me, even cowards.”