Dean DeHart, a community organizer who was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, would like people to know that war is bad business. But he's finding it hard to get the word out, now that the country has invaded Iraq.
DeHart, who has long been active as a labor organizer, feels that Americans are reluctant to question their government in the wake of 9/11. And that, he said, includes the media, which are more inclined to cheer on the troops than ask the hard, messy questions.
So how does a little guy like DeHart get people to pay attention to the ugly underbelly of warfare? Call in reinforcements from Hollywood.
On Tuesday, movie actor and Cheers star Woody Harrelson and Academy Award winner Marcia Gay Harden will join local artists and activists for an evening aimed at calling attention to the plight of Iraqi children. The event, Children of War: The Face of Conflict in Iraq, includes dance, music and speech-making. It takes place at Beneficent Church, 300 Weybosset St., Providence.
Boston's urban-country band, Maybe Baby, will perform, along with West African musicians and dancers Seydou Coulibaly, Issa Coulibaly and Abdoulaye Diallo.
The doors open at 6:30, and the event gets under way at 7:30 on a first-come-first-seated basis. A $10 donation will go to cover expenses.
A highpoint of the evening will be a reading from a new play about Iraq by Tony Kushner, who won the Pulitzer for his Angels in America. Harden and Trinity Rep's Anne Scurria will perform. Kushner will be on hand to speak about our involvement in Iraq.
But the point of the evening is really to get the media to pay more attention to those who feel the invasion of Iraq was wrong.
"The whole point of this," said DeHart, "is to get beyond the glitzy TV images and put yourself in the shoes of an Iraqi child who finds bombs raining down on him.
"Think of your own child and ask yourself, Is that liberation, or what?"
Tuesday's event is part of a series of talks organized by a group of Brown faculty, staff and students against the war. DeHart -- whose wife, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, was recently named head of Brown's center for ethnic studies -- is one of the organizers, and the man chiefly responsible for lining up the celebrity clout.
When organizers decided they needed star power to get their point across, DeHart, 55, called on cousin Jim Burrows, co-creator of the sitcom classic Cheers, and now executive producer of Will & Grace.
Burrows put DeHart in touch with Woody Harrelson, who played the out-to-lunch bartender Woody on Cheers, and who last October lashed out against America's Iraqi policy in a column in the British newspaper The Guardian.
"I'm an American tired of lies," wrote Harrelson. "And with our government, it's mostly lies."
Kushner's latest
It was Brown social scholar Paul Buhle who helped bring Tony Kushner on board. Kushner had written Buhle a note of appreciation for his writings on Jewish socialism, said DeHart, and Buhle asked Kushner if he would speak at Brown.
Kushner, in turn, enlisted the help of Harden, who had starred in Angels on Broadway. Harden, who also won an Oscar for Pollock, will play the part of First Lady Laura Bush in Kushner's new play, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy.
In the script, Mrs. Bush finds herself in heaven, reading to dead Iraqi children who were incinerated by smart bombs and crushed by debris. The first lady, who reads from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, remains unruffled and unable to grasp the tragic human cost of war -- even though there is an angel on hand to remind her of the grisly details. Scurria, who last year appeared in Trinity's production of Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, will play the angel.
And because Trinity's Oskar Eustis directed the premiere of Angels, Eustis, who teaches at Brown, will be part of the panel of speakers, along with Barbara Lubin of the Middle East Children's Alliance and Neta Crawford, Brown professor of international relations.
Gung-ho media
DeHart's main gripe with the media is, as he sees it, their unwillingness to question the party line out of fear of seeming unpatriotic.
DeHart said that there's been no clear connection establishedbetween Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaida terrorist network, yet the media continue to report the administration's inferences that the attacks of Sept. 11 are somehow linked to the Iraqi regime, and that toppling Saddam will be a blow to terrorist activity aimed at America.
Many Americansfeel "that invading Iraq will make us safer," he said, "when it is pretty clear it will not. It will make us less secure by fostering retribution."
DeHart also questions what he called "irresponsible" polling results. Figures indicating public support of the war are misleading, he said, because they are asked out of context.
While people may agree that Saddam should go, he said, they might not be so quick to advocate armed intervention if pollsters asked: Would you support a war with Iraq that resulted in the death of a family member or the killing of thousands of innocent children?
"We are trying to sensitize people to the carnage," said DeHart. "Half of the population of Iraq is under 15."
Career risks
Kushner and Harrelson were at first both reluctant to speak, said DeHart, because they're not experts on foreign policy or the war effort. But since the night is as much about the arts as politics, they agreed to appear.
There are concerns, however, about the backlash against celebrities who voice their opposition to the war, a reaction that DeHart likened to the blacklisting of the McCarthy era. He cited the boycotting of the Dixie Chicks after singer Natalie Maines told a London audience she was ashamed that President Bush was from Texas, the state that spawned the popular female trio.
"These are people who should be applauded," said DeHart, "because they love their country so much they are willing to risk their careers and speak out."
