Dennis Kucinich Has Five Minutes for You-Mr. Fish meets America’s peace candidate (LA Weekly)

Dennis Kucinich Has Five Minutes for You
Mr. Fish meets America’s peace candidate

By DWAYNE BOOTH
Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - 8:00 am

(Illustrations by Mr. Fish) “I can only guarantee you five minutes.”

In the middle of a park in Sierra Madre, on an absolutely perfect fall Sunday morning, Sharon Jimenez, senior adviser on the West Coast for U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich’s campaign for president, is laying down some ground rules. We are surrounded by volunteers, who busily set up chairs, sort placards and stack fliers for the congressman’s speech and fund-raiser. Twenty feet away, at a lopsided picnic table beneath a lopsided tree, sits Kucinich, wearing a ginger-colored blazer that immediately makes me wonder how many Winnie-the-Poohs had to die to make it. With his familiar squint and little-boy haircut that always appears as if it has been combed with a hot buttered roll, he nods in response to the conclusions of a Pasadena Weekly reporter.

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“So the dominant myths now are fear and terror,” he continues, “and if you don’t buy into them, you’re not a patriot.”

“Right,” I say, “you’re either with us or just like us.”

“And now I’m seeing a war gathering against Iran,” he says, “and it’s happening under everyone’s nose, and people are either oblivious to it or they feel that that’s just how it has to be.”

“Which goes to the heart of what I mean about our society’s concept of what real peace is,” I say. “Everybody will stand up and clap when they hear somebody talk about peace, because it’s widely understood to be the absence of war, of violence, which it is, but that can’t be its complete definition, just like the complete definition of love can’t simply be the absence of hate — peace shouldn’t be defined just in terms of what it’s not. If peace is defined only as the opposite of war, then doesn’t that automatically make war a necessity, because peace needs something to exist contrary to?”

“You’re right about that, but let’s go one step further,” he responds. “Let me take your awareness of that to a presidential election where candidates change their position every week so you don’t know anybody’s position on anything. It’s all polled to the point where it’s not the soul of the politician that becomes of interest; it’s the poll of the politician. There again, truth doesn’t matter. Stephen Colbert was absolutely right when he called it truthiness. That’s why half the people in this country still think that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. So, look, I am absolutely amazed that there is someone out there asking these questions, because I didn’t know there was anybody — I didn’t know there was anybody out there to talk to about this stuff.”

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