Sneer-Free Anti-War Reporting (almost).

The Dispatch report on last night's Iraq Town Hall in Columbus quotes office holders and their surrogates, physicians and activists, and all in all seems to describe a newsworthy event.

This is a positive development, because the mainstream media, for at least the last twenty some years, has not been able to look upon anti-war protestors without condescending. Others have discussed the historical and political reasons for this, but mainly it seems that all protest-like activity in the decades since Vietnam has simultaneously been too much and not enough like protests in the sixties.

Which, of course, leads me to the ukulele.

The presence of the ukulele player in the article completely undercuts the advances in tone and content otherwise present, and throws the piece firmly back into the narrative of war protestors as frivolous and irrelevant.

So I've got a confession. Even though I was not there, and am therefore operating on what should be considered insufficient information, I can't decide whether I'm more annoyed with Dean Narciso for writing about the ukulele, or with Tom Harker for playing it at the meeting.