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Theater of Battle With A Familiar Script

From left, Ryan Foshee, Keith Clark and Michael Rigby recall the 1960s hippies who protested the Vietnam War. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

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"I feel when you demonstrate on the government's terms, you're not really protesting, you're part of the allowed dissent," says Green Bandanna, who gives his name as Jasper, 19, a student at George Mason University. ("Can you spell that with a smal 'j'?" he asks. Why? "It's my attempt to be a non-dominant white male.") "We don't want to be part of the allowed dissent."

"Pick up your trash," one of the protesters admonishes, and the polite young anarchists do, leaving only a duct-tape peace sign stuck to the pavement.

Down in the parking lot, there are more speeches and music in the almost-spring weather that is too cold for flowers. It's the subsiding, satisfied-for-now energy of a protest ending.

Here's Lowell, on march's end:

I sat in the sunset

shade of our Bastille, the Pentagon,

nursing leg- and arch-cramps, my cowardly,

foolhardy heart; and heard, alas, more speeches,

though the words took heart now to show how weak

we were, and right.

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