Generally speaking, The Scrapbook adheres to the old Latin aphorism De mortuis nil nisi bonum (roughtly translated: Don’t speak ill of the dead). Our practice is to offer a fond farewell to people we admire and a dignified silence for those we don’t. Which puts us in a quandary, of sorts, about an 80-year-old woman named Concepcion Picciotto, who died last week in Washington.
Few people were aware of Picciotto’s name, but many might recognize who she was. Beginning in 1981, she and a man named William Thomas kept vigil at a small antinuclear-war campsite in Lafayette Square across from the White House. Thomas expired in 2009, and by the time Picciotto died last week, she is believed to have conducted the longest continual act of political protest in America.
In truth, of course, describing her “peace camp” as anything other than a single squalid tent and an assortment of hand-lettered signs and flyers—anti-war, antimilitary, anti-nuclear power, anti-Israel, etc.—is a generous act. Nor is it a coincidence that she and Thomas took up residence there in 1981: Ronald Reagan had just become president, and strange as it may seem in retrospect, it was an article of faith on the antiwar left that Reagan was determined to provoke nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Presidents came and went, the Soviet Union peacefully collapsed—but Concepcion Picciotto stayed on in Lafayette Square, becoming a fixture on the doorstep of the White House and a year-round tourist attraction.
It probably goes without saying that she was mentally disturbed: She claimed, among other things, that the Central Intelligence Agency had extracted all her teeth, which she kept in a plastic pill bottle. And a casual perusal of her many signs and broadsheets made it clear that, in her mind, the threat of nuclear war originated not in Moscow or Beijing or Tehran, but in Washington, D.C.
All this earned her a curious kind of stature: Her seedy vigilance was seen as a quaint kind of martyrdom and earned her the respect of the Washington Post, National Public Radio, the New York Times, and others. Local sticks-in-the-mud, such as The Scrapbook, who considered her campsite a minor desecration of a historic site, were dismissed: “There was something impressive about Concepcion’s resolve,” wrote one Post columnist last week.
Which suggests to The Scrapbook a thought experiment. Let us suppose, for a moment, that Concepcion Picciotto had been a dedicated opponent not of nuclear war but of, say, abortion. Let us suppose, as well, that she and her admirers spent their days and nights in a makeshift tent on public land in Lafayette Square, directly in front of the White House, surrounded by handbills condemning Roe v. Wade and rude signs depicting aborted fetuses. Would the Post be equally impressed by her resolve? Would pro-life vagrant Concepcion Picciotto—seen from his window by President Obama—strike the Post as the First Amendment come to life?
The questions answer themselves.
