Athens Against the War

New Fall Festival Takes Iraq as its Focus

originally published October 10, 2007

Kelli Guinn

Elite tha Showstoppa

There are a couple of basic parameters to organizing large public events in Athens. One: they all happen in the spring and fall, with the notable exception of AthFest. Two: in the fall, they all crowd onto the Saturdays that aren’t already taken by UGA home football games. It often makes for an odd arrangement in which everything civic-minded seems to happen at once, wearying the citizenry.

This year, though, the entire month of October is free of Georgia football in Athens, and the month naturally has a different flavor from the norm. In addition, a small crew of veteran organizers-scenesters has prepared a downtown fall festival taking place at the west end of Washington Street on Saturday, Oct. 13 from 12 p.m. until 10 p.m.

What’s the occasion, besides it being autumn? The “Fall Into Athens” fest takes as its theme - for 2007, at least - the Iraq War. Specifically, that is, strident opposition to the war.

“First there was an idea for a festival, and I think from the beginning, the idea was to make it a current events-relevant festival, mixing current events with music,” says Jeff Hannan, who along with Randy Keen, Drago Tesanovich and Ed Vaughan got the ball rolling on Fall Into Athens just as this year’s spring festival season was winding down. “Then it evolved into focusing on a single current event, and if we focused on a single current event, I don’t think there’s any denial that the war is the most pressing one of the year.”

Keen explains, “It was after a pool game with me and Jeff, and we were just discussing what we were doing. Jeff came up with the idea…” (“At that point I was just the t-shirt guy,” Hannan offers.) Keen continues: "From that moment on, it just exploded with a life of its own, and we’ve been kind of chasing it ever since.”

Says Tesanovich, “It was going to be kind of a smaller, laid-back kind of affair, but once you get involved in doing something like this, it starts to have a mind of its own, and grows and gets bigger. I’m hoping this’ll grow and get bigger than even I have imagined.”

Hannan adds: “It was screaming ’big,’ so we tried to make it big.”

Ralph Roddenbery

The guys now hope to get a Fall Into Athens festival going each autumn, filling a seasonal gap in street fests, and they plan for each year’s edition to take a different “single-issue” focus. They stress the singularity of focus of this first installment: other topics may inevitably come up, but the idea is to spur dialogue and activism about the Iraq War in particular. They’ve assembled a roster of local, regional and national anti-war activists, notably Phil Aliff, a board member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who served in 2005 and 2006 at Abu Ghraib prison and outside Fallujah. In addition to Gulf War veteran Major Kelley Culver and Vietnam War Merchant Marine vet John Heuer (also a conscientious objector in the ’70s), state Representative Tyrone Brooks and Georgia-based “Department of Peace” campaign organizer Cheryl Tarr will speak. Then there are the locals, including Flagpole contributor Eugene Wilkes and Tesanovich himself, who many know as “the button man,” as he’s often seen handing out anti-war and anti-Bush buttons near the UGA Arch. Tesanovich will be bringing his hand-made white wooden crosses, one for each Georgia soldier who has died in Iraq. They now number 109.

Where is the anti-war movement now, four and a half years into the Iraq War? Here’s Tesanovich’s take: “You know, I can tell just from being on the street… The number of negative comments I get is half of what I used to get. And the number of positive comments have increased proportionally. You know, more people are saying, 'Yes, this is the right thing.' I give away more buttons now than I did in the beginning.

“So people, I think, they see the fallacies, you know, the charade that’s been put before us, and they’re ready to do something about it, but it’s hard to decide what to do. So, this festival - that’s going to be my thing, too, when I talk - I’m going to say, again, 'Do something. We’re doing something here today; continue to do something. We’ll get the whole thing to grow to the point where people will listen.'”

He adds, “I think the time for this is good, because people need to see that there are other people feeling and thinking the same way locally.”

“Education and entertainment: that’s how we’re billing it,” Hannan says. In addition to information booths and the mix of speakers and music onstage, there will be a beer tent and artists’ market. The organizers note that booth spaces - which are free - for the artists’ market are still open, with the requirement that all goods brought for sale be made by the artists or craftspeople themselves. This is in keeping with the festival’s grassroots nature; volunteers are more than welcome, too, and sponsorships are still open - Fall Into Athens does have 501(c)3 nonprofit status thanks to the Common Ground Athens resource center. Contact information for the organizers is at www.fallintoathens.org.

Ben Emanuel