Lion historians
American flags are sprouting
everywhere, turning the pastel city into a red, white, and
blue panorama. Some fly at half staff; some cover bay
windows like drapes. Little ones flutter at the end of
antennas, transforming ancient Toyotas into official-looking
limousines. Here and there, lacking true stars and stripes,
someone has tied a striped ribbon around a tree trunk or
pasted a newspaper cutout beside their front door.
It reminds me of Civil War accounts,
when patriotic Union sympathizers draped their doorways with
tri-colored buntings and society ladies wore red, white, and
blue sashes over their evening gowns. On the double-whammy
Fourth of July in 1864, Mark Twain tells us, “the whole
city was swathed in a waving drapery of flags — scarcely a
house could be found which lacked this kind of decoration.”
Montgomery above Pacific “was no longer a street of
compactly built houses, but simply a quivering cloud of
gaudy red and white stripes, which shut out from view almost
everything but itself.”
At the
beginning of the conflict, its citizens’ loyalties were
evenly split between North and South, but San Francisco soon
made up for its initial ambivalence. Overt Secessionists
were hustled off to Alcatraz or run out of town. Copperhead
newspapers that criticized the federal curtailment of civil
liberties found it difficult to publish. After Lincoln’s
assassination in 1865, an angry mob trashed the offices of
the Democratic Press, whose editor, Beriah Brown, was
believed to be an active rebel leader. (The paper’s repute
remained so ill that 50 years later, in his account of San
Francisco Civil War journalism, John P. Young could not
bring himself to mention its name.)
The result?
Our image of this once-divided city, with its strong
undercurrent of opposition to the War Between the States,
became unidimensional. One side of the equation — one
position, occupied by thousands of people — completely
disappeared from the story. It’s like the old African
proverb, “Until lions have their historians, tales of the
hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”
Fast
forward to the present. A new kind of war fever is seizing
the city by the bay and the rest of the United States, one
that springs from a genuine sense of loss and vulnerability,
one that desperately wants to make the pain go away.
Here and elsewhere, critics are speaking out, fearful of
the course their country has embarked on. In San Francisco,
at last Monday’s memorial service, another dissident Brown
— the Reverend Amos — asked an embarrassing question:
“America, is there anything you did to set up this
climate?” His remarks went largely unreported, except for
a mention by Matier & Ross that the “blistering attack”
had “set a lot of people’s teeth on edge.”
In all likelihood, the pastor of the Third Baptist Church
was not speaking just for himself, but for many people in
his congregation. In all likelihood, he was familiar with
the statement issued by the Black Radical Congress shortly
after the attack, which deplored the violence but added that
“we as Black people have lots of experience with the
horrors of terrorism in the U.S., as it has too frequently
been directed against us.” But the passionate critique
fell into a pit of silence.
A pesky website called ZNet.org
was harder to muzzle. For several years ZNet has posted
thoughtful progressive articles on a variety of subjects.
After September 11, it immediately became a clearinghouse
for explorations of the attacks and possible courses of
action by observers like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. Until
September 19, that is, when the website was shut down.
Editor
Michael Albert explained in an email that the site’s
provider in Washington State, “very congenial and nice
people who have worked very hard for us during the lifetime
of our operations … report being very hard hit by
yesterday’s virus attack. They report that of 200 machines
in one of their buildings, ZNet’s was by far the hardest
hit, they think because of its very high use level at the
time.”
The damage turned out to be
reparable, and the site resumed operation the next day. But
the incident was like a tree falling in an empty forest.
Except for a flurry of emailed messages, there was no
evidence that anything had happened to one of the most
active sources of information about America’s involvement
in the Middle East. In fact, except for the continuous
series of emailed messages, there was no evidence that the
site even existed. I’ve never seen it mentioned in the
mainstream media. Have you?
So what’s the problem, if the “wrong”
side of an issue disappears?
The problem is that it doesn’t.
Critiques and criticisms like these arise from unsolved
problems. Ignore or suppress them, and the problems remain,
nasty lumps that spoil the smooth carpet of civil
relationships.
They’ve already started to bump up
in unexpected places. Take the headline plastered across the
front page of the September 20 Examiner: INFINITE JUSTICE.
The lead story outlined the new venture undertaken by the
U.S. government. But the rest of the page dripped with the
irony of the present situation: “Hate Crime Hits Home for
Noe Valley Family: City merchant has been under constant
attack for being Arab American.” “Nation Confronts
Economic Reality: A million jobs gone before the terrorism,
analysts predict million more lost by 2002.” “Cabs Sit
Idle, Drivers Suffer.”
Infinite justice. Tell that to the
lions.
Betsey Culp
