While browsing about on the Internet recently, I came upon some comments about a post on Lindsay Beyerstein’s liberal website, Majikthise. It seems that among the responses to her essay about the Lancet Report on Iraqi deaths, she received the following
“What do your kind think you know ?
You leftwing shitballs poison the well for all of us Americans, but your kind do no better .
It is not that you and your kind don't have the right to call yourselves Americans, you do not deserve to live .
That goes for all of you shit-balls in New York City-an urban cesspool that hopefull will get nuked in the near future !”
http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2006/10/i_get_letters.htmlThere’s nothing especially new or surprising about this. Similar comments can be found throughout the right-wing blogosphere. They can also unfortunately be found in the commentary of more well-known pundits like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly. As someone who lives in San Francisco, I haven’t forgotten Bill’s valentine to this city:
“And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”
11/05
Coit Tower was built as a memorial to San Francisco’s volunteer firemen, the heroes who fought the many destructive and deadly fires that tore through this city in the wake of the Gold Rush. It houses spectacular American murals from the 1930s. It stands atop Telegraph Hill, a beautiful and densely populated residential neighborhood of lovingly tended gardens and houses that visitors can enjoy by walking up or down the Filbert Street steps. If you’re lucky, you’ll see the flock of wild Conyers that has made Telegraph Hill its home, green, raucous parrots with red heads who call to each other from the trees and sometimes fly off in a dazzling flash of green and blue. Climb the hill on a clear night, stand in the pavilion in front of Coit Tower, the one that’s overlooked by the statue of Christopher Columbus, and you can see San Francisco spread out and shining beneath you and hear the far away barking of the seals that have made their home on Fisherman’s Wharf.
And Bill O’Reilly, an American, announced publicly that it’s okay with him to see this place destroyed, the houses and gardens incinerated along with the Americans who live there. And many Americans applauded what he said.
It’s a peculiar brand of “patriotism” that is most often invoked by the very people who are quickest to label others as “America haters.” These are the Americans who express the hope of seeing some of our greatest treasures destroyed. New York City, the home of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Central Park, the Strand Bookstore, Times Square, Broadway -- all of that, they say, can be spared and good riddance. Nuke it. The same goes for San Francisco, that most American of cities, with its lively history, its Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, the filigreed houses clinging to its hills. New Orleans? Why bother rebuilding that amazing place, restoring to us the black lace of its famous iron balconies, its yearly parades, its food, the soft strange accents of its residents? Only stupid people would live in a place so far below sea level.
They call certain American cities “cesspools,” their residents “scum.” They declare they and the rest of the country could do very well without places like San Francisco or Los Angeles or Berkeley or New York City, or even the entire East Coast or the state of California.
It’s not just a matter of geography, of course, but something deeper, more important. San Francisco is hated by these people, not because of our fog or our hills, but because we are an unusually liberal, tolerant city, a haven for nonconformists. New York is hated, not because of its weather, but because of its sophistication, its brilliance, and its diversity.
I don’t understand this weirdly limited form of “patriotism.” I’ve lived in and visited many places in this country, the South, the Midwest, the Northeast, the Northwest, the Southwest. Obviously I have preferences. San Francisco is currently my home and I hope to live here for the rest of my life. But I still think of myself as a southerner because I can’t bear not to consider myself as connected to the American south. And I love every inch of this country.
Chapel Hill, Deerfield, Monroe, Greensboro, Charleston, Chattanooga, New York City, Lookout Mountain, Slidell, Pittsburgh, Hanalei, Wrightsville Beach, Fuqay Varina, Dallas, Corpus Christie, Galveston, Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans Lodi, Berkeley, Houston, Baton Rouge, Chicago, Honolulu, Vicksburg, Texarkana, Fayetteville, Blowing Rock, Destin, Miami, Sedona, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Taos, Albuquerque, Shreveport, New Brunswick, Boston, Philadelphia, Biloxi, Highland Park, Kapaa, Los Gatos, Santa Barbara…
“America hater” that I am, I couldn’t spare a single one of them.
Or any of the people. Which is another thing I don’t get. Not only do these “patriots” relish the prospect of American cities being destroyed, they frequently talk about the Americans they’d like to see hurt or killed. Michael Savage recently announced that Madeline Albright should be hanged. Coulter is well known for declaring that liberals – people like me and my family – are only restrained from treason by fear for our physical safety, and must be kept in line by the occasional execution of a fellow “disloyal” American. And I can’t forget many of the comments from so-called “patriots” who proclaimed themselves happy about the deaths of Americans Marla Ruzicka, (“Good Riddance to that piece of filth” said a Freeper) and Rachel Corrie (“a well earned death” one right-wing blogger called it.)
There are things about this country and its history I don’t love. The lynching epidemic that extended from the late 19th to the mid twentieth century is one big and horrific example. But I’d never be willing to amputate entire chunks of the American South because lynching was endemic there. And you will never catch me relishing the thought of any American – even one who’s viewpoint I hate, even some white supremacist apologist for lynching – being beaten or tortured or murdered.
More and more I am seeing Americans – some of them quite well-known and powerful -- expressing their “patriotism” by turning to point at other Americans and directly or indirectly declaring them the enemy for no other reason than that those other Americans represent a part of this country that they have always feared and disliked.
Our constitution, and the fact that it allows such diversity of thought and belief is radical and therefore deeply frightening to many people, including, apparently, many who were born here. I don’t believe that it’s really the trauma of 9/11 that has prompted the increasing expression of this self-loathing, this rejection of our most important principles. I think it has always existed to some extent, and the “War on Terror” has merely provided some with a rationale to jettison American ideals they have never fully understood or liked.
The greatness that would be lost if we tossed overboard those all-too-frequently hated concepts that have shaped our literature, our history, our culture, will be incalculable. Without those ideals we would not have had that blasphemous satirist, Mark Twain, the bracing blast of American Jazz, and later, Rock and Roll, Arthur Miller’s heartfelt questioning of the American Dream in Death of a Salesman, Hollywood with its often underestimated penchant for nuance, whether in the Westerns of John Ford or Budd Boetticher, or the dark mirror provided by the gangsters of film noir and Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Godfather series.
Without the freedom to question, without hotbeds of liberalism, “intellectual elitism” and dissent like San Francisco, or New York, or Berkeley, or lesser-known enclaves like Chapel Hill North Carolina or Fayetteville Arkansas, what would be left of this country but the simple-minded repetition of a single viewpoint and maybe some good scenery? Beautiful scenery, I’ll grant you, but physical beauty is tragic when the eyes looking out from a lovely face have no intelligence.
As someone who loves America, I also love the right of Americans to say “I hope you are destroyed” to an American city or “You don’t deserve to live” to a fellow American who disagrees with them. But I can’t pretend to understand it, or to hear it growing in frequency and volume without feeling rage. And fear at its implications for my country.
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