Hating America

By Pamela Troy
Created Oct 17 2006 - 3:36pm

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 !" [link [1]]

There'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."

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.

--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson