On Berkeley and "patriots"

by: Jay Stevens

Wed Feb 13, 2008 at 12:52:10 PM MST

Right-wing hell broke out. DC politicos threatened to pull the city's federal funding, and a horde of pro-war demonstrated descended on Berkeley. Last night, the city council backed down.

Council members conceded that they had erred in passing a resolution Jan. 29 that condemned the Marines - rather than the war in Iraq - and some council members added that they felt they owed U.S. troops an apology as well the many Berkeley residents who were ashamed and offended by their position.

"To err is human but to really screw up it takes the Berkeley City Council," said council member Gordon Wozniak. "We failed our city. We embarrassed our city."

Exactly right. It's one thing to oppose the war and the president's policies, it's another to sanction or abet harassment of soldiers and recruits. To be fair to Berkeley, the Marine recruitment office was a physical manifestation of the government they dislike, which they view as aggressively forcing itself into their way of life. Their proclamation was a kind of Sagebrush rebellion, West Coast style. Emotional, angry, ill-considered.

And then there's the rhetoric from the right. Take Melanie Morgan, a radio talk show host (what else?), who was involved in the pro-war demonstrations. Berkeley-ites are "America haters," "Pinkos," "freaks," and "traitors." Those on "her" side are "patriots." There's an effort to somehow paint the city and its inhabitants as outsiders or aliens, fit only for contempt, and decidedly "un-American." Morgan:

Society for years has endured the freakish antics of Berkeley dwellers. Naked people streaking in the streets; smelly hippies begging for money as they sing drunken renditions of '60s anti-war songs; adults sitting in trees like a bad zoo exhibit.

But the Berkeley City Council and instigators from the extreme left have crossed the line this time. The council Tuesday night passed two anti-military, anti-American resolutions and agreed to send a letter to the city's only Marine recruiting office saying the military are "uninvited intruders."

This is treasonous, hateful behavior that steals the First Amendment rights of the Marines, the very group that protects our constitutional rights. What galls me most is that Berkeley is the birthplace of the modern free-speech movement and now it is has drawn battle lines in the war against the First Amendment.

In reality, what's going on here is that Berkeley is fighting for its particular brand of its world view. They are not unpatriotic. (One city council member who supported the proclamation is actually a Marine vet who fought in Vietnam.) And whatever their faults, they are absolutely, one-hundred-percent American. You may not agree with what they did - I certainly don't - you may dislike the image of Berkeley created for you by the Morgans of the world (the actual Berkeley in no way resembles the "freakish" hippie town Morgan would have you see), but you can't argue that somehow the city is an alien nation, outside the body politic. Berkeley is as American as Kansas.

What's going on here, is that the frothing right is putting Berkeley up as its scapegoat, an exaggerated caricature. It's an "other" subhuman collective that represents a threat to the paleo-conservative's particular and fantastic national mythos. (And liberals are the Fascists??) I guess these folks need to stay outraged to focus themselves at a time when their ideology and policies have proven themselves not only disastrous in practice, but wildly unpopular as well.

Enough, already, folks.

I'll let Obama's words from his Iowa victory speech close out for me...

You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that's consumed Washington.

To end the political strategy that's been all about division, and instead make it about addition. To build a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states....

We are choosing hope over fear.

We're choosing unity over division, and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America.

I'll be a president who ends this war in Iraq and finally brings our troops home...

... who restores our moral standing, who understands that 9/11 is not a way to scare up votes but a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the 21st century.

Common threats of terrorism and nuclear weapons, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease....

This was the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided us for too long; when we rallied people of all parties and ages to a common cause; when we finally gave Americans who have never participated in politics a reason to stand up and to do so.

This was the moment when we finally beat back the policies of fear and doubts and cynicism, the politics where we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up. This was the moment.

Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope. For many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path.

It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it....

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. What led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause....

Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

That is what we started here in Iowa and that is the message we can now carry to New Hampshire and beyond.

The same message we had when we were up and when we were down; the one that can save this country, brick by brick, block by block, that together, ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

Because we are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America. And in this moment, in this election, we are ready to believe again.