I began my first trip to San Francisco last month with a visit to City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s famed beat-era bookstore and avant-guard art house. Situated for more than half a century on the corner of Broadway and what is now Jack Kerouac Alley, City Lightswas once considered a beacon of progressivism and liberal thought – a bastion for enlightened thinkers and the apogee of humanism and tolerance in an otherwise conformist society.
Today, however, City Lights, like so many other well-intentioned endeavors of its era, is merely another signpost of liberal bankruptcy and decadence. Case in point: the virtually uncountable number of anti-Israel, anti-U.S. books gracing the shelves and display windows with nothing to counterbalance, rebut or air even one discernable kernel of dissent.
The store’s nonfiction selections range from the laughable to the libelous. There’s the International Socialist Revue, for example, whose editors seem unaware of Marxism’s rather spotty record over the years. (When Cuba and North Korea are the two primary examples of an ideological movement’s solvency, there really is no need to investigate further.)
As for books regarding Israel (of which there were many), the only one I could find written by an Israeli Jew was Baruch Kimmerling’s venomous fringe-work Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians. The book, like its counterparts on the store’s heavily stocked ‘current events’ shelves, paints Israeli policymakers in a purely aggressive, militaristic light, ignores Palestinian complicity in the conflict and makes careful note to praise and elevate the tiny minority of Israeli anti-Zionists to near-mythic status.
You might wonder why I seem so surprised by what I found in a notoriously liberal bookstore in a notoriously liberal city. After all, I’m no longer living in Israel (where I spent the past year) and should just get over the fact that not everyone agrees with me.
First, let me say that I have no quarrel with bookstores selling the works I previously mentioned, biased and covertly anti-Semitic as they may be (and yes, depicting Ariel Sharon, the embodiment of the State of Israel, as a bloodthirsty killer of Palestinian children is both anti-Semitic and a lie).
My objection is that by not carrying responsible works showcasing alternative views, City Lights (and similar establishments) is depriving its clientele of the opportunity to develop mature and nuanced political ideas. At the same time, these one-sided, conspiratorial selections are fostering ignorance and intolerance in a wider American public still disarmed by the supposedly inherent righteousness of liberal ideals.
This intellectual rot does not surprise me; it only saddens and in some cases sickens me.
The political divide between Jerusalem and San Francisco may be cavernous, but in Israeli bookstores and mainstream American chains such as B. Dalton and Borders you can find the works of Edward Said and Amos Oz cohabitating harmoniously beside Menachem Begin’s The Revolt and Ariel Sharon’s Warrior.
As the new New Left finds itself increasingly isolated by an American majority which views the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism as essentially legitimate, it has lashed out with a ruinous multitude of propaganda. The Left’s old heroes, like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, have been replaced with murderers like Yasir Arafat and Marwan Bargouti, who speak just enough pleasantries to let their American fans sleep at night without having to ask themselves any tough questions.
New ideas that might address ways by which we could increase our security and spread democracy have been pushed aside for a brain-dead concoction of conspiracy theories and seething contempt for our elected government.
Today, young Bay Area residents walk around in T-shirts that say “I Fear My Government” but they wouldn’t dream of wearing a T-shirt that says “I Fear Osama Bin Laden.”
Does anyone remember the “Wanted: Dead or Alive” Bin Laden apparel? It seems about as remote a fashion choice for Berkeley liberals as the Magen David-emblazoned undershirts their parents surely wore during the “Summer of Love” (which just happened to coincide with the Six Day War.)
Along the way these political delusions have been abetted by institutions such as City Lights, an establishment so certain of the righteousness of its positions that it feels no need to offer its customers any alternative that might crack the fragile facade.
This is progressivism? Enlightenment? Freedom? No, this is San Francisco. The Mecca of disillusionment and the frontline of liberal perfidy.
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