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another gem from the Left Coast, Neva Chonin, self-proclaimed voice
of the "alternative arts community," complains in the
San
Francisco Chronicle that we are facing a "homogenization"
of our "national narratives." The American flag, she whines,
is suddenly ubiquitous, even in places that she thought safely detached
from all things patriotic: "Old Glory wallpapers Mission District
nightclubs, North Beach sex stores and Haight Street head shops.
It decorates 'alternative' clothing outlets; it hangs in the windows
of tattooing and piercing parlors. You know there's been a radical
shift when even the guy doing tongue piercings is humming 'God Bless
America' and alterna-chicks are getting flag tattoos to match their
red, white and blue hair."
This state
of affairs is bewildering, to say the least, for an "alternative"
scribe like Chonin. Seeking guidance, she turns to an art-critic
friend, who provides this mind-numbing analysis: "It's an immediate
sea change ... Someone is appropriating this outlaw space and turning
it into a patriotic space. Where once there was ambivalence, there's
now a monolithic quality, and there's no resistance to the symbolism.
What does it mean to put up the flag? What are people trying to
say?" These are the questions that keep San Francisco's finest
minds tossing and turning at night.
Alas, however
"alternative" she may think herself, Chonin's reaction
to the explosion of flags is depressingly predictable. The stars
and stripes, she says earnestly, "has increasingly come to
reflect a ... chauvinistic 'Go, Team!' sentiment. It's as if Sept.
11 transformed our country into a giant sports stadium where the
War Against Terrorism is trying for a first down." Worse, we're
creating a climate where "anything outside the mainstream is
subject to censorship." And this "selective censorship"
(which apparently does not yet extend to the Shangri-La of free
thought that is the Bay Area) explains why "few Americans are
able to tie the tragedy to" — you guessed it — "US
foreign policy." After all, "whether directly or through
its financial support, the United States has done much to foster
resentment in the Middle East and elsewhere in the non-Western-European
world. Resentment breeds rage, and rage feeds desperation. Desperation
finds its ideal outlet in religious extremism and acts of amoral
terrorism." The terrorists aren't immoral, you see, they're
amoral. It should be a distinction without a difference —
but for Chonin, it's a neat way of making the terrorists seem less
culpable, and focusing our attention on the real bad guys in this
story, the bullying, censorious, resentment-fostering United States
of America.
Oh, and like
Katha
Pollitt before her, Chonin wants to scrap the flag and find
a new, post-patriotic symbol — "for those who want to
express both national diversity and national solidarity, but not
national chauvinism. Our alternative arts culture could provide
one," she adds, "if it can dig itself out of the Sept.
11 ashes and find its voice again."
We won't be
holding our breath.
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