Kumbaya Watch: Alternative Silliness
The latest in foolish commentary.

By Ross Douthat
September 28, 2001 10:50 a.m.

n 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.