Hash-Heads, and Hope
I am one of those dumbass Americans who got involved in radical politics in the Eighties because I thought that Reagan's policies regarding Central America were ass. At the time, I didn't think that going to Nicaragua to pick coffee beans for Daniel Ortega was a viable solution. So I packed up, left New York City and headed to San Francisco in 1988 to help participate in an anarchist conference that a small radical bookstore called Bound Together was organizing for 1989.
Since then, I've managed work and drink wine with a few great people who figured out how to publish and sell some great books by dissidents like Noam Comsky, Edward Said, Kathy Acker and even my own Janet Hardy. (Not to mention a whole slew of anarchist arm-wavers and other troublemakers.) I figured it was what I was supposed to do for 'The Cause.' Given the fact that I am genetically predisposed to do nothing else except sell books, I didn't know what else could be expected of me.
So, here I am today in Berlin, having meetings and selling the rights to radical sex books to European publishers. I guess I have a "career" now, but I delude myself that I am still doing my part and spreading the word "Dissent."
My friend Sophie, who owns a lovely sex book shop here in Berlin called Lustwandel (sort of the Good Vibes of Germany) called soon after the bombing started in Afghanistan and warned me to not leave my hotel because there were rumors that Muslim kids were roaming around Berlin looking for Yankee ass to kick. So, just like last month, I turned on the television and watched the coverage. I smoked some cigarettes and drank some fine, duty-free single malt. The BBC World Service programs in my four star hotel were as much as you would expect given the way the media works nowadays. Excitable newsreaders interviewed far-flung correspondents while feverish commentators and government functionaries parsed what little actual information there was to be had.
After an hour or so I left to take my chances on the streets.
For the last couple of days, I've had to walk past the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the center of Berlin while on my way to the tube station. This memorial is what is left of the main cathedral of Berlin that was destroyed by the Alled bombing campaigns during the Spring of '45. For those of you who have never seen the memorial, it looks a lot like the tower of Notre Dame in Paris--minus the rest of the church. Berliners affectionally refer to it as 'The Hollow Tooth.' Let me say that the church is a pretty damn good image to the generally suckiness of war.
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Having nothing else to do, I wandered around hoping to find like-minded peaceniks drawn to the plaza for the same reason I was there. No such luck. I guess that since the Germans are not directly involved with this thing, the news of war did not bring them out in droves, as they say. All I could find were hash dealers and clutches of local teenagers plotting romantic strategies while entangled on benches that hedge the church.
The Gulf War--whose obvious aim continues to bug me a decade later--was different than this "sustained, comprehensive campaign against terrorism," to quote the Dauphin from tv last night. This thing, this war he is starting is much more complicated and I am having a hard time figuring out how to react. I imagine Gloria La Riva and her alphabet soup of Socialists are planning demonstrations and other "gestures of support" to the oppressed people of Afghanistan, as she has done so many countless times over the years. (I've always hated her reactive style of protest.) But I imagine the demonstrations will be as sparsely attended as the ones I went to at the outbreak of the Gulf War in front of the old Chevron Building on Market Street. Most people just didn't (and don't) care.
But at the time--and since then--I've plugged my books and continued to think I was doing my part. We kept that little, tired bookstore alive and put out information that nobody, except for a handful of people who still read, really cared about. I knew it at the time and constantly questioned what I was doing since I never had two nickles to rub together, but what else was I supposed to do?
What's being left out in all these discussions of the events of 09-11-01 is the stark contrast between the anti-WTO/Group of Seven demonstrations of the last few years and the nasty bit of work of those determined men who killed all those innocent people last month. I believe it will all change now.
Bush The Elder and Clinton pursued a push button, arcade game military strategy that avoided the use of ground troops, or "closework," as Joe Klein called it in last week's New Yorker. For the Dauphin, this is not an option. Bin Ladin is in Afghanistan for a reason. I've been there and it really is a big pile of rocks and these guys have been fighting from caves for over twenty years. First the Soviets--and then each other. As American soldiers begin to die out there in desert over the coming weeks, perhaps those who walked past that little store on Haight Street will come in and start demanding answers as to what caused all of this in the first place.
Maybe somewhere in what's left of downtown Manhattan, a monument for peace will arise out of the rubble, just like the Kaiser Wilhelm Church here in Berlin. But it is not going to be easy. In today's 'Wall Street Journal,' Francis Fukuyama, author of that smug little essay, 'The End of History' (which claimed that in 1989, world history ended with the triumph of Corporate Capitalism as the highest form of human endeavor) defended himself by writing, 'We remain at the end of history because there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics, that of the liberal(!) democratic west.
I disagree, and as I prepare to leave the city that actually witnessed the end of the history of the twentieth century, I hope that me and my handful of other radical book peddlers were right all along and all our hard work was laying the groundwork for the change that I hope will come. My dream today is that in the future, hash dealers will stroll around that monument in lower Manhattan, selling their wares while teenagers neck on nearby park benches, as the US concentrates on matters within and leaves the rest of the world in peace.