Editorials

One benefit of being a woman of (or even over) a certain age is that you can be invisible when you want to be. Women sometimes complain that after they pass 55 no one notices them, which is often true, but the good news is that this phenomenon allows you to assume a “cloak of invisibility” worth of a Harry-Potterish heroine when you’d like to know what people are up to. Wearing nondescript clothes and not too stylish glasses, you can go anywhere and overhear anyone. 

The vastly over-reported face-off between those supporting and those despising the Berkeley City Council’s recent stand(s) on having Marine recruiters downtown provided me with a good window on America circa 2008. What’s always been nice about Berkeley is that you don’t have to travel if you live here. If you wait long enough, the world will come to you.  

A part of the world we seldom see showed up at Martin Luther King Civic Center Park (known in the 1960s as Provo Park) on Tuesday. If you wandered around in the crowd at twilight that night, you could hear many excellent arguments between citizens vigorously and enthusiastically exercising their free speech rights, catnip for those of us who value the First Amendment above all others. What was most striking about the confrontations were the visuals: Unlike similar scenes 40 years ago during the Vietnam war, the two camps looked pretty similar to one another. 

Both groups had numerous grey-haired participants in baggy jeans and T-shirts, the men on both sides sporting a variety of exotic facial hair decorations intended to demonstrate that they were rugged individualists. The women were a bit more varied, with the out-of-towners leaning toward artificial shades of blonde and false eyelashes and the locals tending toward flaming henna if they rejected grey.  

In general, the visiting team kept to their side of the street, in the park, though the home team, assigned to the lawn of the Maudelle Shirek building (Old City Hall), made end runs around the police lines trying to confront the objectors. A fair number of Berkeleyites have also expressed annoyance with what they perceived as the council’s stance, but they’re not the type to join the kind of screaming-mob-in-training found on the park side of MLK Tuesday night. 

The younger people—and there were some—looked a lot alike too. Some had military-style crewcuts, the only difference being that this included some of the women on the anti-war pro-council side. The World Can’t Wait, the group whose members chained themselves to the recruiting office last week, were attractive multi-ethnic youths sporting dashing uniform orange shirts. Code Pink members, skewing older, wore pink, while their opposite numbers favored red, white and blue, with flags. 

There was also a sizable contingent of employees of Pacific Steel Casting, organized by their bosses and their union to complain to the City Council about what they’d been told was the city of Berkeley’s plan to shut down their plant. They made the other demonstration seem larger than it actually was. 

At first they merged with the crowd in the park, waving signs and shouting along with the rest. I asked a couple of them, who gave their names as Javier and Manuel, if that meant that they support the war, and they assured me that they do, but since my Spanish is even more rudimentary than their English I’m not sure we were communicating clearly. Later this group crossed the street and was herded over behind the city notice board away from the anti-war protesters. 

None of it came to much, though someone did set fire to the Peace Wall sign, accidentally incinerating a couple of bicycles. Contrary to enthusiastic predictions and wildly inaccurate reports in the major metropolitan daily, on television and from the Berkeley police, the crowds were small by ’60s standard, not more that 500 people total, both sides, at any given point in the peak time between 5 and 7:30 p.m. Reporters and photographers seemed almost to outnumber the activists.  

I mentioned to one writer friend there how much I’d been enjoying eavesdropping on arguments, and a tidily-dressed little woman who’d overheard what I said came up to me and asked me earnestly what kind of arguments I’d heard. Why do you want to know? I asked.  

Well, she said, I’m a journalist for Newsweek. I told her I was the editor of the local paper, and that perhaps there wasn’t much point in us interviewing each other. It was that kind of event. 

Obviously out of place on the park side of MLK was a young man, short, plump, hirsute and intense, who identified himself as Danny Gonzales. He was one of the few present wearing a coat and tie, oddly coupled with the de rigueur baggy pants tucked into combat boots. He wore glasses and carried a notebook just like a real reporter, probably because he plays one on the Internet. He identified himself as a blogger for Move America Forward, the jingoistic sponsors of the anti-council protest.  

Sampling the confrontations revealed echoes of scripts from wars past not really applicable to the current situation: 

“Take a bath!” from a sixtyish man with a five-o’clock shadow wearing a grimy outgrown T-shirt with a Budweiser logo, to an articulate, stylish (and cleaner) younger fellow who looked like a graduate student. The older guy opined that “the Taliban’s having its ass handed to them.” The younger one said we were losing both Iraq and Afghanistan, but that he had nothing against the troops, that he just thought they were getting the wrong leadership. His opponent couldn’t argue with that one. “Fuck Bush,” he said, “He’s just in it for himself.” 

Another lively dispute was between two African Americans, one a Berkeley High student and the other a bit older, an intellectual type often seen on campus making lengthy provocative statements in the question period following controversial lectures. The young man was arguing for his right to join the Marines if he felt like it, so there! And the other was trying to tell him what that choice would mean, having the usual success of older people talking to those young enough to know it all. Everyone present probably learned something in these exchanges.  

What was most striking about the parkside people was how pathetic they seemed, clearly life’s losers, tricked by a dishonest regime into sacrificing their beloved children, siblings and spouses for Halliburton’s profits. They claimed that the council’s statement that Marine recruiters aren’t welcome in Berkeley would hurt the Marines’ feelings, but no current Marines, a pretty tough bunch, showed up to say how bad they felt. There were some ex-Marines there, men who didn’t seem to have gained much from their tour of duty, more to be pitied than censured. 

The angry letters the Planet’s been getting match the picture: from people who haven’t gotten much in the way of spelling, grammar or history from the educational system, angry at everything, not sure whom to blame. We’ve put the cream of the crop in the paper or on the web, those correctly addressed “To the editor” and signed by real names. The misdirected ones we don’t run, those addressed to the city council or signed by anonymous swaggering pseudonyms, are even sadder.  

Apologizing is a tricky business, particularly when trying to do the right thing has had the wrong results. Ask the Australians, who’ve finally, after more than a decade’s debate, apologized (in their dialect “said sorry”) to their country’s aborigines, for causing a Lost Generation by taking aboriginal children away from their parents in a misbegotten attempt to help them.  

The Berkeley City Council, with the exception of clueless Councilmember Wozniak, had all the right reasons for wanting to tell Marine recruiters to stay away from our young people. Nevertheless, their action caused pain to those who desperately hope against all reason that the sacrifices they and their families have made were not for nothing. After the fact, the council reworded its statement to use more diplomatic language, but should councilmembers also have apologized for the original harsher version? It’s a subtle calculus, with no right answer. 

Comments at the council meeting from representatives of some Berkeley merchants were misguided, however. If the council’s original vote was wrong, it was wrong because it caused unnecessary pain, not because a few blusterers said that they’d never shop in Berkeley again. One Walnut Creek letter-writer announced that his weekly trips to the Berkeley Bowl and Fourth Street were toast. At our house, the reaction was enthusiastic—one less SUV in the Ashby Avenue traffic jam on Sunday afternoon. And I doubt that the angry writers from Salina, Kansas, or Golden Valley, Minnesota, have been keeping Berkeley businesses afloat.  

The sign held by one demonstrator was puzzling at first: “Castro Supports Berkeley.” Was it pro or con? Fidel hasn’t been much of a player in the protest scene of late. Then he moved his arm, and revealed that the sign actually said “Castro Valley Supports Berkeley.” Thanks, Castro Valley. Maybe you guys can take the place of any Walnut Creek shoppers we might have lost.