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View Full Version : SF confronts anti-military image



gabosaurus
10-05-2007, 12:01 PM
Take it for what it is. Though I know what what of you think.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:


To the rest of the United States, the San Francisco Bay Area is the nation's stronghold of pinkos, radicals, traitors and dangerous fringe groups.

And the proof came last week in reports that the city that allows a group called Dykes on Bikes to parade up Market Street had refused to allow the U.S. Marine Corps to make a television recruiting commercial in the Financial District. And, some said, the city had insulted the Marine Corps, to boot.

The situation got even worse when 200 Marines and soldiers returning from Iraq were prevented from entering the passenger terminal at the Oakland International Airport for so-called "security reasons."

Conservative Internet sites and the Fox television network were full of invective about the Bay Area and the "far left coast."

But, as it turns out, the stories about the Marine commercial weren't exactly true - the city did issue a permit to make the recruiting TV commercial, but not on the day the film company the Marines had hired wanted. The company ended up filming the Marines on the Marin side of the Golden Gate, with the Golden Gate Bridge and the city in the background.

The Oakland airport incident turned out to be less of an insult to the Marines and soldiers than a miscommunication between the airport and the Marines' charter airline and its ground crew. Oakland Mayor Ronald Dellums promised that such an incident would never happen again.

But the damage had been done. "It felt like being spit on," Brandon Harding, a chaplain with the 3rd Marine Regiment, wrote in an Internet posting that made its rounds among the Marines. Retired Rear Adm. James Carey, chairman of the National Defense Committee, a pro-military organization, wrote in another posting circulating online that "While many of us joke about 'the left coast' and the liberal leftists in la-la land, this is disgusting and surely nothing to joke about."

All this happened as San Francisco prepared for a visit by the Blue Angels for Fleet Week, which begins Saturday with a parade of warships under the Golden Gate Bridge. The activities are expected to draw a million people to the San Francisco waterfront and vantage points ringing the bay.

Meanwhile, Ken Burns' "The War" scored ratings last week and this week that San Francisco television station KQED said were "fantastic."

It is a paradox: On the one hand, there is widespread perception that San Francisco and the Bay Area are opposed to the military and all its works; on the other, the citizens of the Bay Area seem to be interested in military history and gather in huge crowds to welcome the Navy.

And perception seems to trump the facts every time.

Not since the Republican Party stirred up the fears of "San Francisco values" last fall to try to head off the election of Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House has there been such an outpouring of patriotic bile onto San Francisco and its neighbors.

There was a virtual avalanche of letters, e-mail and telephone calls, many of them pointing out other unpatriotic actions by San Francisco.

These include rejecting the battleship Iowa, kicking Junior ROTC out of high schools and trying to stop the Navy's Blue Angels from flying on grounds that the flights were dangerous and would frighten citizens, cause war veterans to suffer post-traumatic stress, and even scare dogs and cats.

Never mind that San Francisco Bay already is home port to five other World War II ships and that the resolution to ban the Blue Angels was defeated by the Board of Supervisors 8-3. Minds have already been made up.

One message posted on conservative Web site Theodore's World confused San Francisco and Oakland. "Those **** wouldn't even let the Marines film in the streets ... now they refuse to let Marines into the airport terminal! That city needs to be ejected from the Union! ... I AM BEYOND FED UP with San Fransicko."

The Golden Gate Bridge District, which refused to allow the filmmakers to let the Marine drill team use the bridge sidewalk during morning rush hour on Sept. 11 this year, was bombarded with more than 300 angry e-mails and phone calls. Public affairs officer Mary Currie said she was called a communist, a terrorist, a traitor and "other horrible things."

Even the Marines Memorial Association, a club established by the Marines after World War II, caught some of the fallout. Michael Myatt, a retired Marine Corps major general who is president and CEO, said he'd received e-mails from veterans saying they'd never set foot in San Francisco again.

Others, he said, refused to renew their membership in the Marines Memorial as long as the club was located in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Bay region has always had a complicated relationship with the military - a mixture of history, politics, affection and dislike. It goes back into the very bones of the region.

San Francisco was founded by both Spanish missionaries and the Spanish military in 1776. The United States seized the region from Mexico in 1846, when sailors and Marines raised the Stars and Stripes over the town's main plaza.

The plaza was renamed Portsmouth Square, after a Navy ship, and Montgomery Street for the ship's captain.

Soldiers from the Presidio of San Francisco and sailors from naval stations around the bay were hailed as heroes for stopping the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake.

During World War II, the Bay Area was the major port of embarkation for the war in the Pacific. Don Jardine, then a Marine private on his way to Guadalcanal, remembers he and his buddies found that for Marines, the drinks were free in the bars.

Al Gonzales, a Navy veteran, says that San Francisco was "a Navy town, totally."

But Gonzales, who is 81 now and lives in Santa Rosa, says the city has changed. "It's not the way it was when we grew up," he said.

"The city is too far left, too liberal," he said.

The region shifted to the left in the 1960s, especially during the war in Vietnam.

The Bay Area, particularly San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, were strongholds of anti-war feeling. Many soldiers, sailors and Marines remember the hostile reception they received in the area during the Vietnam War.

Myatt, a young officer at the time, says he was warned not to wear his uniform at the San Francisco airport. Others say they were insulted or even spit on in the Bay Area. Whether it is true or not, that view is an article of faith with many veterans.

However, as the years went by, San Francisco and other Bay Area cities went through a complex change. The population grew, and so did the region's reputation as a haven for views that were not always welcome in other parts of the country.

Political conservatives found it difficult to win elections - nearly all the region's elected politicians are Democrats. However, perception doesn't always reflect reality.

Nancy Pelosi, held up by conservatives as an example of San Francisco values, is in reality a wealthy Roman Catholic grandmother who received an honorary degree from the Jesuit University of San Francisco last spring.

On the other hand, many of San Francisco's politicians, like Supervisors Chris Daly and Gerardo Sandoval, make a point of taking anti-military positions.

And their views are the ones that make the airwaves and the Internet.

Myatt, for one, thinks the political leaders have a skewed view. "The politics of the city do not reflect the views of the population of San Francisco," he said.

Nor does political action, like opposing the battleship Iowa or banning ROTC in schools, mean that the residents of the area dislike the military.

They have made the distinction between the unpopular war in Iraq and the men and women who are serving in it, Myatt says.

"I have never had so many people in my 17 years of service stop and thank me for my service," said Maj. Sean Pascoli, the officer in charge of recruiting for the Marine Corps in the Bay Area.

Pascoli says he has exceeded his quota for Marine recruits in the Bay Area this year.

He is aware, he said, of the Bay Area's reputation. But, he said, "We have been able to recruit some of the best men and women in the Bay Area to join the Marine Corps."

Besides, a reputation for being unpatriotic is bad for business in a city where tourism is the main industry. Perhaps that's why San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom issued statements denying the city had insulted the Marines. "We welcome the Marines," said Nathan Ballard, the mayor's spokesman.

The mayor's office also released a statement from Tight Films, the production company that is making the Marine commercial, saying that San Francisco treated the film crew and the Marines "with respect and professionalism."

However, San Francisco police Capt. Greg Corrales, who originally raised questions about whether the city should have accommodated the Marine commercial, thinks that Tight Films is obscuring the truth about the commercial. He still feels the city did not give its cooperation for political reasons.

On the other hand, he feels that political conservatives and conservative media outlets have been using the incident for their own purposes. "I stopped calling them back," he said. "They weren't concerned about the Marine Corps. They wanted to bash San Francisco."