The Baseball Tree

Back in the early 80’s I was living in San Francisco. I had recently gotten out of the Army and was hoping to pursue a career as a professional photographer. Although I was willing to take whatever jobs offered, mainly commercial, my dream was to do socially relevant photo essays in the manner of Eugene Smith or Margaret Bourke White.

I heard on the news that the San Francisco Housing Police was recruiting a special force of officers to work in a very troubled housing project known as the “Pink Palace.” With visions of a photo essay of project life from the inside dancing in my head I joined up and after about a week of training I was issued a night stick, a police band radio and a uniform and deposited one evening on the curb outside the infamous building where I was told to stay alert, check in by radio once an hour and “try not to get killed.”

I started patrolling the thirteen floors of the project looking for trouble, and for photos. Sometime around midnight a Swedish tourist staggered up to me out of the dark of the parking lot, his face streaming with blood. “They hit me with baseball tree,” he mumbled and then collapsed. As I started to call for an ambulance on my radio, I noticed that there was a fire department across the street so I ran over to it and pounded on the door.

A small window in the door opened and a man peeked through demanding to know what I wanted. I told him the situation and a moment later bells and horns sounded. Then the engine door of the station opened and about twenty firefighters, armed with axes, double-timed out of the station and over to where the injured man was laying. Forming a circle around the victim, they protected the one firefighter who was carrying the aid bag as he worked on the man, from a crowd of project residents who had gathered. A gang of teenage boys, who I suspect had committed the assault, strutted up and down showing off for their friends while the rest of the crowd of mainly black residents glared at the all white fire fighters.

Watching from the sidelines I thought of pulling out the camera that I had concealed under my jacket but lost my nerve when I reflected on the fact that after the fire fighters left I would be alone with this mob, a white man in a uniform with no weapon more formidable than a nightstick. Somehow I knew that this was not a neighborhood that took kindly to uniformed white men snapping photos without permission so I stood and looked on helplessly as some of the most intense photo opportunities of my life slipped by feeling ashamed of my cowardness.

I did not know it at the time but this was a wise move. How wise I was to learn some months later when I had to rescue a black reporter for the San Francisco Examiner from an angry mob when he pulled a camera out from under his jacket. In the ghetto camera equals Nark, which equals undercover informer, which equals trouble. Had I pulled out that camera I probably would not have lived through the night. I did not know it at the time but an armed undercover policewoman had been killed in that very building the night before.

Standing on the sidelines feeling shame and frustration I surveyed the scene before me. The raw light of a bare bulb illuminated the injured man lying in a pool of his own blood. He was sprawled on the floor of my tiny, grubby guard shack, a cinder block building equipped with bulletproof windows, pocked by dozens of bullet marks. The medic bandaged the mans’ head while the axe toting white firemen stood in an outward facing circle confronting a mob of angry black residents who yelled insults and gesticulated obscenely.

Above the door of the guard shack, some wag had pasted a bumper sticker that read: I (heart) San Francisco.

Hot Gates

It is often said, by those who do not understand history that “If the Persians had won their war against the Greeks history would have been changed forever.”

Really? How so? Back in the 19^th century there was what came to be called the “Hot Gates,” school of historiography (named after Thermopolis) which maintained that conquest by the Persians would have killed the so called “Greek miracle” but would it have? Let’s look at the facts.

First, an awful lot of the art, literature and philosophy that came out of the “Greek” world was actually from the Ionian cities under Persian control. Modern historians, freed from 19^th century prejudices, realize that most of the ideas that the Greeks popularized had their origins in the East in the first place. True the Greeks put their own special spin on them but that would have happened anyway regardless of who was in control. The Persians didn’t give a rat’s patooti what kind of government, art or philosophy you had so long as you paid your tribute on time. One big advantage that a Persian conquest would have brought with it would have been a greater mixing of ideas.

This is what happened when the conquest went the other way and Alexander took over the Persian Empire. In the market place of ideas the Greeks were Microsoft and the Persians were Atari. That is to say the Persians (meaning the whole “East” that they controlled including Palestine) had a whole bunch of original and interesting ideas but the Greeks packaged and sold them with ruthless efficiency. Once the two cultures were united the Greeks swarmed all over the East carrying their ideas with them. In Palestine, the mixing of Greek rationalism with Canaanite mysticism set off the whole Judeo-Christian-Muslim powder train which exploded into the ideological flowering of the three religions. Let’s not forget that a certain Galician carpenter, who has become rather well known in the West, came from the area known as the Decapolis, a ten city area in Northern Palestine noted for its mixing of Greek and "Eastern" philosophies.

There are historians who maintain that Judaism grew out of an intellectual reaction to Greek philosophy. One thing seems clear, contact with the Greeks caused the Jews to change their circumcision practice from a minor operation which only took “a little off the top” to the full Monty it has become today.

For better or worse what we laughingly call “Western Civilization” is a synthesis of Eastern and Western trends thrashed out in the market place of ideas. All that a Persian conquest would have done is open the market a little earlier.

New Imperialism

At the battle of Omdurman in 1898 a young Winston Churchill watched in amazed horror as wave after wave of Mahdist troops charged into the teeth of concentrated British rifle and machinegun fire only to be mown down in bloody swaths. At the time he, like most Englishmen, thought that there had to be something different about native peoples, genetically speaking, to make them behave in such an irrational manner. What Churchill and his fellow British officers at Omdurman did not understand was that there were people in this world who would rather die than live under foreign rule, no matter how benevolent its intentions are. The Iraqis are proving to be just such a people.

Although it is unfashionable to say so much of the history of the British Empire, particularly after the middle of the 19th century, can only be understood if one takes into consideration the Englishman’s very genuine belief that he was engaged in a noble enterprise whose mission was to bring the light of civilization to “lesser breeds without the law.” In other words the “White man’s burden.” While imperialists often justified the coloring of this or that bit of the map red by claiming that great financial benefits would flow from their actions the truth of the matter was that they were genuinely convinced that they were doing God’s work by helping liberate oppressed peoples and bring enlightened policies, not to mention clean water and proper medical services, to blighted parts of the globe. What is more surprising is that, for the most part their policies genuinely were aimed at doing good.

The problem was that the people upon whom they hoped to inflict this good did not see things in quite the same light as the British did. People resent being told that their way of doing things, hallowed by generations of tradition, are wrong and that they need wiser, foreign people, to show them the right way and when those supposedly wiser people turn out to be culturally tone deaf, that resentment boils over into anger. Generations of idealistic Englishmen wore themselves out in fruitless attempts to:

To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Kipling’s poem reflects the confusion and bitterness these thwarted idealists felt when they took up the White Man’s Burden only to:

And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

The entire phenomena of third world nationalism can, in very large part, be laid at the doorstep of the British Empire and its misguided attempts to “civilize” the world. The sad thing is that the reward for all their idealism was that the Empire bankrupted England and reduced her to the ranks of a second class power. The cost of running India, of keeping order, guarding its borders and providing health and welfare benefits for its population exceeded the entire revenue of the whole empire combined. It was only the returns on British investments in the areas of white settlement, primarily the United States, South Africa and Australia, that kept the British ship of state afloat for so long. When those began to fail, because the areas the British were developing had reached the point where they could finance their own economic expansion, England sank under its debts.

Today America finds itself in a very similar position. Running record deficits the Bush Administration has seen fit to squander 300 hundred billion dollars in its crusade with no end in sight. The oil, which was suppose to have defrayed these expenses, is not flowing nor will the people of Iraq allow it to be used for American purposes, at least not without a fight which the Americans cannot win.

Many modern day imperialists, innocent of military history, console themselves with the belief that America could win if only it were willing to employ sterner measures. Not so. The Nazis employed as stern measures as they could muster in their attempts to suppress the Warsaw ghetto and yet the Jews kept fighting just as the Palestinians continue to resist the barbaric measures employed by Israel. The American military, which has the American people to answer to, cannot afford to be seen being any more brutal than they already have been and even that may have been too much. There simply are not enough soldiers available to keep a restive population under control and if the Americans decide to really push them then they will really fight back, something they haven’t done so far, and then American forces will be lucky to get out alive. When I first wrote this piece back in April of 2004 I predicted:

“What is more there are not enough troops in the pipeline to sustain even the low levels we currently have on the ground and if the fighting heats up even that flow will dwindle to a trickle.”

Since then my prediction has proved to be prophetic and the Army and Marines have just reported missing their recruiting goals by over 40% for the third month in a row.

The draft is not the answer since it will only help to crystallize opposition to the war in this country at even a faster rate than it is currently forming. It is one thing to wave flags in support of “the troops” and quite another to be asked to be one of their number. A president and vice-president who dodged their chance to serve in combat have precious little moral authority to ask others to do what they were unwilling to do themselves.

Right now the best thing for America to do is to fold their tents and steal away into the night, leaving the Iraqis to sort things out for themselves. True there may be a civil war but what of it? We fought our own civil war and emerged the stronger for it. By automatically assuming that the side we would not like to see win will be the one to come out on top is to discount the values we treasure in the market place of ideas. During the Cold War it was common wisdom that the Soviet Union would be the eventual victor but those of us who had faith in the strength of our institutions and the superiority of our ideals knew that the tide was running the other way.