David Landau

A year after 9/11, the talk of the town in Berkeley centers largely  on two political issues. The first, as you might suppose, is what  many people in this avidly antiwar community see as the coming  invasion of Iraq. The second, rather surprisingly, has to do with  what kind of coffee ought to be legal within the city limits.

How, you may ask, might anyone think of banning coffee? In this haven  of enlightenment, the answer is obvious. The City of Berkeley, in its  offices and at its functions, will only dispense coffee that is  "socially conscious" -- coffee, in other words, that's grown with  deliberate respect for the environment, for the workers who produce  it and for the customers who consume it. Coffee bywords like  "shade-grown," "fair-trade" and "organic" have become points of  almost religious adherence in a city that also proclaims itself to be  "nuclear-free" and "hate-free."

Indeed, the Berkeley City Council will consider, at its coming  meeting, a proposal to outlaw the sale, within city limits, of any  coffee that fails to conform to these measures of social  consciousness. The measure proposes a hefty fine, and even jail-time,  for businesspeople who do not adhere to such a ban. In fairness, the  proposal does not seem likely to pass. Berkeley Mayor Shirley Dean, a  sensible woman by any standard, has all but said of it: How  ridiculous can you get? And even the most politically zealous of  office-holders understand that the city continues to take an economic  bath for the grossly insensitive gestures it committed after 9/11:  such as officially condemning the invasion of Afghanistan while  barely mentioning the attacks in New York and Washington; and  ordering American flags removed from city firetrucks as a sign of  respect to student demonstrators. In the wake of these official  actions, many thousands of people in surrounding communities  undertook a silent boycott of Berkeley's shops and restaurants. The  situation got so bad that city merchants began to advertise the  commercial attractions of Berkeley on local TV -- a first for a city  that has long enjoyed the luxury of thriving businesses while at the  same time striking an anti-business pose.

And that's the nub of irony around Berkeley's "socially-conscious"  coffee debate. The revolution-minded folks in Berkeley love their  privileges. They love their vegetarian diets, their organic-food  supermarkets. They love their morning lattes organically derived,  decaffeinated, topped with soy-milk foam. They insist on the plethora  of choices that the market economy provides them. At the same time,  they argue stridently on behalf of socialist regimes -- Fidel  Castro's Cuba being a particular favorite -- that make no such  choices possible. The politically progressive families in Berkeley  who discuss, each Sunday evening, whether they should eat Chinese,  Thai, Moroccan, Japanese, Ethiopian, Indian, Italian, Persian,  French, Turkish, Mexican or American -- all readily available, at  modest prices -- hold it as an article of faith that present-day Cuba  offers more justice than does the chaotic marketplace of the United  States. Never mind that in Cuba the average family -- no less  talented, no less industrious, no less worthy, no less  pleasure-loving than its American counterpart -- is engaged in a  daily struggle to put just one kind of food on the table; and that in  the typical Cuban home, coffee -- simple coffee, of just one type --  is often a luxury beyond reach.

This rather amazing tendency to savage, verbally, the advantages that  one has -- while at the same time clinging to those advantages  tenaciously -- is just the frame of mind that informed Berkeley's  reactions to the savagery of 9/11. Within minutes after the attacks,  the first concern of Berkeley's activists was to defend Arabic  peoples against premature, and racially motivated, imputations of  involvement. This reaction was the characteristic one of striking a  pose on behalf of the world's underprivileged peoples. Later that  same day, as it became clear the hijackers were exclusively men from  Arabic countries, Berkeley's commentators unfolded a bacchanale of  recrimination against the United States and Israel. In ensuing days,  the message "Vengeance is theirs, and they have repaid" descended all  the way from the Left's most exalted commentators -- Noam Chomsky,  June Jordan, Susan Sontag -- through a structure of subalterns who  spread the word in Berkeley and other places. This reaction permitted  American Leftists to stand above the American people in their days of  incalculable grief -- allowed Leftists, in other words, to ignore a  grief that they themselves had not invented.

Then, some time afterward, the Left evolved a more definitive  explanation for 9/11. Seizing on statements by Bush administration  officials that the attacks had presented the chance to take a hard  stand against groups like Al-Qaeda as against governments that  support them -- and pointing a finger at government analysts who had  earlier seen bits of evidence without imagining the horror to which  they would conduce -- the advanced wing of Leftist conspiracy theory  posited that the U.S. had deliberately allowed the attacks to proceed  as a way of justifying its further march to global dominion. This  theory of the event has even acquired an acronym: LIHOP, which stands  for "Let it happen on purpose." Nowadays, whenever one criticizes the  attacks, LIHOP is likely to be invoked by Leftists who ominously  intone: "We really do not know what happened on 9/11 -- do we?"

Now, with trouble brewing over Iraq, the Left claims to know  precisely what is to come. It's a fetching juxtaposition: what  occurred in the past is questionable, while the future is certain. In  fact, we know pretty well what happened on 9/11. A ring of  conspirators from the Arab world -- many from privileged backgrounds,  their leader comparable to a Rockefeller, a Cabot or a Harriman --  vented their rage in an unprecedented kind of attack against  thousands of people who were just going about their workaday lives.  Hitler's crematoria were abruptly re-created in downtown New York and  in other places. Thousands died, and a world mourned. Meanwhile, the  Left unfolded exotic explanations and denounced any effort that  governments might make to prevent a recurrence.

That bell-like noise you may be hearing is the international Left  sounding the tocsin against America's alleged war of expansion in  Iraq. In fact, however, to borrow the Left's standard-bearing phrase  about 9/11, we really do not know what is happening. The best that  may occur is that America's war rhetoric will foment change from  within Iraq. Indeed, this explanation of the Bush administration's  strategy is as plausible as any other.

What is completely implausible is the Left's sentimental argument  against even the threat of war. "All of us mourned for the victims of  9/11," Leftist apologists are now saying. "Let us not convert our  grief over 9/11 into warlike feelings against Iraq." As a clear  memory will testify, the Left took no part in the collective grief.  If the Left mourned anything about 9/11, it was the abrupt and  conclusive death-blow to its own pallid rhetoric. For convinced  Leftists, the cadences of their own arguments, of their beloved  slogans, are life itself. Threaten to take away their points of view,  and they think their faces might disappear. Others will honor their  humanity more than they themselves will do; but in times like these,  it's an effort supreme.