‘Pity the Nation’: City Lights Books Displays Banners Warning Against Tyranny in San Francisco

City Lights Books in San Francisco this week unveiled banners quoting founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “Pity the Nation,” echoing his call to resist authoritarianism.

By Aidin Vaziri

In San Francisco’s North Beach, where the Beat Generation once gave poetry a megaphone, a familiar voice has returned to the facade of City Lights Books.

The storied bookstore unfurled banners Tuesday, Oct. 21, quoting founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Pity the Nation,” a decades-old warning against tyranny that feels newly urgent amid reports that federal agents are being deployed to the Bay Area.

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars,
Whose sages are silenced and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that praises conquerors and acclaims the bully as hero.
Pity the people who allow their freedoms to erode and their rights to be washed away.
My country tears of thee. Sweet land of liberty!

Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights in 1953, creating what would become a hub for the Beat Generation. His fearless defense of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” during the 1957 obscenity trial cemented the store’s role as a sanctuary for free expression — and for dissent.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and co-founder of City Lights Books in San Francisco’s North Beach, photographed in 1995. JOHN O'HARA

He wrote “Pity the Nation” in 2007, near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, as a lament for what he saw as America’s moral drift. The poem was inspired by Lebanese American poet Kahlil Gibran’s 1933 work of the same name, itself a meditation on a nation’s loss of virtue.

Ferlinghetti — a U.S. Navy veteran, pacifist and self-described “philosophical anarchist” — used poetry as a form of protest, confronting hypocrisy, bigotry and complacency. His words called out a nation that “praises conquerors,” fears outsiders and allows its freedoms to erode through apathy.

The banners remained visible off busy Columbus Street as the Trump administration began dispatching federal immigration agents to the Bay Area on Wednesday, Oct. 22, marking the start of a long-threatened crackdown that local officials have denounced as politically driven. 

The move has rattled immigrant communities and drawn sharp rebukes from San Francisco leaders, who accused the president of using fear as a pretext for federal intervention.

In that charged atmosphere, City Lights’ display reads as both protest and prophecy — a reminder, in Ferlinghetti’s own words, of what happens when “freedoms erode and rights are washed away.”

For seven decades, City Lights has served as a gathering place for poets, thinkers and dissenters. More than three years after Ferlinghetti died in 2021 at age 101, his defiant spirit still lingers in the city he helped define.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/city-lights-pity-the-nation-21115378.php