(NEW YORK)(February 10, 2005) One of our readers responded to the fact that America’s Daily Briefing would be setting up shop in San Francisco February 12-19 by reminding us that legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen referred to that city as “Baghdad by the Bay.” It got me to thinking about how our relationship to cities has changed over the past half century. It also got me to thinking about the real Baghdad.

Can anyone imagine referring today to an American city as “Baghdad”-by-the-anywhere? Baghdad’s name has become part of our consciousness, not a happy part, and the process is still not over.

But who even talks about Boston as “Beantown,” or refers to Brooklyn as the home of the “Dem Bums,” or thinks of Chicago as a “Hog Butcher?” Our relationship to cities has changed as newspapers columnists have declined in influence and omnipresent media and the web have made everywhere accessible anywhere all-the-time.

A half century ago, Caen could call San Francisco “Baghdad,” and it was taken as a compliment and business booster by the local chamber of commerce when Caen’s book took off (in 1949). Caen wrote a second book, Baghdad 1951, and again it sold well. Caen used the term “Baghdad” to connect San Francisco to the exotic nature of the original Middle Eastern city, then viewed as a world away, mysterious and, yes, even naughty. Time Magazine called Caen the “Caliph” of Baghdad. Calling someone a “caliph” today would be considered “fighting words.”

As recently as 1978, Hollywood remade the “Thief of Baghdad,” a classic silent era film that was originally produced in 1924, and remade in 1940 and again in 1960. Then, Baghdad could only be experienced vicariously. Today, Baghdad is engraved in the minds of all who have witnessed the past two year’s conflict.

My own first brush with Baghdad came as a prep school boy in England, where many of my best friends were from Baghdad, and where I vividly remember the day the Iraqi king was assassinated. Baghdad was not the scene of the Arabian Nights any more; my friends came from there.

And so when I first cast eyes on the Euphrates River, and then Baghdad itself, I felt as though I had landed in a familiar place. Now, courtesy of a few airlines, I can toggle back and forth between the Baghdad, Iraq and Baghdad by the Bay.

The tragedy in all of this is that few Americans will ever get to know the real Baghdad. Saddam Hussein’s regime created a caricature, reinforced by false claims of “weapons of mass destruction” and other similar Hollywood-style exaggerations by the Bush Administration. We have lost Baghdad’s historical context. And without knowing the history of Baghdad, the real one, or Baghdad by the Bay, just as real an American city, we forfeit an appreciation for the true qualities of the city.

With all of the “news” engulfing us, with all of the pictures, with all of the talking heads, with the avalanche of information, each year we actually know less about the world, not more. Our entire understanding of the world within, and the world beyond, has become a series of flashing Cliff Notes, briefly flickering on the screen.

Even my favorite buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, have lost all context and are now merely a shorthand starting point for the “War on Terrorism,” whatever that is. Once the towers were alive; today they stand as a psychographic relic, a backdrop for politicians to pander and tourists to visit.

Where am I leading? Without some understanding of the past we risk making ourselves, our own solipsistic selves, the center, the starting point of history, of every point on the globe. It is precisely that imperial mentality that engulfs Washington today.

What Washington believes, counts. Believe or get bombed. “Mission accomplished,” or, more particularly, and menacingly, “You’re either with us or against us.” Nice phrase that. Startlingly clear. A hundred years ago the master of Balliol College, Oxford posted a note on the door saying “I’m the master of this college; what I know not is not knowledge.” Oxford don Benjamin Jowett, meet the Bush Administration.

Yet in a world where preemptory decisions are made by public officials without any historical context and without any cultural texture, we are all endangered. America is not, as popularly claimed, the “only” superpower. If Iraq is proving anything, it is proving that America is not a superpower, that there are no superpowers in a televised, interneted world that delusions about “power” often lead to exactly the opposite: powerlessness. That in aggrandizing ourselves, we have diminished what are most reassuring and endearing about America: openness, honesty and caring, all of these now diluted by bombs, troops and diktats for reform.

Baghdad was the world’s first great city, the first urban agglomeration from whence all later cities and civilizations descended. Unless we keep Iraq in context, unless we respect the past and bow down to culture as much in humility as we do in modernity, we are condemned to float at sea without anchorage in history and without ties to our own American past.

San Francisco is not a “great” city any more; it does not rule California. The over-sized Episcopal Church cathedral relates to an earlier, and grander, day. But in surrendering its “greatness,” San Francisco became an even more powerful urban center, a center of ideas, of rebellion, of freedom. A loss of power led to an increase in power.

Superior claims of knowledge or insight can often prove hollow, as Senator Dan Quayle learned in 1988. During a candidate’s debate, Senator Lloyd Bentsen told Quayle: “I knew Jack Kennedy..Senator you are no Jack Kennedy.” Likewise, in a lifetime of contacts with and in the Middle East, I have come to know “Baghdad,” and to realize how little I know and how much there is to learn. And so, while occasionally writing from Baghdad by the Bay, I can begin by confessing I am no Herb Caen, and go on to study the city during our next reporting trip.

And always I will keep an eye back on the real Baghdad, and the tragedy still unreeling in that great city.

And please don’t tell President Bush they call San Francisco “Baghdad by the Bay.” He might bomb the place. The only weapons of mass destruction I have found in San Francisco to date are open minds and a willingness to challenge and stand up to orthodoxy wherever it appears, whether in Washington or Baghdad or anywhere else. Bombs away.