Marines Stabbed In Heart In San Francisco

San Francisco, through which hundreds of thousands passed in World War II to the Pacific’s bloody battles, now doesn’t have space either for the USS Iowa, which it refused in 2005 to provide anchorage for a naval museum, and is moving toward exiling the Blue Angels from its skies, nor now for the U.S. Marine Corps’ world famous silent drill team to film.

The Bay Area’s ABC affiliate reports that San Francisco’s film commission Executive Director, Stefanie Coyote, denied permission for the drill team to film a recruiting commercial. She claimed that it would interrupt traffic.

Police Captain Greg Corralles, who commands the traffic bureau that works with crews filming commercials, reminds Ms. Coyote that, “the Film Commission often approves shoots for rush hour.” Corrales, a Marine veteran and father of a son serving his fourth tour in Iraq, adds of Ms. Coyote’s action, “It’s insulting, it’s demeaning.” Corrales also said that, "Ms. Coyote's politics blinded her to her duty as the director of the Film Commission and as a responsible citizen."

Instead,

The U.S. Marine Silent Drill Platoon performed Monday morning in New York's Times Square. They filmed part of a recruitment commercial through the start of the morning rush hour -- something they could not do in San Francisco on the anniversary of 9/11.

Stefanie Coyote’s stellar background as an actress in Village of the Damned seems appropriate to her current behavior, as is her marriage to anarchic actor (now enjoying suburban comforts outside San Francisco) Peter Coyote whose view of America expressed in his piece in the January 2004 marijuana magazine High Times she seems to echo.

Not only did we as a generation not stop Imperialism and unfettered capitalism, but, we have been surrounded, seduced, subsumed, and sucked off, to some degree or another, by materialism on a global scale.
…
If today’s outlaws have any task clearly before them, it is to use their wits, skills, anarchic energy and passion to stop those so hypnotized by power and greed from perpetuating this ‘death-producing’culture.

The costs of filming in San Francisco has decimated its once thriving cinema industry. Sanity now also gone, the Coyotes gnaw on the remains of its credibility or respectability.