On my way to the Sweet Spot to buy amber essence and some incense (the very small business is run by a black American who dresses like Osama bin Laden—I’m certain his operation is under surveillance), I came across this small event in Red Apple’s parking lot:

The women with hats are members of MOMAW (Mothers Day Original Movement Against War) and their program is inspired by an anti-war proclamation made in 1870 by the founder of Mother’s Day, Julia Ward Howe, who invented the now-innocuous, entirely Hallmarked occasion in response to the Civil War. “Our husbands,” Howe wrote,” shall not come to us reeking with carnage.” Though my knowledge of Howe is limited to this parking lot, and the question as to whether or not the notion of a “just war” (if there can ever be such a thing, which I very much doubt) can be applied to the Civil War is largely unsettled in my head, in his book Marxism and Literature, British sociologist Raymond Williams describes this type of re-appropriation of a people’s history as a “counter-hegemony.” “[It is] a deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order.” Later he writes: “It is significant that much of the most accessible and influential work of counter-hegemony is historical: the recovery of discarded areas or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations.”

The hats the women wore looked pretty in the sun, and after a moment of listening to their music and speeches (“Tell President Bush and Senator Cantwell to stop funding the Iraq war…We can support our troops without supporting the war”), I went the Sweet Spot, which is near the intersection of 23rd and Jackson. The space that once contained the small business was empty. Sweet Spot had closed. Was it the CIA? The war on terror? I always wanted to tell the owner that it wasn’t wise to look like Osama bin Laden in this day and age. On closer look, a note on the glass door of the empty space informed me that the business had moved to a new location not far from Columbia City. Sadly, the Walgreens behind the ladies with the hats does not sell the essence that was once in Sweet Spot.