Imagethief just dragged his weary self off of the eleven hour flight from Beijing to San Francisco, where he is spending a couple of hours before connecting on to San Diego. Having been following the what's been following around the Olympic Torch Relay for the past few days, I was curious to see if there were any signs of the impending arrival of torch in San Francisco.

There certainly were. The huge above-the-fold image in both this morning’s New York Times and in my hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle*, is of two enormous “Free Tibet” banners that have been strung from the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a startling image, and the latest in a string of difficulties that have beset the Relay.

The huge, all-cap headline in the print edition of the Chronicle is, “SF braces for torch turmoil”. (The online version has a different headline.) More activist action is obviously expected.

Looking at these photographs splashed over the front pages, and thinking back on the disturbances in London and Paris, the apparent grassroots support enjoyed by the Free Tibet movement is quite surprising. While this will certainly concern BOCOG, I can think of one unexpected place that it might be making teeth grind: The headquarters of Dream for Darfur and the Save Darfur Coalition.

These organizations have been running a significant PR campaign –the “Genocide Olympics”-- for over a year, but their message has now been totally overwhelmed by the Tibet issue. As much as they may sympathize with the Tibetan activists, it must also gall the Darfur activist that they themselves never seemed likely to arouse this much grass-roots enthusiasm.

Tibet seems to exert a particular hold over the Western imagination. I don’t know if this is the result of canny PR by the Tibetan exile groups, the power of the Dalai Lama as a spokesperson and symbol, or the halo-effect (pardon the Catholic metaphor) of Tibet’s obvious Buddhism. Obviously current enthusiasm is also inflamed by recent events, which were much more proximate to China than anything happening in Darfur, but the underlying sympathy is long established. Other ethnic autonomy and independence movements around the world must be looking on in envy.

**The Chronicle has been in decline for years and is mostly AP wire copy, barring a three page local section and sports. The main front page story cited above was written by local reporters, who referred to the Chinese ambassador to the US by his given name, "Wenzhong". This in a city with a huge Chinese population. Or perhaps they are just being informal.