Nowtopian

Blogging from San Francisco, I probably already regularly reinforce a civic narcissism that celebrates our little burg as the only, or at least one of the very few really livable places in the USA. I apologize in advance if this entry goes down that same self-absorbed, self-satisifed path, which is not my intention but probably an inadvertant result regardless.

I woke up today, after a wild week of very San Franciscan celebrating, ruminating on the mini-flurry of political attention being paid to a mysterious category called “San Francisco Values”… Seems like a good time to ruminate on that, following Halloween, Day of the Dead, and our own earlier Slow Food Feast two weeks ago…

Halloween is the municipal holiday of San Francisco values I suppose. The bridge-and-tunnel crowds pour in to the beleaguered Castro, where increasingly wealthy residents and merchants bemoan the loss of an imaginary innocence. Attempts to move the party out of the neighborhood have failed, and this year’s concluding shoot-up by teens will probably be used by the local monied to try again to “stop Halloween”–fat chance! Whatever happens to the ‘official zone’ of Halloween, the whole city goes crazy for a few days on either side of it. Parties and costumes are everywhere, it’s almost becoming a kind of Carnival. The end doesn’t really arrive until Dia de los Muertos is celebrated on Nov. 2 with a candle-lit procession full of skeletons and ghouls, rocking to dozens of drums, paying honors to the dead at magnificent altars built in Garfield Park and the SOMARTS gallery, while the Galeria de la Raza and other local institutions host shows that resonate with the theme.

The right-wing blowhards who are using “San Francisco values” to try and scare voters to vote repugnican seem to think that Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom are actually opposed to the political and social world that comprises today’s United States… Hah! Probably they know perfectly well that Pelosi will be a reliable cog in the imperial war machine, just like Mayor Newsom’s gay marriage efforts are perfectly designed to reinforce the conservative institutions and behavior this society holds up as proper and necessary bulwarks of civilization.

It’s long been a source of Orwellian amazement to me that the conservatives are so brazenly homophobic that they don’t embrace gay marriage. If you hate free sex and flamboyant public licentiousness, shouldn’t you then SUPPORT those who want to put sex back into the closet of two-people-for-life, quietly at home in their upscale, well-furnished condominiums or homes? Gay marriage is all about being normal (affluent) Americans!

San Francisco values? What could they be? Carl Nolte in today’s Chronicle takes a stab at it, providing a cross-section of middle-of-the-road answers to that question. I don’t think he gets too close to the real subtext of the query though.

Continue reading Valuing San Francisco