The Great San Francisco Bubble
Life in America’s last great progressive cocoon, as conservatives snicker and puke
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 9, 2003 ©2003 SF Gate
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/05/09/notes050903.DTL&type=printable
It’s that odd dumbstruck jolting feeling you get as soon as you step more than 25 miles away from this most progressive and funked-out and deeply flawed and self-consciously screwy of kaleidoscopic American urban metropoli: oh my freaking God, what is happening to the world? This is what you say. To yourself. Probably.
Because suddenly you find yourself pummeled with many of those lovely bleak horrible things you’ve somehow become so inured to while living in S.F., those things you might’ve slowly come to hope don’t really exist quite so violently and vehemently anymore. But of course they do.
It happens when you step off that plane in some — let’s say — “differently evolved” part of the country and don’t see a single ethnic person for four days and can’t get a decent organic basil-and-goat-cheese omelet to save your life and all the theaters are playing Adam Sandler and the concept of fresh sushi means “less freezer burn than the corn dogs.” Elitist? Whatever.
Sexism. Racism. Guns. Jingoism. Jesus fetishism. Psychopatriotism. Rampant pseudo-religious family-values faux-ethical circle jerking masquerading as Christian humility. Wal-Marts like giant florescent-lit viruses. Strip malls like a stucco plague. Ho hum, ain’t that America. It so is.
Let’s face it: We in S.F. live in a cultural bubble. A giant tofu-huggin’ gay-lovin’ lusciously fed hippie liberal sunshine-y cocoon that might as well get blasted by terrorists and die of AIDS and drop off into the ocean for all the relevance it has to the rest of the world — that is, if my rabid monosyllabic gun-lickin’ hate mail from, say, the psychopatriot Freeps over at freerepublic.com or the bilious dittoheads of lucianne.com is to be believed.
And they’re right — sort of. It’s so very true. We are freaks and crazies and tend to shrug it all off, we in our radical prosaic goofy normalcy. We live in “the Granola State,” full of “fruits and nuts and flakes.” (Isn’t that cute? That’s about as clever as it gets, slam-wise. The poor things. They try so hard).
We are indeed anti-gunlicking and pro-organic and avidly orgasmic. We are more flagrantly enthusiastically balls-out do-it-now feel-good suck-me hell-yes tolerant than Austin and Chicago and Seattle put together.
We are a danger to the status quo, a nipple-twisted threat to the “nukular” family, a pantheistic whip on the ass of the Bible Belt, a pox on the house that oil built. Or at least we try to be. Sometimes. Depends on how much Peet’s we’ve imbibed.
Because despite S.F.’s adorable slew of brazen flaws, despite our frequent hypocrisy and suckass mass transit and decimated music scene and shameful homeless issues and ridiculous housing prices and a desperate lack of exceptional pizza and an ongoing invidious adherence to snippy politically correct mind-sets and Good Vibrations closing at a tragically early 7 pm on Valentine’s Day …
Despite all of this, we sense that San Francisco still remains the most luminously progressive and culturally frappeéd and perfectly climated major metropolis in the nation, if not the entire goddamn universe, and for that we can only kneel down and be forever grateful.
Like my good friend just did. The one who recently returned from a jaunt to Italy and literally fell to her knees and kissed the glorious grungy S.F. ground when she returned, breathlessly grateful to be back on relatively free-thinking ground, as she felt all the ills of the perturbed and uptight and backward world drain right out of her.
Not that Italy wasn’t beautiful and culturally intoxicating, she said, but that it was, as she was painfully reminded, sexist as hell, homophobic as Rick Santorum, intolerant as Utah, what with the example of my friend’s young shy half sister casually molested and possibly worse by a drunken Italian suitor and then everyone pretty much shrugging it off and brushing it aside and asking what she did to deserve it and no one standing up for the girl or smacking the dolt with a brick before castrating him with a rusty pizza cutter. Just one example.
And on one leg of her return flight, my normally kind and gentle friend found herself taking a sort of savage delight in the oddly perturbed stares she received from the Portland-bound passengers, many rather confused and slightly mortified as they read their Nora Roberts and Michael Crichtons and she, of course, sat there enthusiastically marking juicy passages from “The Ethical Slut” with a yellow highlighter. Ah, perspective.
But maybe the sneering anti-bubblers are right. Maybe S.F. is an entirely pointless, disposable, disease-ravaged wasteland full of perverts and icky gay people and used-up liberalism and way too many amazing organic-produce markets and yoga studios and wine shops and fetishwear outlets and Pulitzer Prize winners and a coastline to nourish your soul.
Maybe that’s why we’re the only city in the entire country whose median home prices are still skyrocketing, into gross obscenity, as the rest of the nation’s real estate prices plummet like Bush’s gutted economy.
Seems millions still want to live here. Go figure. Something about the weather. And the dazzling beauty. And the tolerance. The intellectual buzz. The mind-set. The great food and juicy sexuality and progressive politics and funky architecture and the wide-open encouragement to be as independently minded and screamingly divinely naked as you can possibly be. But hey, only if you want to.
Can you get doses of S.F.’s brand of rainbow acceptance elsewhere, in other major cities? Of course. Small but wonderful hot pockets abound in, say, Austin and N.Y. and L.A., delicious enclaves of Chicago and Miami Beach and Atlanta. Not to mention the dozens of staunchly quirky college towns from Ann Arbor to Asheville to Eugene.
But overall, in a nation where innovative, even anarchic ideas about gender and belief and the violent insult that is our sanctimonious oil-drunk warmongering government are not only frowned upon but also openly mocked and threatened and sneered at, San Francisco still reins as the funk epicenter, the winking liberal stronghold, the ecstatic 69 to the nation’s droning missionary position.
Hey, we know it’s a bubble. Most of us love the bubble, are exceedingly proud of the bubble, kneel at its gloriously flawed but still radiant altar. Anti-progressives want to burst that bubble? Have at it, honey. Go on and burst it — all over the rest of the country. C’mon, you know you want to.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Subscribe to Mark’s deeply skewed, mostly legal Morning Fix newsletter.Mark Morford’s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.
