== The Great San Francisco Bubble ==
Life in America's last great progressive cocoon, as conservatives
snicker and pule
(By Mark Morford)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/05/09/notes050903.DTL&nl=fix
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
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 Ashville 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.