My love affair with San Francisco began in the early 60s when I was studying Russian at the Army Language School in Monterey. We would drive up on weekends to do Russian things, like visit the Znanie Bookstore on Geary Boulevard, and the tea shops on Clement for borscht and piroshki. That part of town, which has since become Chinatown West, used to be populated by lots of Russian expats. Except for the Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Cathedral on 26th Avenue and Geary and a few other churches, the Russian flavor is gone now, but the memories remain.
It was love at first sight. When I went to Munich to study and first discovered the delights of the big city, after growing up in rural New England, there was no keeping me down on the farm. While going on one day about never wanting to leave Munich, an American friend suggested to me that I ought to get to know San Francisco, that America too had such things to offer if I wanted to start my life over as a big-city kid, but do it in my own country.
Half a century later I wrote her to thank her and tell her I had taken her up on her suggestion. As soon as I got out of the army in the summer of 1965, I headed straight for San Francisco, got an apartment near Golden Gate Park with a friend, where I spent most weekends on a bicycle, living for almost a year before my savings ran out and I needed to get a job and begin my adult life in earnest. I came at a very heady time, stayed with friends in the Haight/Ashbury before it blossomed as the home of the hippies, marched down Market Street every year protesting the Vietnam War. There was a time when I thought the ideal job would be to drive a cab, and I took pride in getting to know the whole city. I once boasted I could find my way around blind-folded.
Because of those roots I put down in my 20s, I never seriously identified with another place after that. Berlin had captured my heart, and I lived many years in Tokyo and might have settled there, actually. But San Francisco kept calling me home. The people who lived there who had become my chosen family more than anything else, of course. But the physical location, as well. After half a century you build up associations with so many streets and buildings that unless you work at it, it’s easy to give into the temptation of living entirely in the past in your head.
Not every place has that kind of effect on people. But Paris does. Venice does. “See Naples and die,” Goethe once said. And then there’s Tony Bennett’s kitschy little tune that manages to move even the hardest of hearts: "I left my heart in San Francisco."
The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gray
The glory that was Rome is of another day
I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan
I'm going home to my city by the Bay…
Then there's that other great San Francisco song, the one made popular by Jeanette MacDonald in the 1936 film she made with Clark Gable, titled San Francisco.* More sentimental than kitschy:
It only takes a tiny corner of
This great big world to make a place you love
My home up on the hill
I find I love you still
I've been away but now I'm back to tell you:
San Francisco
Open your golden gate
You let no stranger wait outside your door
San Francisco
Welcome me home again
I'm coming home
To go roamin' no more.
Go see a movie sometime at the Castro Theater. They begin with a mini-concert on the Wurlitzer Organ before the film starts and as the organ console sinks below the stage before the film starts, they always play this song and there’s no shortage of teary eyes and wild applause. Did I say sentimental? You ain’t seen sentimental until you’ve seen a theater full of gay queens showing their affection for the city that even today, at least by my generation, gets called the “gay Mecca.”
And now San Francisco, like the rest of this country, has fallen on hard times. Take a deep breath and have a look at this video about the failure of its citizens to keep their heads above water in this time of the twin plagues, the Trump Nightmare and the Covid-19 plague.
What this video makes clear is that good intentions are not enough. We made a terrible mistake in creating a have vs. have-not society which left the have-nots vulnerable to drugs and crime and then jailed them when they fell through the cracks. And then we made a worse mistake by changing that policy so that the mentally ill didn't go to jail anymore without making sure they had homes and hospitals to go to instead - arguing that this is America and we can't remove one's right to fail, and assuming that falling prey to drugs and mental illness is somehow a choice that must be respected - sending them out into the streets instead.
The problems San Francisco faces pre-date these disasters and have causes which are much more deeply-rooted. San Francisco’s social decay is America’ social decay, and while all our attention these days seems to be focused on the November election, my concern is that ridding the country of the corruption at the federal level, the narcissist in the White House and the Senate that has become little more than a rubber-stamp agency for carrying out the wishes of what a friend of mine calls “our corporate owners,” by throwing them all out of office, we will only have stopped the worst of the hemorrhaging that comes from the miscarriage of American democracy. A Democratic band-aid will not do the trick.
There are encouraging signs. Recent social movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, the various women’s marches like the one that followed the 2016 installation of Trump in the White House, all suggest that the American dream isn’t dead yet. There are still people working to keep it alive. But as white people, in particular, - and others as well - finally begin to pick up the pace of recognizing just how much weight we’re carrying as a nation that began with slavery and genocide, we are still working against cultural patterns that might just overwhelm us and do us in in the end.
A recent Rolling Stone article refers to the United States now as a “failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government”…responsible for the death rate of the current pandemic.
Rolling Stone sees the start of America’s demise in its failure to stand down after its victory in the Second World War. Instead, it went on to generate more and more wealth in order to become an imperial power, and as we all know the generation of wealth is always at odds with a fair distribution of wealth. Having made its choice to go with the wealth-makers, thus allowing the little guy to fall through the cracks, the U.S. effectively went down the path to ploughing the American dream under.
The little guy benefited for a while, got his house and his washing machine and his car. But once the endorsement of wealth acquisition as a primary goal became the thing we assumed people came running from Third World countries to America for, and not because it was an equitable society, we had sown the seeds for our ultimate destruction.
One of our political parties, the Republicans, made individualism the center of our national ethic and the other party never seriously offered an alternative. Both reflected American me-first values. Superman became the hero children saw as the savior of the world, somebody who could cut through the bureaucracy, the corruption, the ineptitude of collectives and fix things single-handed. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, the Green Arrow, Spiderman, to name just a few of the individual heroes in the tradition of the Lone Ranger, became the source to look to to find what ails America. For the bookish set, to this day, it is the industrial magnates and the grand entrepreneurs held high by the likes of Ayn Rand that symbolize what’s best about America.
And that means anything smacking of cooperative effort, collective action, unionism or any notion that we as a nation might rise or fall together got dismissed as a Communist notion (which it, of course was). The Europeans found, especially in the Scandinavian models, a middle path and called it Democratic Socialism, but Americans were too conditioned by the Superman mindset to find compromise attractive. We were strong. We were mighty. We were winners. We don’t surrender to bad bad Socialism.
And so here we are, at a time where our biggest challenges are such things as global warming, nuclear proliferation, mass migration from poverty-stricken countries to advanced nations, and a vulnerable global economy and what do we have to meet those challenges with but a “me first, I’ve got mine and screw you” values-system. I’m talking about our actual values, not our hypocritically espoused ones. And me-firstism cannot take us to social equity and social responsibility, and the kind of cooperative efforts that would relieve the tensions that stem from a world divided into haves and have-nots.
Americans are by no means the only bad guys in the world. The Chinese are putting their troublesome minority, the Uighurs, in concentration camps. In Iran, gay people are thrown from rooftops. In Turkey reporters who say the wrong thing go to jail. The irresponsibility at the top in Lebanon which enabled the explosion in Beirut means that three out of four Lebanese will now be dependent on foreign generosity just to put food on the table. Some places have more conspicuous corruption, some are visibly more incompetent. But none of these “What about X” arguments change the fact that America, which once aspired to be a role model for the world, has failed miserably.
Consider the evidence for that claim laid out in that Rolling Stone article:
- in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed as many American men and women by the end of April as died on D-Day. By July, as many as died in Normandy.
- By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.
- The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.
- The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs.
- The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.
- In the 1950s, the salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees. Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen.
- Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy.
- Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans.
- Legend though it may be, George Washington is credited with never having told a lie. Compare that with the current president: as of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false statements numbered 20,055.
- In the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds.
- America has gone from being the world’s big brother to being a nation to be pitied. Newspapers around the world refer to living in Canada as “like owning an apartment above a meth lab.”
- Dozens of flights to and from Asia fly in and out of Vancouver every day. Just three hours south by car, in Seattle, that number is either zero or close to it.
- A few weeks ago, on July 30th, the province of British Columbia had five Covid-19 patients. Massachusetts, which has the same population, had 44 times that many.
We’re broken and are in desperate need of fixing.
I continue to argue that the Buddhists are onto something when they say we should be cautious about thinking that our ideas are real, that we're better off keeping some humility and remembering the blind men and the elephant. So I want to say that what I've claimed here as facts are more fears than certainties, and I'm not convinced, actually, that we are done for. Also, I would never argue that America is or even should be an actual democracy; only that it shouldn’t be an oligarchy. What keeps my patriotism going is the respect for the American dream. It’s fine with me that America fails at democracy, so long as I’m convinced the aspiration to the popular conception of democracy, understood as a maximally egalitarian collective with certain basic rights protected, continues to stay alive. What is really scary at the moment is the evidence that Americans are giving up on that aspiration. The two major camps within Trumpist Republicanism are first, the super wealthy, and those persuaded the super wealthy know best, and second, the politically religious: the first group seeking oligarchy/plutocracy, the second, theocracy.
And let me be clear; I’m not arguing for majority rule. They still had civics classes when I was a teenager and I remember from those days the arguments found in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere that without the means of assuring universal liberties - a Constitution and a Supreme Court to prevent a tyranny of the majority - we would have mob rule. I’m not arguing that what’s wrong with America is that the majority doesn’t get what it wants; I’m arguing that those who get to make the laws are so conspicuously chosen these days by those with the money to buy opinions.
We look to the Constitution to assure that rights continue to be extended to more and more of the population, and historically we’ve done pretty well since the early days in eliminating racism and sexism inherent in its earliest pre-amendment versions. But we are stuck, at present, in that we have not found ways around keeping out of power those who serve their own interests at the expense of the nation at large, specifically the less powerful. Trump governs by executive power because Congress fails to exercise its authority; McConnell holds up legislation unless it makes the rich richer; the Republican Party has taken us back to a time when the landowner had all the say over the landless, except that today it’s the wealthy over the poor. And even the Supreme Court, in Citizens United, has thrown its support behind the plutocrats.
What keeps me hopeful are things like the Black Lives Matter movement, and the efforts to finally rid this country of the monuments to the Confederacy, that loathsome disgusting white supremacist nation people in the South left the United States for in order to maintain the right to hold onto their slaves. From the days of Civil Rights on, there have been efforts to extend full rights to the descendants of African slaves, the same rights held without further ado by the descendants of Norway and Poland and other nations we associate with white-skinned people.
There has been notable progress there, despite the redlining and the backsliding. Gay people, in my lifetime, have gone from being too terrified to admit even to themselves in the wee hours of the morning alone in their rooms that they were gay to being able to marry each other, hold their heads high, and find love and respect coming readily, for the most part, from their neighbors. Even the churches are spending less time these days blaming their gods for their bigotry. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able from the House floor to tell that piece of crap Congressman from Florida, Ted Yoho, that she was somebody’s daughter and deserved not to be called a “bitch.” Things can and do get better in America.
The prodigal son story in the Bible is a metaphor for how a loving parent sometimes has to ignore his or her healthy and socially responsible children and put all their energies into caring for the sick and wayward one. I feel I have two messed-up children, my beloved child, San Francisco, and my pain-in-the-ass child, the United States.
I don't know where the energy's going to come from to fix them both. I hope I'm right, at least, in thinking that both suffer from the same illness - the failure to keep as our highest social and political priority the welfare of us all.
*Footnote: I posted an earlier version of this blog in which I confused the two tunes. To the sixteen of you who tuned in to that earlier version, my apologies. Careless of me. Thanks to my friend Wild Bill, who caught the error.
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