The Great San Francisco Bubble (FreeRepublic Mentioned)

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | day, May 9, 2003 | Mark Morford

[nickcarraway]

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.

[gcruse]

If they would fumigate San Francisco and move the radically mummified 2/3s of the population to Somalia where they belong, I would move the San Francisco in a heart beat.

[putupon]

The intellectual buzz

A city full of stoned Einsteins?

[Psycho_Bunny]

Oh....Mark Morford.

That prattling twit of wit.

[Constitution Day]

You must be missing the standard Friday morning ZOT thread.

No, I am good at multitasking.
Yes, I do "gravitate toward absurdity"! :)

I cannot resist... apparently, neither can you. Heh heh.

[sweetliberty]

"I cannot resist... apparently, neither can you"

Busted! Teehee....

[buwaya]

I'm also a resident of San Francisco.

As an earlier poster noted, this fellow exists in a bubble within a bubble. SF is not like that for most of the people who actually live here, and most of the actual residents of this city probably are a terrible disappointment to this fellow, if he ever actually were to meet them.

On real estate - SF house prices match the regional housing prices, like in Novato, San Mateo, or San Ramon, and the world he describes doesn't exist in those places any more than it does in the suburbs of Chicago.

[Shermy]

that is, if my rabid monosyllabic gun-lickin' hate mail from, say, the psychopatriot Freeps over at freerepublic.com

Hey, we're this guy's best readers!

[Calvin Locke]

... kissed the glorious grungy S.F. ground ...

It's dangerous to do that in SF. At least until the street washer goes by, scrubbing with bleach.

Kills off the various infectious diseases left by street-defecating druggies and other assorted unhygenic bums.

[Cordova Belle]

This should have been posted with a MAJOR BARF ALERT warning. I just lost my appetite.

[buwaya]

Its a city not a suburb.

If you hang around certain places in SF, yes you would see all these sights. If they bother you, avoid Civic Center and Market Street between Montgomery and Van Ness. Golden Gate park is messy and disreputable on the far eastern side. Then there is skid row, the shipyard and the poorer neighborhoods, but those places are the same anywhere.

The rest of the place, Golden Gate park included, is neat, clean, safe and beautiful as anywhere in the world, and far more so than most.

[buwaya]

This is about as over the top as Mr. Morford.

I live in SF. It is very nice.

[B-Chan]

THE SODOM & GOMORRAH DAILY BENDER: "Life in Canaan's last great progressive cocoon, as the Hebrews snicker and puke"


***

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 Canaanite urban metropoli: oh my freaking Baal, 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.G.., 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 camel in some -- let's say -- "differently evolved" part of the region and don't see a single Sodomite for four days and can't get a decent organic basil-and-goat-cheese omelet to save your life and all the corners are buzzing with priests and the concept of fresh lamb's eyes means "Here, Rover." Elitist? Whatever.

Sexism. Racism. Swords. Jingoism. Yahweh fetishism. Loyalty to one's tribe. Rampant pseudo-religious family-values faux-ethical circle jerking masquerading as Hebrew piety. Trading posts like giant oil-lamp-lit viruses. Encampments like a goats' hair plague. Ho hum, ain't that the Hebrews. It so is.

Let's face it: We in Sodom and Gomorrah live in a cultural bubble. A giant lamb-huggin' gay-lovin' lusciously fed pagan liberal sunshine-y cocoon that might as well get blasted by Persians and die of plague and drop off into the Jordan River for all the relevance it has to the rest of the world -- that is, if my rabid monosyllabic sword-lickin' hate talk from, say, the wild-eyed Zealots down in the FreeSouk 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 Wicked Basin" 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-swords and pro-organic and avidly orgasmic. We are more flagrantly enthusiastically balls-out do-it-now feel-good suck-me hell-yes tolerant than Cairo and Damascus and Babylon put together.

We are a danger to the status quo, a nipple-twisted threat to the Hebrew family, a pantheistic whip on the ass of the Torah Tribe, a pox on the house that Yahweh built. Or at least we try to be. Sometimes. Depends on how much palm wine we've imbibed.

Because despite S.G's adorable slew of brazen flaws, despite our frequent hypocrisy and suckass donkey paths and decimated music scene and shameful leper issues and ridiculous housing prices and a desperate lack of exceptional pita...

Despite all of this, we sense that Sodom and Gomorrah still remain the most luminously progressive and culturally diverse and perfectly climated major metropolis in the Fertilre Crescent, if not the entire universe, and for that we can only kneel down and sacrifice a baby to Moloch.

Like my good friend just did. The one who recently returned from a jaunt to Gaza and literally fell to her knees and kissed the glorious grungy S.G. 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 Palestine wasn't beautiful and culturally intoxicating, she said, but that it was, as she was painfully reminded, sexist as hell, homophobic as Abraham of Ur, as intolerant as Noah, what with the example of my friend's young shy half sister casually molested and possibly worse by a drunken Philistine warrior 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 rock right between the eyes. Just one example.

And on one leg of her return journey my normally kind and gentle friend found herself taking a sort of savage delight in the oddly perturbed stares she received from the Jerusalem-bound people in the caravan, many rather confused and slightly mortified as they read their Epics of Gilgamesh and she, of course, sat there enthusiastically marking juicy passages from "Ram It Up My Poop Chute" with a poo-smeared stick. Ah, perspective.

But maybe the sneering anti-Sodomites are right. Maybe S.G. is an entirely pointless, disposable, disease-ravaged wasteland full of perverts and icky gay people and used-up paganism and way too many amazing organic-produce markets and yogurt studios and wine shops and see-thru robe outlets and laurel crown winners and a Dead Sea 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 wandering Jews crossing the Jordan Yalley.

Seems thousands 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.G.'s brand of rainbow acceptance elsewhere, in other major cities? Of course. Small but wonderful hot pockets abound in, say, Jerusalem and Ur and Lebanon, delicious enclaves of Phonecia and Egypt and Africa. Not to mention the dozens of staunchly bendable Hellenic hot-spots from Sparta to Athens to Ionia.

But overall, in a region where innovative, even anarchic ideas about child sacrifice and the violent insult that is the Jews' sanctimonious olive oil-drunk warmongering leadership are not only frowned upon but also openly mocked and threatened and sneered at, Sodom and Gomorrah still reign as the ass-poling epicenter, the winking pagan stronghold, the ecstatic baby-sacrificin', cornholin' finger in the air to the Hebrews' boring "be fruitful and multiply".

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 of Moloch. Now that crazy Hebrew Lot and his stuck-up family wont let us take a crack at their kids? Have at it, honey. Go on and send out your daughters instead. We'll bust the door down. Or leave, if that's what you want. Or--

Hey, does anybody else feel hot? And what smells like sulfur? OH MY GOD THE SKY IS ON FIRE THE SK

[ the scroll upon which this text is written in burned and unreadable]

[buwaya]

Parts of SF. Mainly around City Hall.

And no way is it dirty compared to Paris.

[.38sw]

I saw many of those sights in the financial district, not skid row. It isn't confined to the tenderloid or other skid row areas. The BART stations smell of urine, and I was panhandled while standing in line, and while at the ticket machines. I used to work in SF on Sansome street, not exactly skid row. I'd have to step around vomit and human manure in the mornings. Lovely. When going to the opera house, we were accosted by many homeless panhandling us, and I didn't feel safe. Many of them are agressive. I've never been to the shipyards or the poorer neighborhoods. If they are worse than what I saw, then I'm glad I hadn't gone there. These things are enough to make me very much prefer suburban sprawl.

[buwaya]

The deviators from the Bell-curve in SF are mainly Chinese (based on school test scores, I keep track of these things), and Mr. Morford knows nothing about them.

[buwaya]

Real estate prices in SF are no different than of the region as a whole; part of the reason for this no doubt are zoning and no-growth laws.

[buwaya]

Not true about no single family developments in SF; there have been quite a few over the last three-four years. I'll note for instance the entire block formerly occupied by Safeway (or Albertsons?) by USF, and there are many other in the South and West sides.

[HamiltonJay]

Copared to Paris you may be right, but compared to cities of the civilized and modern world, particularly of the US, SF is definately among the worst!

Can't ride a street car without at least one addict on it twitching for a fix, walk down the street without being accosted by some bum, homeless using the bus stops as garbage dumps, urine smell everywhere... sorry I rank SF as one of the ugliest cities I have been in. SF looks great if you are a few miles away looking toward it, but once in it, its a dump... the facade falls. Tagging on everything... adult shops doors wide open for anyone on the street including children to see in, etc... sorry it may not be decaying in terms of its buildings, but its a dump.