From Both Sides Now

[supergee]

My political approach comes from Robert Anton Wilson: The Right says cruel vicious things about the State; the Left says cruel vicious things about banking and big business; both are essentially correct.

That belief remains unshaken, but I fear that a similar approach is required for populism and elitism. Of course, those who remain Left Populists after Brexit and Trump are demonstrating a heroic ability to rise above mere fact, but consider that San Francisco, the technological elite’s City on a Hill (or many hills) has decayed to the point where people are crapping in the streets. (Somewhere V.S. Naipaul is chuckling.)

I suppose I must mention an alternative theory: Another thing San Francisco is famous for is acceptance of a great variety of sexual orientations, and some say their god is punishing them for it. But that, to cite Wilson again, requires believing that the entire Universe was designed and built by something so mean and petty you wouldn’t trust it to put together an outhouse.

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Sorry to be one of "them", but regarding San Francisco, I have to point out that it's complicated. That's always been a city with peculiar problems: it has multi-faceted racial problems with which it doesn't deal very well, there's a history of conservatism at odds with the reputation it puts forth (and at war with the hippies and now the kinksters), and most crucially, it has no room to expand whatsoever, which makes it remarkably small, puts everyone on top of each other in a different way from NYC, and gives it a fractious relationship with neighboring places, especially Oakland. Despite the presence of some tech companies there, SF is notably not the city of the technological elite or even of high tech; it's the dog being wagged by the huge tail of Silicon Valley, all those formerly sleepy little towns and cities that are regarded by San Franciscans and San Joseans alike as "their" suburbs, and whose tech workers now are choosing to live in San Francisco and are crowding out long-term residents and squeezing MUNI buses off bus stops with their "Google buses" to the jobs. It's quite reasonably called Silicon Valley, and dealing with its new allure and economic vitality is straining San Francisco terribly. There are messages about populism in there, but I'm not political.

M