North Pacific weather patterns have been manifesting at spec. Our San Francisco holiday season has turned out soggy, dank, chilly, and gray. There being no point in griping—if you don’t like gray skies, don’t live in San Francisco—most of us batten down the hatches, turn up the heat, and curl up with a good book or a pitcher of Manhattans. Several days ago came a substantial gap between the eastwards-plodding storm fronts; the clouds parted to reveal a jewelled blue sky with nary a trace of mayhem in sight. More or less the entire population of the City lurched to its collective feet and took advantage of the fleeting respite. It was time to move, time to take action, time to get on the ball. I moved, acted, and got.
In my case that meant a thoroughgoing shopping expedition in the Castro, the village-within-a-city that morphed from a plain-jane working class neighborhood into a wacky yet loveable oasis perched on the last stretch of the real Market Street, just before it loses its asphalt marbles and becomes a serpentine Alpine trail crawling up Twin Peaks—there to forget itself utterly and devolve into the corporate dullness of Portola Avenue. Driving is futile in the Castro; parking is scarce and easily-dented pedestrians swarm everywhere. Thus I grabbed a few handy canvas shopping bags, and trying to ignore the inevitable thoughts of elderly head-scarved Moscow babushkas wearily trudging about seeking potatoes while background balalaikas ululate Doctor Zhivago, out I went into the village, shopping list in pocket, spring in step.
It’s a charming place, the Castro. A very casual glance might confuse Castro Street between Market and 19th for the main drag through a small American town, but although Bedford Falls’ Main Street may sport grocery stores, pharmacies, real estate offices, bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants, and clothing emporia, it isn’t likely to share the abundance of sex-toy shops and gay bars, nor the overall louche je ne sais quoi, that makes the Castro very much its own creation. On my sparkling Monday morning, the sidewalks still mirror-bright from their recent soaking, the air fresh and moist, shops opening like so many morning glories and early birds such as myself chirping hither and yon, the Castro was a place to warm the heart. Only a tiny reminder of San Francisco’s urban woes—by way of a few druggies lurching about, burned by the morning sun—dampened, if ever so slightly, the palpable sense of prosperity and comfort. If you must live in a city, this is a good city in which to live. The grocery store clerk was chipper as she rang me up (quaint phrase, that—but cash registers still ring, even though they’re little more than fancy-pants ATMs nowadays) and the fellow at the pharmacy was antsy and distracted; he had his sights set on a dash down 18th to Starbucks but his supervisor, a.k.a. the clerk at the next register, would have none of it. Poor chap was trapped, uncaffeinated, at his register, a helpless slave to capitalistic tyranny by way of the middle-aged guy (me) buying a jumbo-sized bottle of 1200 mg no-odor fish oil tablets. If the ship goes down, you will die chained to your oar, Forty-One. So row well, and live.
But what a contrast between the Castro’s villageois swank and the America depicted in the media! That America is an offputting, dismaying, even frightening place. An ignorant, superstitious, and violence-prone citizenry inhabits its decaying cities, travels its crumbling roads, suffers its failing schools, and despairs of making good in its tanking economy. That America is a mire of hopelessness, of political gridlock, of danger and incompetence and extremism and fatalism. Don’t get sick, because that will bankrupt you, and while you’re at it, don’t get shot. The end of empire has never loomed so certain, as the failure of the Pax Americana manifests ever more obviously and the shining city on the hill turns slum. I want to run, screaming, from that America. Unsafe, untended, unclean, unloveable, that America resembles Rome of the 5th century C.E., sinister and decadent and crumbling and ready for easy pickings by the first barbarian horde to wander by.
That America seems a long way from here. While I recognize that San Francisco—weird yet wonderful in its silly way—is hardly a typical American city, I think I also recognize an agenda when I see, or more particularly read, one. The major media outlets tend to value their Cassandras over their Pollyannas. But it’s a big country and all is not dire. America may be rotting from within, but the cancer is not terminal and curative measures can be taken. If we choose to take them.
Perhaps we have idealized George Bailey’s Bedford Falls because at some level we all know that it never really existed. But it wasn’t Peyton Place, either, or Pottersville. Those are all fictional creations, just as the dying-giant America of the media could be likewise a work of fiction. I’m not ready to throw in the towel, at least not quite yet. Maybe that’s just the self-serving foolishness of a man in late middle age who is unlikely to be around for the forthcoming collapse. But maybe, just maybe, it’s a quiet refusal to be jerked around by professional mud slingers. There are a lot of peaceful, sunny Monday mornings out there. There will be more.