Fade To Gray

[The San Francisco Bay Guardian comes out every Wednesday, as I assume it has for quite a bit more than the ten years that I've lived here. For my first couple of years as a San Franciscan, I looked forward to Wednesdays, gobbling each week's issue like potato chips from the bag. Its approach to political reporting (i.e., showing the thinnest veneer of objectivity, or what they call advocacy journalism) shaped the way I learned to think about the city's crazy, fascinating sociopoliticoeconomic culture.]

[Around the time I decided to go to law school (2001), I began to get a little weary of the Bay Guardian's "if you're not with us, you're against us" style. In the wake of Tom Ammiano's write-in campaign for mayor in '99, the return of elections for the Board of Supervisors by district the same year, and the consequent election of an anti-"machine" Board majority in '01, I began to question the whole concept that the city's politics could be simply summarized as "big-money Democratic machine" vs. "left-wing advocate for the masses." This doubt began my current philosphical bugaboo, people's constant need to create black-and-white dichotomies: capitalist/socialist, white/non-white, gay/straight, etc. My devotion to the Gray Area can be attributed directly to my disillusionment with the grand narrative espoused by the Bay Guardian and the often unconscious parroting of it by most other commentators on local politics.]

[The only formal stab I ever took at codifying my views was the commentary I published in my school's law review. (Not available online, which is my fault; long story.) My basic thrust was that even the supposedly anti-"machine" '01 Board majority (having only in common their opposition to then-Mayor Willie Brown) existed along a spectrum, from comparatively moderate Democrats like Aaron Peskin to leftissimo firebrands like Chris Daly and Matt Gonzalez. (I can't believe the latter site is still up!) This spectrum didn't get nearly the coverage I thought it deserved.]

[Indeed, the Guardianistas raved that election night that "we" won. Some imaginary collective whole had prevailed, rather than a group of very different individual politicians running in very different districts. I tried to point this out in my piece, and to argue that omitting the truth as the "progressive" Bay Guardian did was always unprogressive, even if it won elections. (Gonzalez was nice enough to write a detailed critique when I sent him a copy.) Nowadays, by the way, the remaning "progressive" wing of the Board is defined mostly by their (weaker) opposition to current Mayor Gavin Newsom, but the B.G. still hews to their good guys/bad guys stance.]

[Well, my own life has drifted elsewhere, and so has San Francisco politics. There are more so-called pro-"machine" Board members than there were just a few years ago, and it seems to me that Newsom is a shoo-in for re-election next year. This would have riveted and appalled me back then. (The gay marriage thing was nice, but that's about it for Gavin.) Now? I can't seem to get that excited about electoral politics anymore. Even Maria Shriver's incipient re-election as California First Lady gets mostly a shrug from me.]

[(I did feel a bit of the old frisson when Steve Inskeep and Juan Williams agreed on NPR this morning that the GOP had pretty much acknowledged that they've given up the House of Representatives for lost, and only had half a hope of keeping the Senate. That means that woman who purports to represent my interest in the People's House will be Speaker of the House in just a couple of months. Wow.)]

[However, I did pick up this week's Bay Guardian and read with real interest their piece, entitled with typical modesty "The Guardian's San Francisco: 40 Years Later." Tim Redmond's "Unified Theory of San Francisco Politics" (not, it seems, viewable online; sorry about that) is exactly what turned me off about five years ago:]

["There are two ways to look at a city. It's first and foremost a place where commerce and industry are done, where wealth is found and distributed - or it's first and foremost a place where people live and meet each other and read and write and sing and dance and make art and fall in love and raise kids and breathe the air and look at the sky...]

["It's first and foremost an economic nexus from which to extract money - or it's first and foremost a community into which you put energy, time, life.]

["You can decide one way or another, and that will determine what kind of a city you want it to be, but you can't have it both ways. Because there are costs to the choices you make." (Italics mine.)]

[Commerce is a human activity, just as basic to us as all those other things Redmond extols. While money isn't a human universal, exchanging things of value is. I get that it's quite common to overdo the buying and selling at the expense of the other stuff, and I believe deeply that money does distort all other human values. But it seems to me that Redmond, the Bay Guardian, and people who believe that Marxism offers a practical program for change think they're working toward an existence without money, without trade. I dream about that kind of world a lot, too. (I dream about lots of things. The other night I dreamt that Anna Nicole Smith got fat again. She wasn't pleased.) Then I get up and go to work to earn my pay so we can play all night.]

[I guess my point is that there are more than two ways to look at anything, including San Francisco. Maybe especially San Francisco. Admitting that would undermine the Bay Guardian's whole world. This makes them profoundly conservative, no matter the Cliché Guevara fist raised in the air. I don't read it much anymore.]

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[P.S. Aside: I prefer the older short form "Bay Guardian" to "Guardian." It adds to their claim to cover the near East Bay as well as the city, avoids confusion with the U.K. daily, and sounds less martial somehow. The damn paper wants a world that combines Burning Man with the Paris Commune; why call it something so soldier-y?]