Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

You call this a free election?
The international community sends watchdogs to monitor foreign elections -- that's just what America needs in 2000.
By Christopher Hitchens
[11/03/99]

Gay panic lite
The Matthew Shepard murder trial goes to the jury after the defense offers a modified version of its disallowed strategy.
By Dave Cullen
[11/02/99]

The faker
What has presidential candidate Bill Bradley ever done to deserve the support of liberals?
By Joe Conason
[11/02/99]

Quiet bombshell in Matthew Shepard trial
Judge Barton Voigt throws out the gay panic defense, gutting the case for a manslaughter conviction in place of murder.
By Dave Cullen
[11/01/99]

I am woman, hear me Gore
Is feminist author and Gore 2000 advisor Naomi Wolf earth-toning the vice president or just destroying his credibility?
By Jake Tapper
[11/01/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

If you talk about curbing peoples' antisocial behavior in San Francisco, you get tagged as a Giuliani. But it's actually a fundamental quality-of-life issue for the city's weakest and most defenseless people. Bus drivers are too busy snarling to attempt to enforce decent behavior on the buses. Those who try get threatened and attacked. And when thugs are threatening other passengers, it drives all but the most desperate away. Bus ridership, of course, skews to the low-income demographic, so the chances are good that the people affected are poor. I'm a single white male who makes a decent living. San Francisco's actually tolerable for me. But it must be murder if you're a couple, or have kids, or have a job where you have to be to work on time in the morning.

One of the charms of San Francisco is watching Muni drivers taunt the crowds of tiny Chinese women who shuttle between Chinatown and the modern-day sweatshops South of Market each morning. They're treated like cattle in the stifling, overcrowded buses that lurch down the street, brake and start with wrenching jerks and sometimes don't bother to stop for riders.

Cabs aren't the answer because there hardly are any. In most of the city you can't depend on getting one before 9 p.m. on non-weekend nights. I'm always struck by the crowds of tourists lined up outside pricey hotels and restaurants, wanly waiting for a cab. They're probably so caught up in the romance of the city that they don't think about how pathetic it is that they have to spend an hour waiting for a ride back to their overpriced hotel.

3) The homeless. It is considered a mark of pride here that the city does not harass the homeless. The trouble with this is that the city does nothing to help them, either. The result is an ongoing human tragedy of epic proportions. On Haight Street, on a given Saturday, you can see dozens of teenagers and those in their 20s, fried out of their skulls, systematically killing themselves and each other. A large portion of the other homeless you see on the street are obviously victims of substance abuse of one form or another. San Franciscans view this as a laudable example of their tolerance. But for the addicted, this sort of tolerance is not so much freedom as a trap. Most San Franciscans like political positions that remove from them the responsibility to actually do something about a particular issue. The city's homeless policies coincide nicely with this tendency.

4) The cultural scene. When people bemoan gentrification, whether thanks to the Internet or other rich people, they generally point to the artists the trend is pricing out of the city. This might not be a bad thing. I could never quite figure out why San Francisco is considered a cultural center. The theater scene here, particularly the mainstream commercial fare, is undistinguished. (The one superior theater company is the Berkeley Repertory, across the bay.) The music scene, save for a few underground turntablists, is unnotable. The symphony and opera are considered decent, the museums less so. The architecture is the visual equivalent of fingernails scraping across the blackboard of the horizon, a panorama of boxy columns and clumsy attempts at attention-getting. This, too, is an effect that took decades to accomplish. The journalism may be said to be undistinguished at best, an ongoing joke at worst.

The artists who do live here are a pain. The idea that the city is a mecca for artists mostly means that the person making your latte considers him or herself too cool to actually do it. In Chicago, there is a reigning civic culture: You do your job. It goes for the mayor, night-club doormen, cops and people who work in coffee shops. In San Francisco, most artists are insecure, which manifests itself in an aggrieved contentiousness that's extremely tiresome to be around.

Salon's recent article about Internet gentrification featured a tale about an artist who wanted to get into a local art group's live-work space. "Getting in was about as difficult as getting into one of those co-ops on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (no Jews, entertainers or new money, please). He's a local hero, and he no longer belongs." It doesn't occur to him that decisions about who occupied the live-work space might be made on the basis of considerations that aren't quite comparable to anti-Semitism.

The biggest problem with those who think the Internet is ruining San Francisco is their naive view of humanity. There will always be jerks with cell phones and car alarms. The real test of a city is whether it makes life better for its citizens, particularly its most defenseless ones. That's a complex task, one that requires a lot of thinking and hard work as well. But those are two trenchant reasons it's not going to be done any time soon in San Francisco.
salon.com | Nov. 3, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon