SF Bay Area is still the best

[+ glutes]

Below is a column written by SFGate writer Mark Morford. Please enjoy and comment!!

 

Dang you left-coast liberal scum.

 

Buncha nugatory tree-hugging tofu-headed pacifist left-wing nutjobs,

antiwar and Dubya-resistant and all smug and gay-friendly, sitting

around naked in your hot spring mineral baths and enjoying deep-tissue

massages in the woods and riding the mountain bike to the next

polyamorous group sex vegan barbecue in the park. Christ.

 

Much of this country really does not like San Francisco in the

slightest. This is my experience, a general sentiment culled from

thousands of emails over a few years, excluding the happy throngs of

yearning SF expats and the large numbers who consider themselves

honorary SF-ites, underground progressives living like vegetarian

pro-choice guerrilla rebels in patriotic ultra-affordable redneck burgs

in dust-choked states that tend to rhyme with "Lexus."

 

Much of goodly America, from what I've read, thinks SF is truly

beautiful and curious and worthy of a nice tourist visit to Fisherman's

Wharf and maybe Alcatraz and North Beach for some overpriced pasta,

strolling the streets with that oh-my-God-honey-grab-the-camera-

look-at-all-the-crazies gleam.

 

But there is a certain chunk of the heartland, the "real" America (or

"Amurika," as Geedubya calls it, or sometimes just "Merka," depending on

how much he's struggling with the phonetics on the TelePrompTer), a

great gaggle of honest hard-working citizens who write in and truly

believe SF is Satan's own Romper Room, a festering cesspool of

out-of-touch non-Americans who secretly worship Fidel Castro and want to

abolish God.

 

And they think they are safe -- safe in the deeply mistaken knowledge

that their kids will never get a nose ring or a sacrum tattoo or a

hemp-wearing heavily dreadlocked boyfriend named Starrspanker, never

suffer the slings and arrows of a nuanced progressive ideology featuring

a deeper understanding of exactly who is profiting most from our "war"

on terrorism.

 

They just open, say, the Provo Daily Gazette and read about the latest

whacked Berkeley city proposal to legalize dog marriages or maybe SF's

groundbreakingly weird surgery benefit for in-progress transsexuals and

they scoff, viewing our fair City as incredibly weird and foreign and

vaguely dangerous, an open threat to family and the sanctity of marriage

and the GOP political war machine and pretty much the entire genital

region in general.

 

Oh, we've got problems, make no mistake. Issues galore. Gaping woes. We

are a deeply flawed city, an exasperating intellectual cluster-bomb

sitting like a pimple on the face of a ridiculously large and confused

state that can't even agree which end is more exploitable.

 

We are saddled with a sellout mayor and a wooden humorless governor,

homelessness galore and far too many grimy streets that smell like a

nasty mix of stale Starbucks and cheap leather and urine; water-use

issues like a collective psychosis, tract home developments like a

cancer, enough excessive PC puling and self-help whining to make Deepak

Chopra wince.

 

Energy disasters and environmental abuses and abundant

self-righteousness, a state with far too many semi-quotable celebrities

who truly think they know something about anything when in fact they

know incredibly little about almost nothing.

 

We are precious. We are indignant. Our homes are wildly overpriced. We

still ooze with far too much New Agey Birkenstock granola

sentimentality. We are often wrong. But man, at least we try.

 

Why, of course they hate us. What with all the incredible restaurants,

terrific parks, a coastline to die for, beaches, dense forests and

stunning untouched nature within a 15-minute drive, wine country less

than an hour away, and more tolerance per capita than France and maybe

Amsterdam combined except for all the hookers and the legal pot lounges.

Gosh. Jealousy is a terrible thing.

 

We have interracial dating and happy mixed-race children and men

flagrantly holding hands in the street as if it was no big deal,

lipstick lesbians riding their Harleys to Peets on Sunday mornings, the

best overall climate in the nation if you ignore the fog and entirely

avoid the Richmond/Sunset.

 

We have phenomenal sushi and astounding art murals and Good Vibrations

open late on Valetine's Day; we are the birthplace of the astonishing

Burning Man desert art festival, home to the best burritos this side of

Tijuana, panoramic views to make you weep, more world-class universities

and Nobel Prize winners than all of Switzerland.

 

And we have, more than anything, a certain awareness, a consciousness,

an attuned perspective unlike any other city. We are, as my S.O. calls

it, a "womb" city, a giant incubator of new ideas and fresh

perspectives, a destination for thinkers and rebels and innovators and

mad scientists and various quasi-geniuses some of whom are wildly

obnoxious but most of whom are truly interesting.

 

You can find it here. You can find support and a niche for your crazy

art, your vision, your body type, your particular freak flag, your

perspective. Many people don't like SF because people dare to do things

here, and they get away with it.

 

We are, in fact, quintessential urban America. More balanced and lush

and less manic than New York, more temperate and quirky than Chicago, SF

is what the freedom-inducing utopian metropolis was mapped out to be:

which is to say, more open, tolerant, funked-out, colorful, strange,

unorthodox, thoughtful, nature aware, baffled, contradictory, and

kaleidoscopic than any other city in the nation. It is equal parts

beautiful and annoying, frustrating and wonderful.

 

Perhaps this is why we seem to be so hated by sundry hunks of 'Merka. We

get it right, even in how frequently we get it wrong.

[mmk]

As only someone who had visited SF, I can completely agree with that article. I think San Francisco is a beautiful town. If I could afford it I would move there in a heartbeat (unfortunately as the columnist states the housing out there is outrageous-I have checked into it)

 

I found the people there to be very friendly and very accomodating (and not just at Blow Buddies either-ha ha ha). There is just so much to see and so many sites of interest that are not labeled as "touristy" I am planning a trip back there but will not be able to go until the beginning of next year. It is definately a city that everybody should go to see at least once.