The next stop after walking down Laguna Street was busy and wide Van Ness Avenue. It's a good spot for restaurants and Starbuck Coffee outlets. Coffee is muy importante in San Fran. They have Starbucks in banks, grocery stores, et al. Starbucks seems on every other block in the busier throughfares. Van Ness Avenue has more Starbucks green signs in a couple blocks than Ashland has in the whole town. And I'm not counting the other coffee bar chains and indy cafes. I wonder what would result in more chaos and lawlessness: Congress banning handguns or closing all coffee bars and drive-thru caffeine stands? I bet the latter.
If the latter prohibition occured, radical coffee dealers could train the baristas in automatic weapons and they could take over, say, Frisco, and establish a "Latte Republic." Given the 1990's military base closeures around the Bay Area, it would take months to gather effective government opposition to retake the city. The NRA, with it members deprived of caffeine and forced to try and get militant with only decaf-Tab and Sobe for fortitide, would be no match for the Starbucks Commune.
I dropped by a "Chevy's Fresh-Mex" just ahead of the workday lunch crowd and got seated at a nice table. The food might not have been 3-star Michelin quality, but it was indeed fresh and I got a chance to see the eatery fill up with people. It was, as I wrote earlier, a sunny day in an oft-foggy city, and people seemed generally cheerful. Asian tourists speaking their native tonque mixedin well with the profesional lunch crowd. Cell phones and blackberries were abundant. I'm old enough that I still look over at someone talking to themselves standing next to me, and than I realize in a split second it's not an escaped nutcase but a person making ing a "mobile" call and talking loud enough into their little phone to wake the dead.
I had some time before meeting my friend at a near-by museum so I stopped off to see what was inside the San Francisco City Hall since its renovation work that started after the 1989 Loma Pireta Earthquake. (see picture above) The metal detector wase so sensative now that, even after I emptied my pockets of keys and coins and such, it still gave out a buzz when I stepped through the electronic barrier. Turned out the disposable camera I was carrying was still simulating an unaceptable risk. . "See, there's metal in that camera," the security man told me, as if I should have known that and surrendered the camera the first time around. Well, the little contraption looked like cheap plastic to me.
There was a shooting in City Hall back in November, 1978. Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were gunned down in their respective offices by a high-strung Supervisor and ex-fireman named Dan White. Milk happened to be the sole openly gay supervisor in the city and many believe that was why White shot him instead of the other supervisors he might have shot. White was something of a hero to a smattering of blue-collar white males. He got a light sentence because of a now-outlawed "diminshed capacity" legal defense and, upon release after a few years, committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in a car garage. Coming so close--less than two weeks--after the horrific Jonestown Massacre by a San Francisco-based religious cult down in Guyana, folks in around Bay Area went into a state of shock. So much hatred and craziness lying just underneath the surface of a city named for St. Francis of Assisi.
City Hall itself is really something. Maybe too much of something. There is a dome on the place that looks not unlike St. Paul's Cathedral when you look up from the rotunda. It also has gold panelling around the dome on the outside. Statues of Greek mythologoical figures were above the entry ways and in the elaborate ceiling above the Board of Supervisors Meeting Room. Busts of mayors past and present--including those of the well-known Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the original Slick Willy, the honorable former Mayor/Fixer Willie Brown--were all around.
While I was there, there was some kind of a fancy luncheon going on on one side of the second story of the faux-Vatican. A string quartet was playing beautiful music to the "guests" and SF's present mayor, Gavin Newsome, soon after spoke to the crowd of swells from a podium. I could only see him from the back but I recognized the JFK-style haircut. He was speaking just loud enough to be heard by the gathering of folks around him.
I'm sure it was all for a good cause.
On the other side of the second floor around the rotunda, two weddings took place. Photos were taken as a justice of the peace administered the vows. That part of the City Hall experience I liked as a watched the couple and their well-wishers from a respectable distance. My good friends, Richard and Julie, had been married at that same spot a few months earlier. I recognized the area from a picture they had sent me of the event.
But, still, I couldn't help looking around this City Hall and feeling like all this gilding and stautary and marble bric-abrac was a bit too much. I mean, do we still live in republic anymore? Why was all this money spent to fix up a already-serviceable public building when California's prisons are overcrowded and the pere capita spending on schools is one of the lowest in the nation? Why all the gold? Was the place being fixed up for King Solomon or Donald Trump to buy?
My mood wasn't helped when I happened upon a small tour group inside the Board of Supervisors meeting place and was told by a guide with a laser light poking about the place about all the expensive, imported Manchurian Oak that went into the panelling of the chambers and that the gates outside of the City Hall had been patterned after the fences at the Palace of Versailles.
"This is the people's place. The People rule here." the guide told the assembled tourists. I wondered.
What would our founding fathers have made of this? Well, maybe Alexander Hamilton would have dug it, but what about Tom Paine, John Adams or even Ben Franklin? Our country was formed by farmers and merchants who fought against the British and their corruption and ornamental pomp. What have we turned into? And if you say, "well, what do you expect--it's only San Francisco" I suggest one visits the City Hall of any large American city or go on the C-Span website sometime and see the expensive inner rooms in the House and Senate in Washington, DC.
We're the oldest democracy in the world--who the hell are we still trying to impress?
And will aping the Bourbon or the Winsors or the Romanov dynasties of past and present in our public decor bring government closer to its people? Didn't look or feel like "the people's place" to me. Next time I go, I'll bring a tux.
With such troubling thoughts on my mind, I staggered out of the Cathedral of Civic Ostentation a little after one o'clock and headed out for less ornate environs. (see links below for more info on events mentioned on this post.)
http://www.culteducation.com/jonestown.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/26/MNGF33B0R31.DTL
(to be continued)
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