I Left My Money in San Francisco

 “Spend what you need but just throw even a few coins into a tin and forget that you have it. A woman should always have something put by.” Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

We spent three days in San Francisco to celebrate our children’s birthdays. Miranda turned twenty on September 3, and Gabriel ushered in his twenty-fifth year on the 4th. They were born five years apart. Our last visit to San Francisco was fifteen years ago and much has changed in that short span of time. There was the financial implosion of 2008 and 2009, the recovery and gentrification that changed many of SF’s neighborhoods, the election of Donald Trump and the madness of his administration, massive wildfires that confirmed some of our worst foreboding about the changing climate, and the pandemic. Gabriel lived in San Francisco for a couple of years, moved down to Los Angeles for a job at the LA Phil, then back to San Francisco when he got a job at the Opera. He lives in a quintessential Victorian-style house with three roommates. The front door opens on a steep flight of stairs, climbs to a landing, then another short flight of stairs to the living area. The windows in the high-ceilinged living room offer views of downtown. The room Gabriel occupies has hardwood floors, a fireplace and a lovely bay window. 

Miranda spent most of her time in Berkeley visiting two of her girlfriends from high school who attend UC Berkeley. She got her first tattoo and rode the BART for the first time. We all had dinner together at Gabriel’s on his birthday. The boy made pasta, bread, a lovely salad, and cookies for dessert. 

We stayed at the Marriott Marquis on 4th street, near Union Square. There’s a Trader Joe’s across the street from the hotel. The room was decent, although the mini-fridge leaked water. Marriott charges its guests $14.95 per day for Internet access, $80 a day to park a car. Aside from being annoying, it was another reminder of how corporations try to squeeze as much profit as they can from every customer. We parked our Honda across the street for $58 a day. The Dodgers were in town for a weekend series against the Giants and the hotel was full of baseball fans decked out in team gear. Face masks were required in the common areas of the hotel, and at every restaurant and the Academy of Science we had to show our vaccination cards and ID to get in. We didn’t find this unreasonable or see it as an encroachment on our freedom. It seemed a sensible precaution in a pandemic. We got around on foot, and by Uber and Metro. Union Square is gritty and grimy, populated with tourists and homeless folks, street corner preachers and panhandlers. The Disney Store is closing, Crate & Barrel is looking for seasonal help. 

The Academy of Science in Golden Gate Park was fantastic, worth every cent of the $40 entry fee. We went to the top of the observation tower at the de Young Museum to take in the panoramic view of the city. The sky was hazy that day, but the view was still spectacular. The park was crowded with joggers, cyclists, people walking dogs, picnicking on the grass, playing Frisbee. The weather was fine, sunny and warm. I like the ethnic diversity of San Francisco. I enjoy looking at the architecture and the fire escapes, the old facades juxtaposed with gleaming glass towers. 

 I tried to stay away from the news during the trip, but it was difficult with the shocking reproductive news coming out of Texas and the Supreme Court. The conservative political minority in the United States has been intent on killing a woman’s right to an abortion ever since it realized it was a potent wedge issue. The political (banks, insurance and real estate, large corporations, and the Pentagon) arm of the American right wing cares about low taxes, minimal regulation, weak unions, heavy defense spending, and limited social insurance; this arm doesn’t care one bit about the unborn. The issue is useful in that it gave the political right entry into the world of the Christian right. Both arms are after the same thing, power, but on their respective planes of interest, which frequently overlap. The Christian right believes its male members are sanctioned by the bible to control womens’ bodies. This marriage of convenience and mutual aid is why a man as immoral and religiously illiterate as Donald Trump was adored by evangelicals. 

Naturally, Texas, being Texas, had to go full Taliban against women, with a cruel and bizarre law. The Texas state legislature has a long history of crackpot members and idiotic laws. Read Molly Ivins for confirmation. Note, too, that the legislature rammed this abhorrent anti-abortion law through at the same time it was passing a vicisous voter suppression bill. Power and control, minority over majority, not accidental. I don’t know what to say about the Supreme Court other than to call it what it is: an unelected and unaccountable political body. The action taken by the Court in the Texas matter isn’t as surprising as the cowardly way the majority went about it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed to create a bill that will codify in federal law a woman’s right to an abortion, but this is a hollow response since such a bill has zero chance of getting through the Senate, unless the Democrats change the rules regarding the filibuster, an action they are too timid to undertake. Pelosi is probably thinking that the abortion issue might be very useful for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Women voters (especially women of color) could very well hold the key to the Democrats holding the House and Senate. 

In the final days of the US occupation of Afghanistan many conservatives expressed concern about the fate of Afghan women, and cried their crocodile tears, and yet when it comes to the reproductive health of American women, they are only too happy to support Draconian measures that will hurt the poor most of all. The GOP is the party of Hypocrisy. If Republicans are so concerned about women, why is their standard-bearer a serial sexual harasser? Why is the ERA still languishing, and why won’t Republicans back renewal of the Violence Against Women Act? Spare the tears. 

I’m reading The Fall of the House of Dixie by Bruce Levine, a fine history of the Civil War. 

We're Outta' Here

“As soon as we believe that we cannot be citizens of the world, we lose the world of which we might have been citizens.” Andrew Solomon

My wife and I haven’t been abroad since 1998, when Bill Clinton was president, the dot-com bubble hadn’t burst, and the Twin Towers in New York were still standing, representing American power, not an American tragedy, and my father-in-law, Guero, was alive. In the big scheme of things twenty years isn’t a long time, but America -- and most of the world -- is a different place now. Very different. Much more on the surface, tilting toward raw, racist, cruel, crass, and deadly. Twenty years ago climate change was far in the future, a whispered warning among scientists, a problem we had time to deal with. We could deny it, push it to the back burner, go on extracting and burning fossil fuels, polluting the oceans, rivers and lakes, pretend that endless consumer consumption was sustainable. Today there are those, like Donald J. Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, who continue to deny the evidence in front of them, the massive hurricanes, floods, wildfires, sinkholes, and warming of the oceans, but the rest of the world understands that catastrophic climate change is real, and it’s happening right now. Trump, as stupid and incoherent as ever, surveys the devastation caused by the Camp Fire in California and declares that we will have “great climate,” as if the climate is a product that can be bottled and sold on the cheap at Target. Meanwhile, his lawless administration does everything it can to hasten our demise.

The US has been a belligerent military power for more than twenty years, but in the post-9/11 hysteria the belligerence was given a double dose of steroids by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. The US invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly to hunt down Osama bin Laden and make it untenable for terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base, then the mission changed to rooting out the Taliban, building infrastructure and democratic processes, all of which have been spectacular failures. The Afghan people have suffered for 17 years, their country, not stable to begin with after years of war with the Soviet Union, is even worse off -- and the US remains, unable to win or find a plausible way to withdraw. I have lost count of the number of times I have asked my elected representatives to explain why we are still in Afghanistan. The responses are pathetic.

Then, based on a mountain of lies and false evidence, and with most of the world against them, Cheney and Bush invaded Iraq and set the Middle East reeling. The promised cakewalk didn’t happen, nor did Iraqi citizens line the boulevards and toss flowers at the feet of American soldiers. Iraq was torn apart, sundered by sectarian violence, corruption, and rampant death. It remains the greatest military blunder in American history, and as if that were not bad enough, the invasion and occupation also proved to the world that America wasn’t any better than other countries who murder, torture and destroy. Killed the myth, except in the US, where every last soldier, sailor, marine, and Air Force desk jockey was treated as a conquering hero. The full-US-PR monty, football stadiums, airports, everywhere, support the troops. Don’t ask what they’re doing or where, just support them, no matter what. Naturally, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and all the rest of the perpetrators have walked away, written books, made money as media pundits, or, in Bush’s case, painted portraits and had his reputation rehabilitated. Fifteen years later, the US remains in Iraq, in neighboring Syria, and Libya, and other places in North Africa, and, let's not forget, our role in Yemen.

Nearly two decades of non-stop warfare has had domestic consequences, not in rejuvenating the anti-war movement, but in nurturing hyper-militarism and hyper-masculinity, the dangerous notion that all problems can be solved by state violence, against unarmed black people, Mexican immigrants and innocent children. Hate groups are ascendant, fueled by the rhetoric of Donald J. Trump and the grifters on Fox News. Absurd conspiracy theories flourish, like the idea that immigrants and people of color are waging genocide on white people. America is now a place where facts come to die. The president makes up his own reality in which he is always the biggest winner, the strongest man, the tough guy, the guy who knows stuff because of his very large brain.

For fourteen of the past twenty years I have written about all this stuff, and more, on this blog, now more than 700 posts. Shouts from the Balcony was my wife’s idea; ironically, she never reads this blog. Neither do my kids, which is amusing because they were the main reason I wanted to record some aspect of our times, so they would know, one day, what their father was thinking about and doing to exercise some agency in the world, to raise his voice, no matter how faint or ineffectual, against injustice. Think, I tell them, about all the people in this world, today, as we speak, who have almost no say over any aspect of their lives. Every massive wildfire, every hurricane-induced flood, every report of melting glaciers, I worry for their future. As many countries in the world, desperately trying to cope with climate change and income inequality and refugees and aggrieved citizens -- all of which can be traced back to the death machine that is unfettered capitalism -- turn to authoritarian figures for solutions, I worry for their future. As I look at the economy, knowing that its fundamentals are all wrong and completely unsustainable, I know a reckoning is approaching and I worry some more.

And over it all, my entire life, the threat of nuclear annihilation.

But in the short run there is a trip to Italy to make, the trip we were supposed to make in 1991, before we started raising a family, when we were much younger and I had more hair and a dark beard rather than a gray one. I am so looking forward to being outside the US for a couple of weeks, away from the non-stop insanity and stupidity, the rampant ignorance and poisoned atmosphere. Who knows, I may come back with a story or two to tell.

Under the Cobalt Sky

Most of the country is snowed under or enduring freezing rain, but here in Santa Barbara it’s a balmy January evening with a full moon rising over the Lobero Theatre. My wife and I are walking down State Street toward the beach with no particular destination in mind, out mainly because we don’t have our kids and the evening is too lovely to spend indoors. Tourists and pods of young people pass us by, a panhandler plies his craft without much success, and a street musician strums a beat-up guitar.

We stop before a vacant storefront and struggle to recall what had occupied the space. I think it was a jewelry store but my wife remembers it as a place that sold imported bric-a-brac. Not often being in need of bric-a-brac, imported or domestic, I can’t say if she’s wrong or right. We move on, enjoying the air and the cobalt sky. The recently shuttered Borders book store looms before us, hollowed out and empty, outlines on the carpet and walls where display shelves once stood. Across the street Barnes & Noble has also closed, so except for the venerable, cozy Book Den on Anapamu Street, downtown Santa Barbara is without a bookstore. I know my wife is also contemplating the demise of downtown bookstores; over the years we spent many, many pleasurable hours browsing the stacks in Borders and Barnes & Noble and it’s hard to imagine our downtown without a major book retailer.

“Our downtown” is perhaps overstating things because, in my opinion, downtown SB hasn’t belonged to locals like us in a long time. SB was a town but has been transformed into a travel destination, hawked in glossy magazines and on the Internet in the same way advertisers sell soap or beer. Brand recognition. The American Riviera they call it. Santa Barbara Magazine makes it all look beautiful and refined, clean, safe, a charming paradise where life is fulfilling and rich, and unpleasantness has been forever banned.

I’m old enough and have lived here long enough to remember JC Penny, the White House, Lerner’s, Lou Rose, OTT’s, the lunch counter at Woolworth’s, the Earthling Bookstore and the Copper Coffee Pot – all relics of memory now. My wife reminds me of the many banks that lined State Street in our childhoods, which brings to mind Crocker Bank, where my mother once worked as a teller. How long ago did Crocker Bank close its doors? Twenty-five years at least, perhaps longer.

A hazard of living in the same place for many years is watching it change. Whether the changes are good or bad depends on one’s sensibilities. Businesses and people come and go, landmark stores and eateries close their doors, slip into memory and become fodder for conversations that start with “Do you remember…?”

We continue strolling as the moon climbs to mingle with the stars, lost in reverie and nostalgic feelings for childhood and a bygone era, and the trance holds until our senses are assaulted outside Abercrombie & Fitch by pulsing music and the overpowering smell of men’s cologne. Abercrombie, Juicy Couture, Old Navy, Macy’s, Nordstrom, GAP, Betsy Johnson, Restoration Hardware and Banana Republic, big name retailers that have displaced locally owned mom & pop stores. Some might call this progress, and they would be right, of course – cities either change or perish—but it leaves me feeling alienated from the main street of my hometown.

At Cota Street we cross to the other side of State and head back uptown, past the fountain near the Metro Theatre where a kid with matted hair and a dragon tat on his chest asks for change. He smiles politely when we decline to aid his cause; I’m sure he has no idea that Crocker Bank ever existed or that SB boasted a Woolworth’s with a lunch counter. He may not even realize how quickly the present becomes the past.

But his moment will come.