Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in San Francisco

By Eric Rozenman (October 2017)

Outside Lands, Peter Max, 2013

 
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix/ angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .

And so on, and on. At 19, it struck me as mysteriously profound, suspiciously repellent and seriously run-on. Stream of consciousness, baby. In those days hipsters was a cool word, not a marketing cliché, and Mr. Wikipedia now says Howl is considered one of America’s most important literary works. By hipsters, no doubt, but reread it for yourself. See, if it doesn’t put you in mind of that Steven Wright joke: “When I first read a dictionary, I thought it was a long poem about everything.” The more time passes, the more Howl reads like a short dictionary defining Allen Ginsburg’s inability to distinguish between Dwight Eisenhower and Juan Peron.

Five large banners draped City Lights. They were drawn in the flat, hard, pseudo-proletarian style one sees on placards and posters of the causes de jure. The first four quoted poet Mahmoud Darwish: “Nothing is harder/ On the soul/ Than the smell of dreams/ While they are evaporating.” The fifth exhorts: “Stop the Deportations.” Under each line of text was a non-Caucasian face.

The banners lacked disclosure. Darwish was a Palestinian Arab supremacist and Palestinian Liberation Organization “cultural affairs” functionary when the PLO was one of the world’s leading terrorist movements. His poem “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words” told Israelis 10 times in 52 lines to “get out.” A revisionist work denying Jews’ organic tie to the land of Israel, it instructed them to “pile your illusions in a deserted pit, and be gone . . . Die wherever you like, but do not die among us . . . ” Posters proclaiming solidarity with undocumented immigrants in general and “Dreamers” in particular were common around San Francisco. But rhetorical hyperbole equating opposition to Trump’s overturning of Obama’s DACA maneuver (Deferred Action on Child Arrivals) with guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II raised suspicion.

When lobbyists for unrestricted immigration—which is to say opponents of national identity, or at least American national identity—first pressed Obama on legalizing Dreamers, Obama correctly observed unilateral action by the president would be unconstitutional. But after Congress, the legal embodiment of popular sovereignty, refused to act, he went ahead regardless. Amnesty—deferred action [postponed deportation]—for children infiltrated by parents themselves illegally present in the United States (and sometimes children who border-crossed on their own) became sacrosanct. Like all leftist causes célèbres, it melded into the secular fundamentalist catechism, which admits no doubt. A wedge issue for civic deconstruction, it in many cases also is a matter of compassion. Nevertheless, Dreamerism challenges rule of law. And rule of law is what distinguishes America from Cuba, for example. Still, humankind cannot bear too much truth, as T.S. Eliot observed. So smart money does not bet on City Lights publishing a neo-beat epic poem on the Castro brothers’ decades-old policy of imprisoning disagreeable poets and restricting emigration to the States largely to those dreaming of reaching free soil and willing to risk sharks in the Florida Straits—so far 10 percent of the Cuban population.
A weekend evening near but not quite in Chinatown and a half-dozen young women lined up outside a club of some sort. They were dressed pretty much as Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue models if the latter wore stiletto heels with Lucite platforms to the beach, which is to say bulging out of and around strategically placed Lycra Spandex straps over satin-like short shorts. Except for the tallest, prettiest of the group. Over her heels and briefs she wore nothing at all except a wide-mesh, black fishnet top. Her breasts were large, well-shaped and there for all of greater San Francisco to see. My head snapped back as we walked past. My wife asked, “Club-goers, shills for the place, or prostitutes?” True-false or multiple choice? A do-I-look-fat-in-this-fishnet trick question? I can’t tell.

San Francisco is like Jerusalem—“builded as a city compact, together” (Psalm 122)—the former with its seven hills, the latter with its 40 or so and both urban areas with numerous, distinct neighborhoods. We took the Hyundai on a spin through the Mission district, the Castro and Haight Ashbury. Gentrification and genteel shabbiness contend, with an occasional residential tent. The once notorious Mission district features the homeless, yes, but also numerous signs in Spanish and inviting corner restaurants, probably not Tex-Mex but just authentic Mex. A morbidly obese woman steers a motorized chair-scooter down the sidewalk, her tiny dog trotting beside on a red leash. We drive through the Castro, busy long-time hub of the city’s gay life. Rainbow flags adorn lampposts, their colors and patterns repeated in a crosswalk and on the sign of a nearby used car lot. Three men stand in doorway talking. Two, middle-aged and muscular, wear only red, G-string-like, fringed penis sheaths. The third man converses as if this were normal. Normal—now there’s an increasingly hateful concept. Too much normality and one might imagine nudity as a private affair. Pondering the essentially naked men and half-naked young women, not to mention the yoga pantsed legion, we wonder if the less a society values fertility, the more it flaunts sexuality.

Haight-Ashbury affects a 50-year hang-over. It’s been half a century since Scott McKenzie sang “If you’re going to San Francisco/ Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair/ Summertime will be a love-in there . . . ” Yet “Summer of Love” posters are still on display. Tourists can’t escape them, which may be the point but, then, neither can locals. Langston Hughes asked what happens to a dream deferred and provided powerful, unhappy answers. Nostalgia prolonged, on the other hand, curls up like a faded Peter Max poster.

Bay area streets throng with Toyota Priuses, the electric/hybrid automotive equivalent of quinoa. They are a powerful signifier, fashionable in their ostensibly anti-fashionable way. They advertise to all and sundry that the driver practices sustainable living, narrowing his or her carbon footprint. This is done by plugging the coal-fired Prius into an electric outlet for recharging every night. On our way back to the hotel in city traffic we watched as a black Prius in front accelerated—they can do that—pulled left partially into oncoming traffic, straddled the yellow dividing line to pass a slower-moving, hydro-carbon consuming vehicle ahead, and ducked back into our lane. Sustainability confers its privileges.

Our last night in San Francisco we had dinner with Bob and Jane, we’ll call them. He describes himself as one of the oldest techies in Silicon Valley. Life was good and he was considering retirement when one of the Big Four Trusts of our age—Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook—made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Now he commutes in a company bus filled with techies 30 years or more younger than he to a new corporate campus and—sometimes also jetting to other parts of the world—assists this particular robber baron industry move to the next level of controlling what mankind consumes, reads, writes and remembers. Some capabilities “are scary,” he acknowledged. And some are life-savers. Not knowing in whose archive it might eventually repose, we did not take a selfie. Early the next morning, we returned to our nation’s capital, where some people imagine there is an e pluribus Unum nation and they are in charge.

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Eric Rozenman is a communications consultant in Washington, D.C. His poems, commentaries and analyses have appeared in New English Review and numerous other publications.

More by Eric Rozenman here.

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