Fraudulent Frisco

Have you ever felt like a fraud? Maybe you have at some juncture in your own life. Right now I feel like an imposter. I live in San Francisco, but I don't think of myself as a San Franciscan. It occurs to me that San Francisco itself is a fake urban center that can't take care of itself and its own inhabitants, thousands of whom live on the streets, hungry and homeless with no solution to their plight in sight. San Francisco feels like a dying city, though Mayor London Breed recently gave a press conference and insisted that it is not a dying city. She sounded like a public figure protesting too much. Also a public figure, who had surely heard through the grapevine that the city is on the way to a grave and then promptly went into denial mode. 

I recently tested my notion that the city is dying by asking nearly everyone I met, friends and strangers alike if they also thought that San Francisco was dying. Many, though not all, did. Some citizens pointed out that the libraries still work smoothly (yeah!), public transportation runs more or less on schedule and that streets are relatively clean, at least in some neighborhoods. I see those streets. They're in my neighborhood. Two men who work for the city sweep and clean regularly. That makes me happy. 

But in some places in the Mission and around Civic Center the streets and the sidewalks are filthy nearly all the time. Garbage is everywhere, albeit so are beautiful murals on the outside walls of buildings, especially in the Mission. Beauty and ugliness go hand in hand. Fresh air rushes in from the ocean but it doesn't entirely wash away the acrid smell of urine. 

One woman who was born and raised here told me “it's rotten to the core.” A Lyft driver explained, “San Francisco is two cities. It's lively during the day and at night it's a place of despair.” I rarely go out at night. The Lyft driver was planning to leave San Francisco after giving it a whirl and going back East where he was born. I was also born and raised in the East and rarely if ever felt like an imposter and a fake. Perhaps one has to have been born in San Francisco to feel like one isn't a fake and that it's as real a town as any other in the US. Still, to many inhabitants it's no longer a habitable place. They have already left or are packing their belongings and are moving to Oregon and Florida and places in-between. If they have money they will probably find some place to rent or buy that they can afford, though I suspect that cities all over the country are also dying. 

Maybe it's not the fault of public figures and government agencies. Maybe it's because we're trapped in a society that might accurately be called “late capitalism.” How late it is I don't know, though we are clearly sliding down toward the junk heap of civilizations both ancient and relatively new. That prospect doesn't make me happy. All empires inevitably go into decline and fall. Our empire is no exception.

Perhaps I should get with the program and live like a decadent in a decadent society. Anyone care to join me at the end of the dock that Otis Redding sang about in “Dock of the Bay"? Michelle Cruz Gonzales has recently written and published a novel set in the future in California, which is its own country. The state “forces intermarriage between whites and Mexicans for the purpose of creating a race of beautiful, intelligent, hardworking people.” That sounds like an act of desperation, but perhaps only desperate measures will save us. Meanwhile, I still feel like a fraud eager to escape from the condition I'm in. Will someone in Mendo throw me a life preserver please?