A sequined G-string orbited the television screen, propelling a barely concealed package through the shear will of well muscled hips. The dancer wore nothing else aside from a posterior-mounted feather array that would make a peacock blush.
My father glanced suspiciously at me from the corner of his eye, safely separated from the dancer by an entire continent. I admit that tales of San Francisco are my favorite fodder when visiting home. Nothing gets a rise out of conservatives and southerners like stories of the wicked and wanton west coast.
San Franciscans fail to understand how the rest of the country perceives them. Blame it on traveling storytellers like myself, or blame myopic media portrayals of the gaudier aspects of the Modern Sodom. American treats San Francisco as their slightly dangerous and thoroughly deranged cousin who crashes the family reunion but whom, out of familial courtesy, is never turned away.
San Francisco always had a reputation, not unlike those held by inebriated spring break co-eds. Gold rush era originalism of an entirely open and debauched society laid the foundation of “Frisco’s” image in the country, and it never improved much thereafter. Television news transmitted segregated images of 1960’s hippies and their lifestyles into the homes of the Eisenhower middle class. San Francisco’s political peculiarities tickled or trampled the sensibilities of suburban dwellers. Over-the-top flamboyance of some members of San Francisco’s gay community were the video feeds of choice come Pride Week for outlets as radically diverse as Fox and CBS.
It is little wonder that America perceives The City as perpetual perversion, both procreative and political. Hence the Pelosi Proxy. The heartland cannot aggregate their collective distrust of Baghdad by the Bay — their distaste for the decadence and degradation of assumed American culture — so they must distill reflexive repulsion to perpetual homelessness, cultural vagrancy, and sexual surplus into an icon. In the dichotomy of modern American politics, right-of-center voters find a convenient and rational representative in San Francisco’s own.
While San Franciscans fail to understand how they are perceived throughout the rest of the country, they also fail to understand how and why they are so thoroughly different. Nearly 25 years ago, John Naisbitt noted in his book “Megatrends” that our country was simultaneously growing older, more suburban, and more southern. The amalgamation of these population drifts resulted in the public growing more conservative, or at least more resistant to radical leftward shifts, and thus marginalizing our beloved open-air asylum. One has only to look at a county-by-county red/blue map of the last election to see that the great swathe of aging outlanders has contained Shaky Town’s cherished madness.
It will get worse before it gets better, and it could exponentially decay if Pelosi ascends to the speaker’s podium. If Democrat control of the house leads to left-of-center extravagance, and the full force of so-called “progressive” political thinking comes to fore and validates middle America’s perceptions, the backlash will be savage. Deserved or not, San Francisco culture and politics is on probation, and cultural beat cops are more than ready to arrest again. Too much, too fast, or too in-your-face realpolitik will slam shut the door to this cell.
Perhaps dear old dad summed it up as the televised Pride Parade crotch shot continued invading his domicile. “I’d don’t give a damn if he’s gay, I just want him to put some clothes on!”.
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