Greetings From (The Republik Of) San Francisco

Here we are in the City by the Bay for our second annual couple of weeks in June of house-sitting duties (!) in San Francisco. The weather has been magical, the people so weird that normal people stand out and seem out of place. We love it.

Snippets:

Yesterday we had dinner with an old friend who confided that we were the only people he’d ever spoken with who supported Bush on Iraq. I allowed as how, based on what we’ve seen and heard, if you enclosed an area by drawing a line southeast from, say, Mendocino southwest to the middle of Sacramento and then southwest to the coast below Carmel we might well be among the dozen of so people in that area who did.

Another old friend said she’d never been so ashamed of her country. Ashamed of what exactly? I asked. Well, what we’re doing in Iraq, she said. But what are we doing that you find so shameful? I asked. Well, killing people and making more Arabs mad at us, she said. Curiously, though she hates Bush and Ashcroft, she added that she couldn’t really criticize what she took to be Ashcroft’s policy of rounding up several thousand Muslim likely suspects and throwing them in jail because that might well have prevented more terrorist acts.

And then there’s the San Francisco Chronicle. It seems to revel in bad news from Iraq, but is forced to stretch to find the silver lining in the cloud of good news when it arrive. Example? Headline on a news story today about the booming economy: “For Voters, War May Outweigh Surge in Jobs.”

the problem for Bush is that good news on the economy is swamped by bad news from Iraq, political analysts said. That presents Bush with the reverse of the problem his father faced heading into his re-election defeat 12 years ago, an irony given Bush’s intense drive for tax cuts to revive the economy and avoid his father’s fate.

“He’s facing the opposite dilemma of his father,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “What his father would have given for this economy in 1992, what he would have given for his father’s good sense in Iraq.”

Sabato did not say, at least he was not quoted here as saying, what Bush I good sense he meant.

The Letters to the Editor are also always entertaining in the Chronicle. Here’s a good one today from one Irving Waldorf of San Francisco:

Editor — There was a time when reading Letters to the Editor was enlightening and enjoyable, even when disagreeing with some points raised, especially by the far right. But these days as the quality of life in the Bay Area has gone down, so too has the quality of some of the letters, especially from the far right.

The hubris of such people as Rick Schmitto (Letters, “Culture clash, ” June 4 ) is pathetic as is his god, Dubya. I do not hate President Bush. I just disagree with what he has done and feel that he plays with less than a full deck. I am a registered Democrat who has voted for Republicans in the past and could do so in the future, so I am not locked into any specific ideology.

Too bad some people in this otherwise wonderful section of the country can’t take off their blinders and see what is really going on around them and be willing to listen to differing viewpoints. They need to stop calling people names as children would do and act as adults and offer solutions to our problems

Irving, who opposes child-like name calling, is a tolerant person who doesn’t hate Bush. He just finds him dumb and so presumably feels sorry for him. And of course calling Bush “pathetic” and another letter writer “pathetic” for worshipping him is not name-calling. Everbody knows liberals don’t indulge in name-calling.

A day or so ago an obviously odd Berkeleyan wrote to complain that his was the only American flag he saw displayed anywhere, except on a bumper sticker that declared “These colors don’t run … the world.” This produced a torrent of letters in reply, which the Chronicle published Saturday under its heading of “Berkeley’s True Patriots.” (For some reason these letters don’t appear in the online edition.) Here are some selections from some of them:

I guess the price we pay for living in a university city is enduring our flagless, bumper-sticking neighbors’ raging tolerance. Personally I’m heartened by how many United Nations flags I’ve seen around town.

… there are many ways to show your appreciation for what this country provides: One would be challenging the injustices that are perpetuated in its name…. Another would be consideraing what a shallow gesture mounting a flag is, especially when it has come to mean misery and oppression for much of the world.

There were several others, but here is my favorite:

I, for one, am a devout Christian and truly love Bush, but evidence shows he is too fatuous and narrow-minded to lead our great and diverse country, including Larkspur.