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Published: February 11th 2008
It's just after midday, the infamous San Francisco fog that had shrouded the city as I flew in seems to have passed. The Californian sun now piercing the azure nothingness as I clamber up the steps of Powell Street station fully laden with backpack/daypack, front 'n' back. I quickly scan the tourist map for the best route to my hostel and decide to make use of San Francisco’s grid patterned streets, negating the necessity to turn more than once or re-consult before reaching my destination.
The bustle of street life immediately evaporates, replaced by the sweet sickly smell of baked-in urine emanating from the solar heated sidewalk. I notice some African American men sitting on a doorstep smoking a badly rolled reefer. Further along I pass a couple of middle-aged black ‘winos’ drinking from brown paper bags. As I approach the next intersection the only commercial activity seems to be a couple of scantily clad women dancing to music pumping from a parked car inhabited by a couple of mean looking gangsta rap-dudes in their oversized pimpmobile.
It seems I’ve stumbled into the wrong part of town, fully tourist laden, funny British accent and carrying enough cash to travel
for a year. The policeman in my head admonishes me for my indiscretion… it takes little imagination to figure out what’ll happen next…
In reality, nobody finds me interesting, or even acknowledges my existence - let alone robs me at gun point - yet the premise bypasses my conscience without a single meaningful objection. I turn off the street and just two blocks later lily-white middle class assurances ease the tension from my stride.
The adrenalin however has already kicked in and now with no meaningful task is turned on the policeman in my head. I scold myself for letting that reactionary redneck invade my thoughts; I’ve walked some of the poorest streets in the world without let or hindrance, and his opinion I believed had become worthless.
More than the perceived gap in wealth, class, cultural irregularities or even race, the trigger to my irrational fear was the scene itself; the backdrop, the characters and the plot. Those all too familiar ‘shooting up the ghetto’ and ‘robbing liquor stores’ scenarios. Yet this being the first time I’ve ever set foot in an American Metropolis, how did those images find their way into my mind and arouse
my base evolutionary survival instincts?
Is it farfetched to think the same infectious paradigm could have poisoned those that I had passed, to believe that criminal activities are glamorous and celebrated in an underclass subculture of violence? If they were to “bust a cap in my ass” wouldn’t they just be playing out a self-fulfilling prophecy…Or maybe they don’t watch as much TV as I do?
From San Francisco’s most undesirables, just a two minute schlep up hill and you’re surrounded by the million dollar apartments of Nob Hill in one of the city’s most prestigious districts. Two contrasting sides of America living virtually side-by-side; The dream of moving up that hill, so near, yet so far away, is the tantalizing dream that drives a nation.
The reality for people in the ghetto is that their American Dream could be achieved simply with a move away from segregated neighborhoods where crime runs rampant, to peaceful security, where their children can receive the education to break the cycle of poverty.
Despite having just movie-watched my way over the Pacific Ocean, and having had a rather protracted journey into town due to a fire on the
BART, I'm shot full of verve and hit the town at a canter.
The idea of implementing a simple grid street plan over the steep hills of San Francisco is mental. Yet this seeming lack of imagination has ironically resulted in one of the most iconoclastically originative cityscapes in the world. For five hours I pound up and down exploring with my camera until the sun goes down behind that big red bridge, a chill sets in, and I suddenly realize how under dressed I am in a cotton T-shirt... As a destination to stimulate the senses San Francisco is way up there near the top.
It was The California Gold Rush that propelled San Francisco from a sleepy, little-known backwater, to one of Americas most prosperous and diverse cities. In 1848 The Mexican War had just ended, and since the government hadn’t quite gotten round to properly policing, gobbling up and taxing their newly conquered lands and people, the gold was essentially free for the taking and San Francisco became the center of the global imagination and the destination of hundreds of thousands of people.
By 1850, most of the easily accessible gold had been gathered.
Ghirardelli
San FranciscoAmerican prospectors then began to drive out ‘foreigners’ to enable them to collect the remaining gold; organizing attacks on foreign miners, particularly Chinese and Latin Americans. In addition, the huge numbers of newcomers were driving Native Americans out of their traditional hunting, fishing and food gathering areas.
The old American Dream of the Puritans was one of men and women content to accumulate modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year. This new dream was one of instant wealth, won in a twinkling of an eye through audacity and good luck. Since then generations of immigrants have been attracted by the California Dream. California farmers, oil drillers, movie makers and dot comers, have each had their boom times in the decades after the Gold Rush. Nowadays it can be argued this California Dream has become The American Dream.
The next day I meet up with Chris at breakfast, an American, about my age, in San Francisco looking for work with the dream of moving down here sometime in the future on a permanent basis. Hailing from Ohio, the competition to US Heavy Industry during the 1990's which had to compete with the inexpensive labor, rich resource
base and low regulatory environments in Asia and South America spelt an end to his trade, so he entered the modern world of computers to pay the bills.
After breakfast we visited the Chinatown district, where Chinese forcibly driven from Gold Rush mines, settled and took up low-end wage labor such as restaurant work and laundry. Then, with the post Civil War economy in decline, anti-Chinese animosity and xenophobia became politicized and The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 allowed the US to suspend Chinese immigration for the next 60 years, affectively freezing the Chinese community in place. Forced to live apart, they built a society in which they could survive on their own.
Then it was off to the Mission District, San Francisco's very first neighborhood, which today as then has a majority Hispanic population. The plaza around 16th Street Mission was full of Latino men; not in cafes, restaurants, or supping beers from brown paper bags, but simply occupying public benches and sitting on steps. Dropped from the sky you’d swear you were in Latin America, yet somehow the pace of life here was out of step with that notion; here was a desperate lethargy, which I
assumed due to the mid-afternoon hour and the collective body language to be unemployed restlessness.
It is estimated that as much as 10% of Mexico’s population now lives in the US. Three-quarters of the estimated 12 million ‘illegal’ migrants in the United States come from Mexico and Central America. Last year, Mexico received a record $20 billion in remittances from migrant workers - equal to Mexico's 2004 income from oil exports. The income differential means a Latin American migrant may earn 10 times in the United States of what he can earn at home. For these people the American dream is to be allowed to come here and be given the opportunity to achieve more prosperity than they could otherwise in their countries of origin.
A 700 mile wall is currently being built along the border in an attempt to keep them out.
Taking a walk up I6th Street past the Mission Dolores, built in 1791, three blocks further you hit the Castro and house prices have raised three-fold. The Castro is an overwhelmingly white middle-class neighborhood perhaps better known for its predominantly Gay community.
As we sat waiting for the tram for our trip back to
town I thought about why people would pay three times more, for what is effectively the same house three blocks down, just so they could live amongst their homosexual peers? Gay people come here from all over America and the world to be ‘free’. Yet this form of voluntary segregation gives the impression these people are choosing to isolate themselves and hide away from a mainstream society that doesn’t really appreciate or accept their freedom of choice of sexuality.
The following day we visited Haight-Ashbury, famous for its role as the centre of the American hippie counterculture movement in the 60's. It was pretty obvious things had changed over the years, even ignoring the obvious death knell of a McDonald's in attendance; the vintage clothing stores, exclusive boutiques and hip restaurants gave the distinct impression that commercialism had long ago moved in to profit from the areas legacy.
Chris had introduced me to ‘Thrift Stores’, which for us non-Americans, are clothes stores where all the products have been donated by the local community and are therefore stuffed with cheap secondhand items. My proud purchase was a Tuxedo suit and Dress Shirt for about $15 (why will be revealed
in the next blog…) - an absolute bargain, yet slightly ironic I felt; as I had just purchased my first
semi formal evening dress in the spiritual home of counter culture and The Hippies...a sure sign of gentrification if ever there was one!
I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road towards freedom - external freedom is a way to bring about internal freedom.
Jim Morrison Being a Hippie was resisting the status quo and it was attempting to fight tyrannical corporate/political power. Opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative peoples, cultures, and each other. Its main grievances were the illegal war in Vietnam, corporate America, and the consumerism it created to keep the masses conformist and repressed through mass produced objects and a mass produced media.
…see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want …all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures
Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums) 1958 It was their stated aim to ‘destroy the policemen inside their heads’ yet the culmination of their struggle and that of the Yippies, the Black Panthers and the SDS was ruthlessly repressed and all but destroyed in the next city I visited; Chicago.
In April 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated, leading to race riots in 125 cities. In June anti-war presidential candidate Bobby
Kennedy was assassinated. Then to cap an already tumultuous year, The Chicago Police Riots two months later mercilessly crushed the non-violent resistance at the Democratic Convention, live on TV, to the shock and outrage of the world. Ruthlessly repressed, the radicalism, hope and optimism of the sixties had affectively died.
The Nixon administration of 1969 further carried out a Gestapo-style assassination of The Black Panther Party activist, Fred Hampton, in Chicago, while he slept. Then came The Kent State Massacre, when 4 students were murdered protesting the American invasion of Cambodia.
Those who wanted to continue the fight were splintered and dispersed. The most infamous of these groups were the Weathermen Underground, who continued their fight against the government’s illegal wars in Southeast Asia with a campaign of targeted bomb attacks on govt. targets, which continued well into the next decade.
Yet the old zeitgeist had been crushed through a concerted media effort and an FBI sponsored policy of sabotage and ridicule, instigated through the COINTELPRO campaign. Most of what people knew or thought about hippies revolved around tie-dye clothes, flowers and dope smoking. Mass-murdering and acid crazed in the image of Charles Manson, or worse still,
simply a fashion statement stripped of any ideological meaning.
As the sixties drew to a close people began to believe it was impossible to fight against the state and destroy the policemen in their heads. So a new tactic of climbing inside to remove the controls was devised. If enough people changed the way they were then society itself would change. Political activism was deemed useless.
Many began to believe if you could become happy in yourself, changing society was irrelevant. Big business stepped in to make people feel individually happy; now people could express themselves as individuals through the clothes they wore and the products they chose to consume. They could buy an identity. Lifestyle marketing was born and next stop the Material Girl and the material world of the 1980's...
Forty years after the death of the hippie movement the gap between rich and poor has risen year on year, with those at the very bottom having shown little gain; People are still judged by class, religion, sexuality or the color of their skin; An illegal war rages in Asia and much of the world is still in flames.
These are the very conditions
that radicalized an entire generation.
Have we been convinced that further struggle or effort is futile?
Are we not moved by injustices anymore? Have we simply gotten used to the way things are and ceased to notice them, or have we become too individualistic to care?
Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction.
Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson feared people would forget what freedom was all about and stray toward selfish greed without morality and integrity. Today The American Dream is all about wealth and the desire to ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’. This is becoming the dream of the entire world. Pursuit of material happiness has corrupted the old values that gave substance to the dream. But the very essence of the American Dream is that it cannot work for some and not for others; it has to be attainable to all. And although people may not end up in the same place, or even desire to; if everyone starts from the same place, then surely that’s the dream fulfilled.
"The thing the sixties did was show us the possibility and the responsibility we all had, it wasn’t the answer, it just gave us a glimpse of the possibilities"
John Lennon
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Angie
non-member comment
quite interesting
this was interesting... it amazes me how there are people who enjoy travelling this much...and have the will to share it afterwards... bon voyage! greetings from croatia :) angie