Walking around downtown San Francisco at night is an awe-inspiring experience.
(For some reason, I like walking around big cities at night. As a student in NYC in the 80's I'd often finish a night of studies with a random stroll in Manhattan at 2AM.)
At any rate, the steep hills of San Francisco, the huge glass and steel buildings that tower over the brick and stone remnants of previous eras...the Hudson Bay Company, the start points of the Gold Rush, the Barbary Coast, stomping grounds from the days of Ambrose Bierce, Samuel Clemens..buildings that survived the earthquake and firestorm of 1906...all nestled alongside the Bay, shrouded in fog and dominated by the gargantuan Western span of the Bay Bridge...all these monuments combine their effects to create an overwhelming sense of wealth and power centered on one small corner of a peninsula at the far Western point of the continent.
And, even though the dot com boom has long since crashed....and google searches of the term "multimedia gulch" turn up articles that are five years old...downtown San Francisco is growing, booming, expanding, churning in a steathily persistant way...across Market Street to Mission, now a corridor of skyscrapers....past Mission to Howard...down Second Street in a straight line to the ballpark and beyond to the new BioTech campus of UCSF..tower after tower housing and employing tens of thousands of skilled, well-paid citizens...brick warehouses retrofitted to survive earthquakes to come...aluminum and steel live/work lofts popping up right and left in vacant lots, or where factories used to hum and moan and where families lived and cooked and played...
What does this mean? Does it have anything to do with our politics? With our future?
It does. And it means many things.
One of them is so basic and fundamental that we neglect it at our own peril. It's the sole point I'd like to address: we are a tremendously wealthy society.
Our wealth, our accumulated power, capital, and infrastructure is something we take for granted. Whether dowtown, in an "edge city" or in the "edgeless" sprawl of office parks and manufacturing zones that line our Interstates for miles from every big city...or at the universities, large and small, that drive the engine of our economic and technological might....or in the form of the airports, ports and roadways that link all these up and make shipping and supplying an effortless dance of FedEx, UPS, and less well known companies that ply the roadways and shipping lanes...or in the technological infrastructure underneath it all...even the internet on which we blog.
American wealth is built on this infrastructure. Quite simply, there is a tremendous amount of money to be made selling and buying to the American public, in finding a corner, an edge of this huge slice of apple pie, and staking a claim. All of us who work here, participate in the economic and political life here...all of us who enjoy the fruits of this economy...we are back-end recipients of the greatest gold rush in human history: the creation of American wealth.
I could talk about the irony of the impending repeal of the estate tax...and how, every fortune made in America, from Bill Gates to Sam Walton..was made because of this national infrastructure, was made off of this wealth, not in spite of it, or due to some kind of personal merit. I could talk about the cynical power grab that the GOP has made in turning the "estate tax" into an issue that wins the sympathy of the "common man" when it is in reality a sure fire way to build a new American plutocracy of wealthy families that will dominate the economy for generations while our national debt explodes.
But that's not the side of things I'm thinking of. Because that still, in my mind, ducks the issue. We are all filthy rich. Including the "common" men and women. Including most every one of us reading and writing here today. We are all participants in this gold rush. And, for the most part, on most days, 99.9% of us take this for granted. We live it, breath it, accept it as a given. We take our monuments...our downtowns, our universities and hospitals, our "World Trade Centers" if you will....for granted. They are ours. They will last forever. Nothing will change our comfortable status atop a globe of 6 Billion fellow inhabitants.
Of course, that assumption isn't true. It wasn't true before September 11th, and it certainly isn't true now. American power and economic might is real...as real as the marble corridors of the banks and investment firms that line Montgomery Street, and it is backed up by the world's strongest and most expensive military. But the vulnerabilty of that power, its basis in what really is a dream of American exceptionalism...lies in the fragile illusion of Reagan's parting vision, that we are a "city built on a hill."
The dream of American exceptionalism...of the self-justification of our wealth...is a two-edged sword. It is one that a wide swath of families in this country have bought into, and aren't likely, in my opinion, to "buy out of" for light reasons. On the one hand, it seems so true...and powerful...and real. We really are the world's wealthiest, most powerful nation...in part, because of our ideals, in part because of our efforts, and in part because of the sacrifices of those who've gone before and of those who serve in so many ways today.
We are also wealthy because of many "happy" accidents that led to the success of the American experiment. We are amnesiac about that history, and ignorant of the broader lessons taught by the history of human civilization...lessons that would tell us that our nation's story IS that of an experiment, and one riddled with self-justifying myths, of greedy land grabs and grubby ideologies that rewrote our stories and white-washed our past. Like every nation before us or after, we are not exempt from the laws of history or from common sense.
Downtown San Francisco is founded at the site of a gold rush, a land grab, a human tide that came in quest of riches. Slightly under one hundred years ago most of this city burned to the ground in the fire following the 1906 earthquake. Walking around downtown San Francisco late on a pleasant Saturday night with revelers trickling in and out of clubs and bars one can almost forget those facts. Just like, I guess, it's easy to forget that, as of today, 1556 of our fellow citizens have died in Iraq in a war that a majority of Americans link directly ot 9/11 and to defending our nation and its wealth from another attack.
Our wealth and our amnesia are connected. Our wealth and our "turning of the blind eye" to the wounded and the dead in the war in Iraq on all sides are connected. The point is not that our nation is "tainted" so much as to say that we have bought into Reagan's pleasant dream hook line and sinker, and been lulled by our good life so much that we've blithely accepted a news black-out of the costs in bodies and lives of a war that supports it.
We take our wealth for granted. We believe in our own exceptionalism. And the dominance of the GOP in our political lives is an expression of this state of affairs. As Bill Clinton said...at the end of the day, most Americans really would rather be "strong and wrong."
Even 9/11...what might have been the "ultimate" wake up call...has been rewritten to match that myth....woven into the Republican's simplistic vision of what makes America strong...even as their policies, on so many levels, have weakened us and led us headlong down a dangerous path...even as the GOP has undone the infrastructure and ideals that have made our national experiment so admirable, and beneficial to so many.
All this makes me wonder what it's going to take for us as a nation to wake up. It's a scary thought. And, of course, waking up, and taking stock of common sense reality...will really only be the first step in reclaiming and remaking the American dream in this new global reality. The hard work is what comes after.
On some level, we all know that. On some level, we all know that common sense tells us we can't pay tommorrow for what we spend today....or bank on an eternally rising tide. Gold rushes end. Earthquakes bring buildings low. Wars fought based on lies have consequences.
However, in the face of the realities of the year 2005 one thing is clear: America is driving into its future in an SUV wearing a pair of sunglasses made by the GOP.