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California turned this Democrat into a conservative

May 26, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

My California upbringing shows that people will cling to ideas long after the facts reveal those ideas are flawed — a scary thought for the 2020 election.

California San Francisco Democrats Poop Map

The infamous San Francisco “poop” map.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of America’s bluest of blue regions; attended UC Berkeley, which once was the standard-bearer for campus Leftism, although others have caught up; and lived in and, for many years, practiced law in San Francisco. If politics were a marinade, I would have been marinated in the stuff for decades and would be blue through and through.

Instead, my life experiences gave me a deep and abiding distrust for and disgust with Leftism. To the extent that our American states are laboratories of democracy, California proves everything that is wrong with Leftism.

Growing up, Leftism meant tolerating the Haight Ashbury invasion. After the pretty summer of love, filled with rainbows, rock, and half-dressed young women in gauzy shirts ended, what remained were the ancestors of today’s homeless: drugged out people lying in their own filth, destroying public property, and committing crimes. Back then, the poop map ran the distance of Haight Street, with Golden Gate Park thrown in for good measure. Even though San Francisco was less lenient than it is today about homeless behaviors, the City government still allowed the hippies ridiculous leeway when it came to engaging in uncivilized public behavior. But I was still a Democrat.

My public schools were on the cutting edge of each crazy idea that was emanating from teaching colleges, in which Leftism was becoming ascendant. I didn’t learn math because we were being taught some crazy variant of Base 6 math. (Go figure.) I was lucky to be a natural-born reader, because phonics — the thing that makes reading incredibly easy to master in English — were already being phased out in favor of “whole word” teaching. Teachers were also warned not to correct children who misspelled words lest it harm the children’s self-esteem. These ideas blossomed nationwide in the 1980s, but were already creeping into San Francisco classrooms almost 20 years earlier. Having failed there, they were ready to take on the nation. But I was still a Democrat.

My public schools also featured a handful of gifted teachers, a decent population of good to average teachers, and a small, but completely stable population of horrible teachers, many of whom were also horrible human beings. There was the science teacher who said of a Jewish student, “There’s another one Hitler should have gotten.” There was the math teacher who would periodically insult students as “Future pimps and whores.” There was the English teacher famous for having sex with male students, which bothered us in those days only because she gave them a pass for bad work. There were the teachers counting the days to retirement and a pension who couldn’t be bothered with teaching at all. (I had a lot of those.) The common denominator was that, thanks to government unions, none of these people could be fired and, with the exception of the science teacher — who finally got himself kicked out of the classroom for throwing a movie projector out of the window (although he apparently still collected his salary for years) — all of them continued to teach generations of students. But I was still a Democrat. [Read more…]

San Francisco, the City that no longer knows how

July 22, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

The once proud, shiny San Francisco of my youth has turned into a feces ridden hell hole thanks to unabated Leftist policies.

I’ve always thought that the Hippies marked the beginning of the end for the City that knew how

I grew up in San Francisco. Moreover, my time in San Francisco goes back long enough that I remember when it transitioned from a working- and middle-class City, with a slightly sophisticated 1960s edge (including ladies who lunches in hats and gloves); to a Hippie haven; to a self-realized, self-actualized, utterly self-involved therapeutic city; to a cutting edge gay freedom town; to an AIDS-wracked yuppieville . . . and then I left.

My overriding sense when I’m in San Francisco now is a sense of sadness and lost. The last time I spent an evening there, going to a little show near Union Square, my friend and I found ourselves walking down a street that was completely lined with homeless people These were not the homeless of the old, 1930s “Hoover-villes,” made up of primarily of people destroyed by America’s temporary economic collapse during the Great Depression. These were people openly shooting up and drinking down any intoxicants they could. Littered around their feet were broken bottles, needles, condoms, feces, and other detritus.

Some sat or lay there inert, some screamed at each other or at imaginary enemies, and some reeled around, lost in their own private world. My friend, one of the most decent people I know, made eye contact with each conscious person we passed, because she feels it’s cruel to deny someone’s humanity, no matter how destroyed their body, brain, and soul. When we reached the street’s end, though, she turned to me and said, “I’ve never been so frightened in my life.”

All trips to San Francisco lately have that feel: cars with smashed windows; piles of feces and needles; and scary homeless people who, in a more civilized society, wouldn’t be lying unconscious or raving on the sidewalk, with needles in their arms and open sores oozing all over their arms, legs, and faces.

Once upon a time, Herb Caen — Mr. San Francisco, the Sacramento boy who came to the City and made it his home — spoke for many San Franciscans when he called my hometown “the City that knows how.” On the one hand, it’s a meaningless phrase. On the other hand, to those of us who lived there, it meant a lot: we were small but cosmopolitan; a lovely blend of natural and man made beauty; hewing to a traditional Democrat Left (think JFK), but willing to let Republicans live in peace in our midst. [Read more…]

Fisking a risible argument that Leftists, not conservatives, are reality-based

August 11, 2017 by Bookworm 6 Comments

After explaining how the Left invented a detachment from reality, Kurt Andersen makes the laughable argument that the Left, not the Right, is reality-based.

A shining example of Andersen’s Leftist “reality-based” community.

A Leftist friend of mine told me that novelist Kurt Andersen’s article in The Atlantic, entitled How America Lost Its Mind : The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history, is a “must read.” Although the article is ostensibly about a movement that began in the 1960s, one that saw America abandon facts in favor of emotions and magical thinking, the article is really a very, very, very, very long effort to say that Trump voters are credulous and irrational.

Because I am a nice person, I will not ask you to read the article — unless, of course, you are a glutton for punishment and have endless amounts of time. Instead, I’ve worked my way through this magnum opus to distill the essential points in each paragraph. To save you the time of even reading my summation — which, while long, is still shorter than Andersen’s article — here’s a quick summing up of what he says:

During the 1960s and 1970s, America went crazy. It was mostly the Left that went crazy, especially in academia, where our colleges abandoned truth and, instead, settled for moral and cultural relativism, navel gazing, and Foucault’s “everybody makes it up as they go along” theory. This madness swept the land.

Fortunately, by the 1980s, the Left managed to distill only the purest and truest thought from this insanity. Conservatives, meanwhile, embraced the crazy because they believed in God and distrusted both Big Government and the media. They were aided by the end of the Fairness Doctrine, which allowed the crazies to hit the airwaves. First Rush and then the internet convinced conservatives that there is a God, and that both Big Government and the media deserve to be distrusted.

And that’s how we got Trump.

Andersen’s turgid, long, frequently ignorant, invariably condescending, and very nasty essay boils down to a variation of the saying that “Fascism is always descending on America, but landing on Europe.” According to Andersen, “An unprincipled retreat from reality is always bubbling and burgeoning on the Left, but only reveals itself on amongst conservatives.”

That’s really what Andersen takes 117 paragraphs to say. I know, because I read all of them and, as noted above, I’ve set out below a precis of his wordiness, along with my interlineated comments: [Read more…]

Thoughts on ladies of a certain age in their pink pussy hats

February 6, 2017 by Bookworm 17 Comments

The Women’s Marches may already be history, but the pussy hats linger on. Yesterday, a chilly, wet, blustery day, brought out a couple of those pink hats. It wasn’t until I saw the second pink-hatted lady wandering down the aisles at Trader Joe’s that something struck me about her, about the gal I’d previously seen, and about the many “ladies of a certain age” who showed up in photographs in their pink hats or at the parades.

The premise for my observation is that these are women my age and older who are ostensibly taking a stand for empowerment, for unconstrained women’s sexuality, for women’s freedom, yadda, yadda, yadda. What they should look like is bountiful, cheery (yet slightly ferocious) Valkyries, updated hippie gals who once danced in parks thanks to their liberation from centuries of male oppression. Certainly many of the young women on parade looked cheery enough, if vapid and ill-informed (content warning about vulgar images):

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When a gun is a gun and not a flower

June 17, 2013 by Bookworm 6 Comments

The photo above must be one of the most iconic images from the hippie, anti-war period. A youthful anti-Vietnam War protester, faced with a ring of National Guard troops pointing their rifles at him, carefully places a flower in each muzzle. He thinks, no doubt, that the flowers have magically converted the guns into harmless instruments. The troops, however, know that their rifles are still rifles. The only thing that’s preventing them from firing is their inherent decency and, of course, the lack of any order telling them to pull the trigger. The flower didn’t change anything; it’s the underlying morality that matters.

I thought of this liberal delusion — that guns can magically be transformed into harmless flowers — when Hube brought to my attention the clarity with which Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about the existential threat facing Israel, and about the West’s passivity in the face of this threat:

“The leaders of the Allies knew about the Holocaust in real time,” Netanyahu said at the opening of a permanent exhibit called “Shoah” in Block 27 at the Auschwitz- Birkenau State Museum.

“They understood exactly what was happening in the death camps. They were asked to act, they could have acted, and they did not.

“To us Jews the lesson is clear: We must not be complacent in the face of threats of annihilation. We must not bury our heads in the sand or allow others to do the work for us. We will never be helpless again.”

To stare down the muzzle of a rifle is a remarkably clarifying moment. Why aren’t we having such clarifying moments in America despite the Islamists’ relentless war against America and Western values? I think the problem is perfectly summed up by the young man in that photo: reality-challenged Progressive think that, by pretending the rifle is a flower, it will magically become one. That’s not how rifles or flowers work.

Just Because Music: The New Seekers “I’d like to teach the world to sing”

April 18, 2012 by Bookworm 4 Comments

I remember the hippies as dirty, drugged-out, pathetic human beings lying on the streets in the Haight Ashbury. Their continuing legacy is one of drugs, sexual self-indulgence, and mindless statism wrapped up in equally mindless slogans of “love” and “fairness,” as if a government is capable of giving love or imposing fairness from above.

However, the bells and whistles with which the hippies dressed up their drugs, sex, and Leftist fantasies were often quite lovely. One of my favorite childhood memories is of a rainbow themed art exhibition at the de Young Museum (this one, not this one), an exhibition that would never have happened but for Flower Child imagery.

Likewise, there was something charming, albeit manifestly naive, about the notion of universal brotherhood. I thought as a child, and still think now, that one of the prettiest, most harmonious, expressions of that naive belief was The Seeker’s I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing:

And for those of you who remember the Coke commercial:

(And don’t you just love the all-Americanism of a vapid hippie philosophy being co-opted by Madison Avenue and a multinational corporation to market a caffeinated sugar drink?)

Your scary story for Halloween (NC-17 rating; read without children around)

October 31, 2009 by Bookworm 11 Comments

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

It’s scary out there!! Have fun tonight!!

Have you ever wondered what happened to all those cute,crazy, good-looking, young hippie chicks who did drugs, smoked weed, got tattooed everywhere and did every guy during the Age of Aquarius back in the 60’s?

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Found one!

(WARNING: Do not go below the fold unless your kids are out of the room. This is a serious warning. Your children may be scarred for life.)

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