Dreams, Myth & Saga

29Nov07

We, The People of these United States hold this truth to be self evident: that our America is the Dreamer’s Dream Incarnate.

Though weak and nearly friendless amidst a creaky Old World of monarchies, autocracies and subjugated masses, America, it is said, lit the first beacon of liberty and freedom since the brilliancy of Athenian democracy was extinguished. Those 13 original states, constitutionally joined as one—that mythic United States of America, is said to have been a rarified union, where justice was blind and balanced, and talent fairly rewarded no matter one’s humble origins.

Here, personal initiative and willpower, when pushed nose-to-grindstone, provided each citizen tools to master his own destiny. In exchange for allegiance to our infant republic we granted ourselves the limited freedoms put forth in our Constitution; a representative voice in governing, peace when not at war, and implied financial stability to the thrifty and prudent. These privileges were accorded every land owning citizen, assuming that citizen was both male and Caucasian. And thus our grand bump-and-stumble experiment began.

Those statesmen who were convinced our budding republic’s survival demanded its grand expansion soon triumphed. The Manifest Destiny of our young nation would stretch it from one ocean to the next. Few suspected the seeds we planted would grow into a global empire.

Having arched across the vast continental rainbow, our nation’s territorial quest temporarily dead-ended upon the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Out here western pioneers no longer identified as mere citizens devoted to some pie-in-the-sky national commonwealth for all, turning instead to obsessing their very own Midas-like fortunes.

Most claim the madness erupted in 1848 with the discovery of our fabled Eldorado. Depthless pots of gold lay, they said, free for the pickin’s out West in Californy—out there, out at the end of the emigrant rainbow. Here lay humanity’s eternally quested cornucopia, from which sprang, in time, not only the shiny and metallic, but likewise mineral, liquid, and vegetable gold; human, industrial, high tech and just plain ol’ garden variety dirt patch gold. With native peoples dispatched and/or disposed of, the pillage and plunder continued unchallenged, and the eager creation of the Great Western American Myth would challenge even those of ancient Greece and Rome.

A self-anointed aristocracy had already emerged back East. These robber barons laid the hereditary foundation for latter day corporate imperialism. Still, even their enormous depredations paled in myth and legend compared to those of the glittering, kaleidoscopic Wild, Wild West.

Out here on the razor edge of the rainbow anything goes hedonism; every filthy, amoral, treacherous, two-faced, lyin’, cheatin’, connivin’, thievin’, violent and just plain no-good dastardly behavior was finely honed to a near art form. Siren songs blared out hot and loud from every Barbary Coast dive, creep joint, deadfall, cow-yard and crib; from each and every winedump, gambling and dance hall, shanghai and opium den in the city of terminal romance, roulette luck and twenty-four hour depravity—the one and unmatched City of San Francisco.

But we can’t stop with the City. So on we push, on into this entire present day post modern pre-apocalyptic San Francisco Bay Area. Here, nature’s sublime perfection is re-imagined into Pixars and Lucasfilms, into oil refineries, cargo ports, nuclear arms and biotech labs, into obscenely expensive “affordable” housing and gated golf course communities; re-imagined into freeways and collapsing bridges, into internet communes and staid financial houses built on mud; re-imagined into Masserati dealerships, underground sewers and cable systems, faux Victorian mixed-use malls, into Apples and Oracles and Suns—and into thousands of acres of world class vineyards providing ego-nectar for the endless bacchanalia our pantheon of provincial gods host to fete their own growing fortunes and the fortunes of their kind.

Tallied together and we SF Bay Area folk constitute the haves, the have mores, the hope-to-haves and the desperately impoverished. But in contrast to good ol’ fashion salt of the earth rebel & Yankee cornpone sodbusters, we out here in weirdo-land proudly power those fraternal twin engines named Genius and Madness, in total and in tandem. Of course, many of us landed here from elsewhere, so we’re lickety-split to re-imagine our boring and checkered pasts, puzzling each new moment as it arises, and flinging ourselves dead-on into myriad optimisms and the fantastic possibilities of tomorrow.

San Francisco’s storied fog-enshrouded nooks and film noir crannies interweave into the larger tapestry of our Beemer & Brie Left Coast environs. Six successive flags covered the patriotic butts of those many who “developed” and decimated this Eden. Audacious schemes and Utopian dreams heaped high hill upon golden hill their inventions, art and broken corpses. Out from these shifting sand-hills emerged our nation’s first instant metropolis. Starry-eyed Argonauts, atom bombers, cannibal emigrants, Beats, Raiders, Hounds, Silicon Valley vandals, Bohemians, Hippies, shrewd madames, Queers, Panthers, Diggers, Dot Com-bustants, Vigilantes, labor unionists, Paint Eaters and greasy Barbary Coast Rangers mixed with countless ethnic, religious, artistic and political groups pouring through our Golden Gate: dream-laden malcontents, misfits and human refuse, from each and every corner on earth. Each soul came to create and/or to take every good thing here, or else to pawn off failures to the next poor mark in line. “Sodom!” charged the critics. “Gomorrah!” added choruses of pious distant cowards.

Yes, the San Francisco Bay Area is just another seismically doomed chunk of this tiny, fragile planet—though we who actually live here ponder inevitable annihilation less than, say, whether to go with the round loaf sour or the baguette. Our San Francisco Bay Area is that perfect unholy place of things best and worst, ever strange, shocking, shifting, timeless and new.

Listen now—the ancient redwoods whisper. Listen closely for ghetto yearnings in a thousand foreign tongues. Brace for paradise in hell, where Nobel laureates ponder abstractions aloud while shuffling among our homeless. Here, in this microcosmic chip on planet earth millions live, die and suffer the exquisite, excruciating pain of euphoric mundanity. Ultimately, none survive, but strive to work from the heart and this saga may continue….

Filed under: Native Americans, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area History, Vitus vinifera, democratic society, eccentrics, gold rush, legend, madness, the elite, thieves & scoundrels   |  Leave a Comment