Interesting article about the new urban monoculture. This is one of the reasons why I was glad to get out of San Francisco. Now that we’re in Murfreesboro, 30 miles from Nashville, we long to move to the city, to enjoy all the delights of the urban fantasy. Nashville has become not all that different from San Francisco.
It’s not quite as off the charts crazy as San Francisco. It’s not as much of a gay Mecca, for example, and the Mayor and Council members are pretty sane and sensible. There are no resolutions to harbor illegal aliens or to ban high school ROTC, but the city has a similar feel nevertheless. Candace played a gig at the Whole Foods in Nashville. There were beautiful, young, left-wing people everywhere. Everyone we know in Nashville would fit in in San Francisco without the slightest need for readjustment, other than financial.
Nashville, unlike my memories from back in the day, has world-class restaurants, a symphony, a ballet. It has always had world-class music coming out of its ears. Bill Frist endowed a very respectable art museum, not as fancy a building as San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, but arguably with a better collection. There are beautiful parks, the Cumberland River, a happening NFL franchise, and it’s a day’s drive, more or less, to Chicago, Atlanta, Birmingham, Savannah, Louisville, Washington DC, Bay City Michigan, New Orleans, not to mention Knoxville, Chattanooga, the Great Smokies, and Asheville, NC.
It is now too expensive for us to live in Nashville. Not as bad as SF, but bad enough that we’re stuck out here in the burbs. And people around here think 30 miles is a lot further than do the citizens of the Bay Area.
In 1969, my wife Susan and I, and our two children, Jason and Jennifer, were living in San Francisco. I was working downtown in the financial district for a consulting company, pulling down a very respectable salary, something like $12,000 a year, enough money to have afforded the down and payments on a nice, three story Victorian in the upper Haight. However, held back by my beliefs as I was, we did no such thing. Instead we paid $160 a month for a beautiful seven room, third floor, Victorian flat on Page Street, 4 blocks from the corner of Haight and Ashbury, two of the local streets.
That hypothetical three-story Victorian is now worth somewhere around $2 million. In those days, San Francisco, groovy as it was, was still a local place, not all that different, economically, from Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was of course the emerging bummer of the Haight, but there were also neighborhoods, families, children, blue collars. It was more or less as affordable as anyplace else. Silicon Valley did not exist. The peninsula was a rural landscape of apricot and pomegranate orchards.
So it goes. Now the Democrats have a lock on the urban poor, who don’t, fortunately, vote, people who think of themselves as being “of color”, and the young, urban, professional elite, who, fortunately, also don’t vote. And the Republicans have the middle-aged, white, middle, and working class, and old folks like me, who vote like crazy. Did you see the recent Gallup poll that had McCain ahead of Obama by five points among likely voters?
As I read the comments at the end of this article in the LA Times, I see a fair number of them, coming from those of the leftward persuasion, that advance the notion that the mainstream media is so in the pocket of the right-wing extremists, who have betrayed and bankrupted this country, and who should be prosecuted and shot, that of course Obama has not seen a bounce in the polls from his inaugural tour.
This is indeed good news. If Obama, and the Democratic Party, are even slightly as delusional as these commenters, even a crazy old Republican fart like John McCain has a chance. These are the people Obama still has to be careful not to offend. McCain has already offended all of his crazies.