FundamentallySound Blog

I keep thinking about San Francisco, trying to pin down what this city is about. When I was young, I grew up with an idea that the city was home to a rare combination of progressive politics and cutting edge art. But in fact, it's really a conglomerate of villages controlled by an elite of some of the richest people in the world, who are amused by the spotty idealism of the city's residents. In a deeply schizophrenic way, this elite is able to reconcile its slash-and-burn capitalist activities with its vaguely liberal notions by passively tolerating occasional outbursts of populist activism. And by making an occasional donation to giant organizations like HRC, which have completely let go of any progressivism with their current support of anti-gay legislators.

This kind of passive tolerance is in direct odds to central European countries like Holland, Belgium, and Germany which, to use a very American term, proactively work to create cultures of tolerance, where an openly gay man can be elected mayor (Berlin), cities pride themselves on their active inclusiveness of foreigners and outsiders (Hamburg), become the first countries to allow gay marriage (Belgium and Holland), and generally work towards cultures that value life, relaxation, and peace, and actively resist the corrosively suicidal-pop-culture-government-policies of the United States.

Dissonance between what America professes to stand for and its death-wish tendencies has always existed, I don't actually think the country has changed much. But what has changed is that we now have a "Keystone Cops" (to quote Vonnegut) executive branch hell-bent on dragging this country through the mud and a popular resistance that took six years to materialize. I think one of the best analyses of the deeply dark side of this country was made by Lars von Trier in his film Dogville. I saw it in the Hague while I was living there. My only complaint at the time was the obviousness of his use of David Bowie's Young Americans as the closing-credit music. But in retrospect, I forgive him of that, it was a necessary brashness matched only by the movie's subject.