The Gilded Corpse of San Francisco

San Francisco is over. It’s done. It’s been over for a while, but the mission bros reserving Dolores Park areas with their fountains of $$$ is at once both emblematic and fatal. San Francisco is nothing more than a rich person’s playground, carved out of the corpse of a city that used to have something worth experiencing. It’s an overpriced facsimile of what San Fransico used to be, but far douchier and without any trace of self-awareness whatsoever. If you make 250k then I’m happy for you, feel free to keep living here and pretending, if you want to. But this is not San Francisco.

You don’t live in San Francisco. You live in a rich D-bag summer camp which uses price as a means of enforcing exclusivity. This is the heart of the problem. The point of paying four times too much for everything — rent, coffee, burgers, you name it — is not to get superior quality. Nope. It’s about exclusivity. If you’re paying four times the price to eat out, you know there won’t be any poor people there. If you go to boutiques where you have to spend $300 to buy a shirt, the point is exclusivity, not quality.

And that’s why Dolores Park is so emblematic. The public park is one of the last vestiges of the commons that we have, and rich fuckwads think they should have the right to simply buy their way to whatever they want, to shove everyone else out of the way with cold hard cash. If you aren’t nauseated by this then it’s time to take a look in the mirror. After that, look around this city and and see what’s really there. It’s disgusting. It’s a greedy pig wearing the skin of San Francisco’s corpse, and I personally want nothing to do with.

And you know what? San Francisco is not the only place with colorful and vibrant people. It’s not the only place you can find unique clothes and decor. It’s not the only place you can find amazing art, dance, and music. It’s not the only place you can find a wide variety of excellent cuisine and organic groceries. All of these things can be had in many other places at less than half the cost nowadays. The only reason to pay double or triple for these things here in San Francisco is the privilege of being in San Francisco itself — but everything people love about San Francisco has been bought out, torn down, and remade in a shiny and sterile facsimile of the original. At a certain point you have to look at the reality of what it costs to live here, and ask yourself, what am I really paying so much for?

This post is not about protest. It’s about acceptance. It is hard, and it hurts. We’ve been living in denial — the very act of continuing to live here IS a form of denial. I’ve been zeroing in on a certain aspect of human psychology in these current times which I think explains it, and this denial of reality is merely an echo of a larger phenomena, which is this:

We humans have a tendency to see things as they were, as we wish them to be, instead of how they are. All of our institutions here in America are corpses and parodies of their intended purpose, but we treat them as if they were not. Our public education system is nonfunctional, yet we send our children there (don’t get me started on charter schools, that’s just more stratification). Our government is basically nonfunctional, and almost entirely corrupted, yet we still vote. Our regulatory agencies which are supposed to protect us serve the interests of polluting industries instead, yet we drink the water, hope for the best, and try not to think about Flint, Michigan. Our religious institutions are mostly fraudulent, yet religion has a valid place in human existence and so we still seek out meaningful experience inside of these fraudulent institutions. Our legal system is a total inversion of its intent, as anyone knows who has had to deal with it without great financial resources available to them. Our news media — I mean LoL. It’s sick. And yet we still watch, to varying extents. Some have successfully reduced this, but the point is we are SUPPOSED to have a healthy news media — it’s one of the four pillars of society laid out in the constitution. College educations aren’t all they are cracked up to be, and even if you choose an industry that doesn’t collapse in ten years, you’re $40,000 to $80,000 in debt or more. Our healthcare system — now there’s a walking zombie corpse who preys on the living, turning them into more corpses. The zombie metaphor was never more apt.

And yet, despite all of this, we walk around with this foggy memory of how things used to be and how they were intended to be, superimposed over reality, never realizing we are interacting with zombies wearing the skins of functional institutions.

If I may go further, I would point out that all these institutions have been undermined and hollowed out for the purpose of converting them into corporate profiteering scams (with the exception of religious institutions, which are private profiteering scams). Go back through each one of the things I listed, and you will realize that all of these non-functional institutions have become a corporate scam. Healthcare, government, regulatory agencies, college loans, the media — all of it is exactly the way it is right now because “the way it is” makes a lot of money for rich assholes.

We help to perpetuate these frauds by not realizing what they are and calling them out as such. That’s why the message of Bernie Sanders is such a breath of fresh air — he’s pointing at the zombies and saying “don’ let them touch you, and we need weapons.” That zombie may look like your friend Tim, but it’s not Tim anymore, you know? He’s not your friend. He’s here to eat you.

To bring it back to San Francisco (forgive the brief digression), I believe we are experiencing the same kind of phenomena here, just in a localized fashion. San Francisco is a walking corpse, albeit a gilded one, and it’s a natural human coping mechanism to try to see it with the rosy glasses I am describing here for as long as possible. What used to be here was so good, and I don’t blame anyone or myself for holding on… but it’s reached the breaking point. It just doesn’t make sense here anymore for regular people. Spending all your money on rent just starts to feel a little silly after a while, and the time has come to face reality.

San Francisco is dead, but it still walks and talks and throws money around. It’s a gilded corpse-turned-zombie, and if you value your precious braaiiiins, you better run.