I am not a promoter of San Francisco as a glorious city.
I am realistic about the city where I've spent most of my life. It has at times been one of the world's great centers of revolution, important change and global vitality. Today it is a shit hole of Lefty Fundamentalists political theology. It is also filthy thanks to its love of Street people.
I was just thinking about how extraordinary San Francisco has been over its history as a source of countless global movements and how little appreciation it has ever gotten. That may be fine. It may be wonderful that New York gets credit for everything. The ambitious go to New York, the creatives come to San Francisco.
That simply makes it easier for the next wave of global revolution to occur in San Francisco.
Let's begin with San Francisco in the gold rush. San Francisco did not have the hierarchical social structure found everywhere else on the planet at that time. It became a source of incredible vitality and wealth and consequently architectural and artistic refinement.
It was central to the creation of Jewish communities and Jewish private clubs such as the Bohemian club, all of which have an influence to this day.
San Francisco's gold fury was so shockingly aggressive that it generated many scientists and organizations that shaped and still shape the environmental movement worldwide.
The antismoking movement came from San Francisco.
The entire baby-boom of the 1890s came from San Francisco along with its music, its language, experimental communes, health foods and most importantly the politics that we know of as the Progressive Party.
San Francisco after WWII was the home of the gay movement and every part of it; the lesbian movement and every part of it as well as the subsequent training in human sexuality.
It was the revolutionary center of the hippies. The center. Everything the hippies contributed from home home-schooling to the health and food revolutions, to the fashion revolutions to music revolutions and a dozen other elements; they came from San Francisco. I can find the same things in arts, music and visual arts. By the way, modern TV came from San Francisco. So did the modern personal computer.
If you have ever been part of an underground event in your city whether it is walking through the sewers or having a paintball fight in an abandoned building or climbing a bridge; you owe that to the people in San Francisco who started it and promulgated. A teeny residual of that is Burning Man.
The list is endless. In includes the 1890 and the 1990 wave of 'cocktails'.
These revolutions came out of two elements that were present in San Francisco in the gold rush.
* The absence of social hierarchy to oppress the innovative people in our society and
* A fairly light touch of government that allows people to be imaginative and creative.
The current political disaster in San Francisco is probably not impeeding the underground creative world. San Francisco has always had idiotic politics.
(Photo of Philo Farnworth's lab where he invented TV.)