Authoritarian California
Why I left my heart in San Francisco and it broke it
I left my birthplace of the South for something better to the Golden State where dreams are made of, and over the last 17 years, this place has become more Progressive with wokeism and therefore, more authoritarian in many respects than the Bible Belt South. When I first arrived in San Francisco in 2006, I casually remarked to a yoga friend that something was "awfully pretty” to which I was harshly shamed “What’s so awful about being pretty”? I replied something to the effect of it was just a Southern expression said piquantly to accentuate if something is extremely pretty. The culture of hemming in speech has not improved since then.
Having lived all these years in the crucible of woke ideology is making me feel (in more grandiose moments) like I am the protagonist, Winston in George Orwell’s 1984 where the Party is trying to convince me that two and two is five. I've been holding steady to reality despite the pressures of woke totalitarianism, relying on an internal locus of control to help me keep my bearings from the unmitigated Progressive shaming, lecturing, and relentless agitating churn that things should change as if change itself is all the balm we need, as if the underpinnings of the mechanisms of life are nothing but power plays to continually shapeshift around in a pointless anxiolytic (anxiety-reducing) exercise of movement for the sake of movement.
In this perpetual hamster wheel of change for change’s sake, we can all unabatedly fight with each other in the California secular religion that is a toxic stew of politics, culture wars, and narcissism. Narcissism precludes nuance and agreeableness. No more can “we agree to disagree" and go on our merry way. Nay, every disagreement on politics, which is readily discussed openly in this Californian culture, is grounds for ad hominem attacks replete with ample shaming and coercion to get on board with the "right way" of the mercurial day. WrongSpeak and dissent are not countenanced in the holy grail that is obscene narcissistic righteousness and sanctimony. The prevailing sentiment seems to be, that the more defiant (psychopathic) and sanctimonious, the better, as you are totally in your power. There is a chronic wind of ambient low-grade narcissistic abuse in California in a culture of shaming, blaming, and lecturing, and an obsession with power as the chief currency of wokeism. In the absence of religion in this secular state of California, narcissism, worship of self, has rushed in to fill the vacuum and with it, its own “value” system.
Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, long a thorn in gender critical constituents’ side, passed this week SB 58, noting healing properties for PTSD in particular. This is a psychedelic bill decriminalizing small amounts for personal use of magic mushrooms (psilocybin and psilocyn), DMT (ayahuasca and mescaline) except peyote. How serendipitous that this psychedelic bill upon second attempt should pass given that he will be traumatizing a number of parents and detransitioners with his euphemistic “gender affirming care” bills, notably AB 957 passed this week also and pictured above.
“Conservatives govern without shame and liberals shame without governing.” Bill Maher
The South, having weathered many storms, stalwartly reminds us that old fashioned values can be good and that new is not always better. Traditional Christianity as a value system is obviously more prosocial than secular California’s newfangled narcissism. The South will rise again because it's still based on the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and not woke ideology, which espouses that reason is legacy patriarchal and holds the nonsensical and counterfactual view that words construct reality rather than describe reality.
Meanwhile, in authoritarian California, where youth and its accompanying infantile perspectives are valorized, it's fitting that medically and technologically based transgenderism would be embraced so readily, as it's a reification of living in a pathological fantastic space with all the hallmarks of narcissism and its rejection of life. Mutilating children is not life affirming. Similarly, San Francisco is known to be a childless city to do with this rejection of life. The more one rejects life, the more it sets the stage for being attracted to narcissists and sadomasochistic narcissistic abuse. The shared fantasy is not attractive if you're already embracing the reality of life. Put another way, fantasy is a release valve for the rejection of life.
Growing up in a Leftist household, I have spent more time in the last year taking in right-leaning media than I have ever in my entire life, and it's been both comforting and enlightening to step away from the Right/Left splitting that's endemic to our narcissistic society and look at the whole political picture. (Splitting is dichotomous, black-and-white thinking and an infantile, primitive defense mechanism consistent with narcissism). That's not to say that some newfound ideas on the political Right sit well with me, having always been on the Left, though many of these ideas do feel more freeing than what is being pushed on the authoritarian Left. The Left is about controlling speech, not free speech, and deplatforming people which I categorically, reject.
It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child to quote comedian Steve Martin in the classic 1979 movie The Jerk. In all seriousness, I was born and raised in Memphis Tennessee (gasp!). I know, I know, digesting this fact might land on your ears with as much fright as though for the first time, you heard your dog speak. Strap yourself in (don't fall out of your chair!), my mother was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a true southern belle.
Rejecting what I thought was the authoritarian, repressive, and oppressive Bible Belt city of Memphis where I could literally walk to at least a handful of nearby churches from my childhood home, I fled to New York City as a Southern “refugee” (after a one-year detour to the Philadelphia area to attend Bryn Mawr college) and then made my way to of all places to get married (still married!), in San Francisco, California after a two-year scenic route hiatus to the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia.
The South has a sense of humor because they've always had to have a sense of humor. It's poor and miserable and we make fun of it and ourselves as a coping strategy with terms like white trash. No, we aren't mental, “giving away our power,” and in need of therapy with self-deprecating humor, f*ck you very much, Californians. “It's the humor, stupid,” to riff on James Carville that makes the South so captivating and charming. Where else would Scarlett O'Hara make a ballgown out of Green velvet curtains but the Antebellum South?
Californians always stupidly think I must be stupid, because I came from the South. Tell me, how open minded is that? Isn't that what Californians are supposed to be about, being open minded?? Never, not once, has anyone I have met in California been at all interested or curious about what it would be like to be raised in Memphis, the birthplace of Soul, Rock 'n' Roll and Blues music and home to Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Memphis is also where Martin Luther King was shot to death, his death commemorated with the National Civil Rights Museum. And as an aside, Memphis is prized for its notable, delicious pulled pork barbecue and ribs. When Californians find out that I hail from Memphis, they usually avert their eyes and deflect to another subject after a painful pregnant pause as presumably their stomach does a somersault. I get the same treatment when I mention that I worked in I.T. for a decade for major corporations. Californians think their sh!t doesn't stink and that they are better than you: hello, narcissism! I met a Californian once who had a pathological fear-based aversion to ever stepping foot east of the Mississippi River, which just happens to be where Memphis is located on the bluff of the Mississippi River.
Living in San Francisco has all the feels of living in a lonely tech bro office complex with an accompanying fentanyl/meth-addicted homeless zombie apocalypse. My hairdresser said it best the other day when she said, “San Francisco is a great place to make money, but not a great place to make friends.” Across town, in the Haight Ashbury district, the old hippies persist in pretending as though it's still the 1970s heyday of free love and dropping acid. For the rest of us, tech has turned us into solipsistic, atomized robots, maybe there is some blood in there? California is the fifth largest economy in the world, and all this wealth lends itself to narcissism and its concomitant loneliness, where nobody is good enough for you. The technology wrought with Silicon Valley has also increased anxiety, depression, and suicidality amongst other mental health concerns including an uptick of narcissism. Is it really fair to say that this grim landscape can be called progress when it's one step forward, two steps back, in a death cult of microchip materialism? Or would it be more fair to say that we are barbarians with tech, being narcissistically regressed into a hapless state of dependency on said tech. Is California really improving life??
I'm still learning just how Southern I am with time; it's called humor. Californians take themselves entirely too seriously. It's expensive here and lacking a sense of fun. This place called California is too much sugar for a dime, as my mother would've said. Translation, it's more trouble than it's worth. By the way, Californians, by and large, don't understand idiomatic expressions. While Orwell would advocate plain straightforward language to avoid euphemisms and white washing language, a lot of flavor and pizzazz gets drained from the culture without expressions. To Orwell’s point, years ago, in San Francisco, I got caught up in a yoga cult of false advertising of authoritarianism dressed up as spiritual freedom. San Francisco is ground zero of what's euphemistically called New Religious Movements including Jim Jones’ People’s Temple and I drank something like the Kool-Aid when I really should've been reaching for a gin fizz.
If you need a break from Wokeistan, travel to the South to New Orleans, for instance, as I just did, though I did see a fair amount of preaching in the forms of BLM and especially, pride/trans flags on this trip which I chalk up to their annual Pride festival called Southern Decadence. For over the last decade I have made an annual pilgrimage to New Orleans for a California detox. I've had my fill over the years of shrimp étouffée, gumbo, jambalaya and bread pudding. New Orleans is the Las Vegas of the South, where you can let your hair down and avoid haranguing.
If I could put my finger on it, I'd bottle it and sell it. I came down here originally in 1972 with some drunken fraternity guys and had never seen anything like it — the climate, the smells. It's the cradle of music; it just flipped me. Someone suggested that there's an incomplete part of our chromosomes that gets repaired or found when we hit New Orleans. Some of us just belong here.
John Goodman - Actor
And move over Joseph Conrad and your “Heart of Darkness”:
“Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits, the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Woke ideology is humorless and authoritarian because everything's a capital offense, in a woke purity quest race to the bottom. You know Californians are compensating for their narcissism by virtue signaling, because in the land of plastic surgery, it's all about appearances, isn't it??
New Orleanians embrace their dark side with goth, punk, voodoo, and a jazz ethos, unlike Californians who have what, skater culture? Being covertly dark is worse. Covert narcissists are snakes in the grass.
When considering how uptight Californians are (this is the most humorless place I've ever lived) and how they really should undergo an image makeover consistent with who they truly are as not free-wheeling liberals but authoritarians, I asked my niece, who has lived in Louisiana for years now, what's the difference between Memphis and Louisiana? She said they're a lot more laid-back in Louisiana. Touché, New Orleans is called the Big Easy for a reason. Sign me up!
I've been thinking that this whole country needs to effectively, get over itself and come together. No place is a utopia and every place has its problems. Maybe we should all try to be cultural mutts to understand each other's vantage points better. Being a cultural mutt compels you to have an internal locus of control, where you draw upon your own internal judgment without overreliance on exigencies to shape you or undue external influences. This internal locus of control, as opposed to an external locus of control, stabilizes and buttresses you against the vicissitudes of erroneous and fallacious social change. This expansiveness of mind to do with being a true free spirit could save our country and our civilization.
Upon returning from New Orleans, I took myself out to lunch at Brenda's French soul food restaurant in the dreary homeless Mecca of the Tenderloin District in San Francisco where I listened to jazz music over rice and beans with andouille sausage to essentially cry into my beer that authoritarianism should find me in the supposed liberal bastion of woke San Francisco. I could've saved myself a lot of trouble if I had just stayed put in Memphis or found my way to New Orleans to walk on the side of the street that’s sunny.
Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worry on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street
Can't you hear a pitter-pat?
And that happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street
What a tragedy California is, and especially San Francisco. It really is a superb advertisement for what narcissism actually looks like. Any rational person can easily see the decline and the dysfunction, a true open air lunatic asylum. And yet they double down because the narcissist's thinking is disordered. Their self-image must always be attended to above all else, hence the rage when ordinary people point out that people shooting up in broad daylight is a sign of a broken society. Anyone can see it, except of course the narcissist. They only see themselves.
Great article. Thanks for publishing.
Ginger i feel the same way about nyc that you do about sf. myrna minkoffs on steroids have taken over.
trouble is i don't have a memphis to fall back on. what a crucible for genius that place was.
chris bray has been kicking some serious ass on the cali situation https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/parent-notification-parsing-the-endless