The fall semester has been over for a while now. The inevitable pile of grading that has to be done before any thought of holiday cheer can happen in an academic household has long since been put away, and the holidays have been well and truly cheered. It was a good semester in many ways. My classes were fun to teach and my students were interesting and, for the most part, interested. I was well treated by both my department and several different campuses, when all was said and done. I had a friend to carpool with on the long drive to Mid-Range Campus. Life was good.
Still, there was one troubling aspect.
I’ve been rewriting the last third of my US2 class for the last year or so – two full run-throughs of the course now. You have to rewrite classes now and then. This is especially true with any history class entitled “Something-something-something to the present,” as every day there is more of it. Plus my thinking on how the basic mechanics of post-WWII American history has worked – the underlying things that make what you see turn out the way you notice – has shifted considerably in the last few years. You can only tweak it so long before you have to do a complete teardown and rebuild it from top to bottom.
The previous structure of the post-WWII part of the class was all about limits and limitlessness.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII, so the old version goes, the US felt that it was effectively limitless and it could remake the world as it chose. Accordingly it adopted a number of policies and shouldered a number of burdens with this in mind – the Bretton Woods System, the Containment of Communism, and NSC-68 in foreign policy; the Politics of Growth at home. This kind of world was a place where it was un-American for people to be left out of the growing prosperity, where you could give to the poor and the marginalized and not mind the rich because there was always more to go around. The Great Society was based on this kind of thinking as were most of the early phases of the social protest movements of the 1960s, such as the Civil Rights Movement.
This mindset basically worked until the mid-late 1960s, when cracks first appeared in the foreign policy angle – notably because of Vietnam – and then in the 1970s it fell apart completely. We discovered limits to both our role in the world and to our own economic and political power at home, and the next four decades became a story of how the return of the Zero-Sum World played out at home and abroad. The Zero-Sum World is a world of limits and harsh struggles over scarce resources, and if you think this doesn’t apply today you can look around you. It’s also a much more conservative world, where generosity can be seen as foolhardiness and a general sense that things were once better pervades throughout.
This was a useful framework for hanging the major developments of post-WWII US history upon, and in some ways – particularly the initial part – it remains embedded in the fabric of the class.
But over time the pesky little details that seemed to resist being explained by this framework became more and more apparent, and I began to think that a more important focus for this unit of the class would be the sharp turn to the right that we’ve experienced over the last forty to fifty years.
How do you get from a place where Barry Goldwater is considered a right-wing extremist to a place where Goldwater is bitterly describing himself as a liberal on some issues because his party and the country in general have moved that far rightward? How do you explain the fact that by any rational post-WWII standard Barack Obama is a moderate conservative – throw an Amy uniform on the man and there is precious little daylight between him and Eisenhower – yet there are legions of Americans who will look you in the eye and tell you with an absolutely straight face that he is some kind of howling Socialist?
That process is interesting.
It usually takes me two to three renditions of a new course or a complete rebuild (which is more or less the same thing) to get things down to my satisfaction – to get it to where the story flows naturally, the points build on top of each other, and the evidence fits without being either distracting or overwhelming. Until then there is a lot of volatility.
Take, for example, the emergence of the Religious Right in the 1970s.
There is a huge shift in American politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the social protest movements radicalized after about 1966 or so, they began to shift their focus from economic and legal issues (segregation, equal pay, free speech) to more cultural issues. “The personal is political,” they said. While this shift therefore begins on the left, it ends up being adopted wholeheartedly by the right, who realized that they had essentially nothing to offer most Americans in economic or legal terms – the vast majority of Americans are objectively better off under Progressive economic policies than under laissez-faire for the simple reason that supply-side economics do not work in a demand-side economy, for one thing, and for another a legal defense of inequality is a non-starter in a nation whose founding creed specifically argues otherwise. If the right wanted to reach voters they needed to shift the grounds of politics to something that they could win on, something that hid the inequalities that inevitably result from the economic and legal policies they espoused. That something turned out to be “values.”
I put the scare quotes in there because “values” becomes something of a buzz phrase that may or may not have anything to do with actual morality. I’ll stop doing that now, though, as even I find it aggravating.
When you shift the basis of politics to values, suddenly supply-side economics is about “freedom” rather than taxing the poor to benefit the rich. Suddenly taxes and indeed all dollars-and-cents issues get lost in the shuffle of moral debate, making sane fiscal policy unreachable. Suddenly treating the marginalized and the oppressed with the dignity they have long been denied is a threat to good old fashioned American values, because the world as it was is changing and They are coming for You, whoever They are and whoever You are. Suddenly compromise is impossible, because nobody wants to compromise their values – and more importantly, nobody wants to be seen compromising their values.
In the long run this shift makes the country essentially ungovernable, as we are discovering here in the 21st century.
The first place you really see this shift happening on a national level is with Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968. The Southern Strategy is an attempt to move the Southern Democrats alienated by the Civil Rights Movement into the Republican Party permanently – not because treating blacks as actual real-live American citizens threatened white jobs but because treating them that way struck those whites as counter to the way the world ought to work. It was a threat to their values, in other words. The Southern Strategy works exactly as advertised. Those voters abandon the party that had opposed civil rights for blacks in the 1870s and move into the party that opposed them in the 1970s, where they remain to this day – the backbone of the GOP and the heart of the social conservative movement.
And once you understand that, you understand a lot about where the Religious Right comes from.
The first time I ran through this version of the class I did a fair amount of handwaving as to the connection between the emergence of the large and influential evangelical voting bloc in the 1970s (if the personal is political, what is more personal than faith?) and the fact that this bloc becomes a hard and fast part of the right wing. But from a historical perspective that identification is strange. Christianity – and specifically evangelical Protestantism – has often been a liberal and reforming force in American history and the most prominent evangelical politician in America in the 1970s was Jimmy Carter, whose personal faith led his politics toward the left of the American spectrum (which is not that far left in broader Western Civilization terms, but that’s another story). How does this group become the central pillar of the New Right?
In the first run-through of this rewritten class, I simply attributed the change to “conservative activists” and left it at that. But that vagueness felt unsatisfactory, so I decided to dig a bit further into the specifics of how and why those activists made that happen.
If you listen to social conservatives today – the sort of people who have turned the GOP from a once-proud defender of Jeffersonian small government and Gilded Age laissez-faire capitalism (coherent intellectual stances, whether you agree with them or not) into a hive of batshit insanity where Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Ted Cruz are somehow considered legitimate candidates for office rather than walking advertisements for the importance of taking one’s medications – they will tell you that the primary impetus for the emergence of the Religious Right was their outrage over Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that removed restrictions on a woman’s right to have an abortion.
This is untrue.
The mainstream evangelical position on abortion in the late 1960s and early 1970s was essentially pro-choice. “God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed,” wrote Bruce Waltke, an evangelical theologian at the Dallas Theological Seminary, in 1968. “The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.” In 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention called for all Southern Baptists to work for legislation that would allow abortions in many cases, including the emotional and mental health of the mother. And the Roe v Wade decision itself was hailed by W. Barry Garrett of the Baptist Press: “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”
The court case that launched the Religious Right – and with it the heart of the modern definition of conservative in America – was a far more obscure case known as Green v. Connally, where a US District Court ruled that private schools that practiced racial discrimination – banning blacks from entering, segregating them if they were admitted, and so on – were not entitled to tax-exempt status under federal laws. Tax-exempt status is not a right – it is a gift of taxpayer money, and it comes with strings. Those institutions who do not respect the rights of American citizens do not have the right to public money.
When the fundamentalist Bob Jones University saw its tax-exempt status revoked in January 1976 for its racist practices, right-wing leaders such as Paul Weyrich seized on it as a pretext to organize the emerging evangelical voting bloc into a right-wing force. They did this by working to convince those voters that religious liberty was at stake – that the message of Christ was about hating one’s neighbor and that this trumped any responsibilities American citizens might have to the Constitutional requirement to treat other American citizens as American citizens. And this, too, worked exactly as advertised.
Indeed, you still hear this nonsense being spouted today and taken far more seriously than a thinking person could possibly imagine, as anyone who has paid attention to the issue of gay marriage will attest.
This is the origin of the Religious Right. This is where it comes from, the notion that being required to treat fellow Americans as Americans is somehow a burden. The bottom line is that the Religious Right and the social conservative movement that derives from it and currently dominates the American right wing is rooted entirely on a defense of segregation.
But, comes the counter-argument, what about all the economic issues that conservatives ramble on about so much? The smaller government, libertarian-themed waltz that gets played over and over again on right-wing radio? This, say those in that camp, does not follow from that.
Actually it does, and the originators of the New Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s were quite open about that. They saw no problem with it. They were defending their values, which included such things, and that was that.
Lee Atwater was one of the architects of the New Right and later served in the Reagan Administration and as the campaign manager for both Reagan in 1984 and Bush Sr. in 1988. He was the guy who brought you the Willie Horton ad. And in a remarkably candid 1981 interview, he laid out exactly how those issues are connected and how you get from opposing civil rights to cutting government services, in language that was at once direct and appropriately racist. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” he said. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing, states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. … You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”
Do you think it’s an accident that right-wing policies consistently harm non-white Americans far more than anyone else? Do you think it’s an accident that all of the big issues being thumped by right-wingers today – “law and order,” “voter fraud,” “welfare reform,” on and on – are just new and more abstract ways to say to suburban and rural whites, “Black people! BOO!”? Think again. They’re designed that way – they’re dog whistle issues harping on themes only the initiated can hear, designed to give plausible deniability when called out but otherwise crystal clear to those who understand.
It’s interesting these days how when armed criminals threaten to shoot the officers sent to enforce the law conservatives cheer the white ones – Cliven Bundy and his band of deadbeats, for example – but bitterly condemn the black ones. The Second Amendment has a long history of being for whites only, after all.
The Atwater quote is the link that makes the connections clear, the prism through which this underlying mechanism can be brought into focus. It sums up the shift from economics to values, grounds the New Right in its racist origins, and explains much of the next forty-plus years of American politics in a way that allows students to connect disparate events that might otherwise seem to be coincidences or randomly unrelated events. They’re not random. They’re not coincidence. And they sure as hell aren’t unrelated. If you want to understand the politics of the last forty years or so, the Atwater quote is pretty much essential reading.
But how do you use that in a class?
Even if you preface it with the kinds of language warnings that are now required to protect the sensitive ears of the modern student from any kind of historical authenticity when it comes to offensive words (and don’t even get me started on that issue), the fact is that these issues are tricky to bring up in a classroom setting. As Ferguson burns and Eric Garner asphyxiates in an illegal chokehold, how do you even broach this topic without turning the classroom into a battlefield?
I never did figure out how to do it this past fall, and that troubles me.
It seems dishonest to punt on the Atwater quote, to leave it out in the interest of preserving the illusion of peace in the classroom. It certainly made the rest of the semester make less sense than it otherwise would have done – the events became divorced from their underlying mechanisms, turned into seemingly unrelated things and students walked away from the class thinking it was just a collection of random observations, many of which they did not like very much. The last couple of weeks of the course really didn’t hold together well as a coherent narrative that way. Without that coherence, students felt free to dismiss the class out of hand rather than trying to grapple with the interpretation presented.
I don’t ask that they agree with me. I do want them to grapple with what I say, though – to consider it and determine rigorously whether and how their own views should change or not. What they think is their business; that they think is mine.
I’m hoping I can figure out how to be more complete about this transition and the mechanics that make it go during the upcoming semester, how to tell the whole story without sacrificing either authentic historical reality or classroom peace.
We’ll see.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Monday, January 5, 2015
The Fourteenth Day of Christmas
We tried the Bacon Wave today. It made crispy bacon, and that’s pretty much all it promised to do. It is nice to know that in this age of hype and hypocrisy you can still trust the manufacturers of the Bacon Wave to deliver on their promises.
The Bacon Wave was the prize from our fourth and final rendition of Christmas this season. It was a drawn-out holiday this year, with all the traveling. We had our first Christmas before we left for San Francisco, just the four of us. We had another in San Francisco. There was a third after we got back, because we missed a few things the first time – we roasted a lovely turkey that came straight from a friend’s farm and had a nice low-key celebration. And this past weekend we did it again with Kim’s side of the family – the traditional Ukrainian Christmas involving all kinds of foods with names I can never remember because they have too many consonants but which are tasty nonetheless. My people are vowel people.
A good time was had by all.
At the end of the evening all the adults play The Game, where each one brings two wrapped gifts to the table – one nice, one odd – and we roll dice for them. And then we roll dice to trade until the timer runs out. There were some nice things out there, but Lauren insisted that one of us come home with the Bacon Wave.
And so we did.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
The Bacon Wave was the prize from our fourth and final rendition of Christmas this season. It was a drawn-out holiday this year, with all the traveling. We had our first Christmas before we left for San Francisco, just the four of us. We had another in San Francisco. There was a third after we got back, because we missed a few things the first time – we roasted a lovely turkey that came straight from a friend’s farm and had a nice low-key celebration. And this past weekend we did it again with Kim’s side of the family – the traditional Ukrainian Christmas involving all kinds of foods with names I can never remember because they have too many consonants but which are tasty nonetheless. My people are vowel people.
A good time was had by all.
At the end of the evening all the adults play The Game, where each one brings two wrapped gifts to the table – one nice, one odd – and we roll dice for them. And then we roll dice to trade until the timer runs out. There were some nice things out there, but Lauren insisted that one of us come home with the Bacon Wave.
And so we did.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Tales of the City, Part 4: Photography
One of the most delightful things about San Francisco is that it was seemingly designed for photographers. And the joy of digital photography is that you can take as many pictures as you want without having to worry about how much they cost to process.
Lauren and I took full advantage of this.
Lauren does the photography project in 4H, and she can probably pick a few winners out of the ones she took while we were in San Francisco. She has a very good eye for an image. But the photos that follow are mine – I’m not sure what the rules are for 4H about publishing photos ahead of time and I’m not about to find out by disqualifying anything she took.
These are from various portions of our trip. The first one is the Ferry Building. The second is Coit Tower, photographed as we walked along the waterfront. The third is from Chinatown. The fourth is from the AIDS Memorial Grove. All of the rest are from our visit to Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
Enjoy!
Lauren and I took full advantage of this.
Lauren does the photography project in 4H, and she can probably pick a few winners out of the ones she took while we were in San Francisco. She has a very good eye for an image. But the photos that follow are mine – I’m not sure what the rules are for 4H about publishing photos ahead of time and I’m not about to find out by disqualifying anything she took.
These are from various portions of our trip. The first one is the Ferry Building. The second is Coit Tower, photographed as we walked along the waterfront. The third is from Chinatown. The fourth is from the AIDS Memorial Grove. All of the rest are from our visit to Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
Enjoy!
Friday, January 2, 2015
Tales of the City, Part 3: Christmas in San Francisco
I have now celebrated Christmas in four different states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and California. The ingredients seem to be the same pretty much everywhere you go.
You start with good people – family, friends, loved ones – and you add food, conversation, and enough gifts to satisfy the urge to do nice things for the aforementioned good people (which is a variable quantity, really, and one that declines over time as most of those people acquire the ability to get things themselves and as you discover that really what you want to give them and receive from them is time spent together). You surround this with a comfortable place to be, and presto – you’ve got a holiday.
We celebrated Christmas Eve in San Francisco with a lovely meal back at Geoff and Dave’s place, where we were joined by their adoptive granny Denise, who lives upstairs, and their friend Cracker, who actually does go by that name. It was a festive and convivial gathering.
Perhaps the highlight of the evening was the rainbow measuring cups that Dave received. Not the measuring cups themselves, though they were brightly colored and likely useful items. No, it was more the reaction to them.
Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a conversation that started with one small ridiculous observation and then snowballed from there, with each additional comment more ridiculous than the one before until finally you realize that you have spent the last half hour or so laughing maniacally over something as simple as a rainbow assortment of measuring cups?
We have.
The next morning we did much of it again, though the measuring cup conversation did not recur. This is probably for the best. Don’t want to wear out the batteries on that one.
Tabitha was not feeling very well that day, having come down with the winter crud that has slowly worked its way through most of us over the last week or two, so she stayed home for the next part of the celebration on Christmas Day, when the rest of us – including Denise, Cracker, and Dave’s nephew Ben – went over to a dinner party at Adrienne and Dan’s house.
Adrienne and Dan live in one of those neighborhoods that you only really find in San Francisco, where topography has never factored into urban planning in the slightest. This was the other thing we drove to in San Francisco, and when we turned the corner onto their street I genuinely wondered how the car would make it up that hill.
It was actually difficult to walk across the street to the front door of their house.
But once inside we were welcomed warmly and fed royally, and that is about all you can ask of a get-together I think. We had a very nice time, and we thank Adrienne and Dan for welcoming us into their home for the holiday.
It is nice to remember that there are good people wherever you go.
You start with good people – family, friends, loved ones – and you add food, conversation, and enough gifts to satisfy the urge to do nice things for the aforementioned good people (which is a variable quantity, really, and one that declines over time as most of those people acquire the ability to get things themselves and as you discover that really what you want to give them and receive from them is time spent together). You surround this with a comfortable place to be, and presto – you’ve got a holiday.
We celebrated Christmas Eve in San Francisco with a lovely meal back at Geoff and Dave’s place, where we were joined by their adoptive granny Denise, who lives upstairs, and their friend Cracker, who actually does go by that name. It was a festive and convivial gathering.
Perhaps the highlight of the evening was the rainbow measuring cups that Dave received. Not the measuring cups themselves, though they were brightly colored and likely useful items. No, it was more the reaction to them.
Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a conversation that started with one small ridiculous observation and then snowballed from there, with each additional comment more ridiculous than the one before until finally you realize that you have spent the last half hour or so laughing maniacally over something as simple as a rainbow assortment of measuring cups?
We have.
The next morning we did much of it again, though the measuring cup conversation did not recur. This is probably for the best. Don’t want to wear out the batteries on that one.
Tabitha was not feeling very well that day, having come down with the winter crud that has slowly worked its way through most of us over the last week or two, so she stayed home for the next part of the celebration on Christmas Day, when the rest of us – including Denise, Cracker, and Dave’s nephew Ben – went over to a dinner party at Adrienne and Dan’s house.
Adrienne and Dan live in one of those neighborhoods that you only really find in San Francisco, where topography has never factored into urban planning in the slightest. This was the other thing we drove to in San Francisco, and when we turned the corner onto their street I genuinely wondered how the car would make it up that hill.
It was actually difficult to walk across the street to the front door of their house.
But once inside we were welcomed warmly and fed royally, and that is about all you can ask of a get-together I think. We had a very nice time, and we thank Adrienne and Dan for welcoming us into their home for the holiday.
It is nice to remember that there are good people wherever you go.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Tales of the City, Part 2: Old Friends
San Francisco is a great place to see and we had a great deal of fun wandering around the city taking in the sights. But my focus when I travel has always been visiting people – seeing the friends and family that are there. This is one reason why I tend to go back to the same places.
The main purpose of our trip was to see Geoff and Dave, but while we were there we were lucky enough to catch up to some old friends as well. And that made the trip just that much better.
Josh and Sarah were friends of mine back in college. There were anywhere from eight to twelve major student theater groups at Penn when we were there, depending on how you counted, and out of the nine thousand or so undergrads there were about a dozen of us who did theatrical lighting. We went from show to show to show during the semesters, feeding on cast parties like locusts. We got to know each other pretty well. I ran the lighting board or a spotlight for several shows where Sarah or Josh designed the lights, for example.
They live out near San Francisco these days, with their daughter Samantha who is a year younger than Tabitha and – as we discovered – cut from very much the same cloth. They hit it off amazingly well. We will have to get them together again as soon as possible, yes we will. They had family coming in for the holiday and still wanted to see us, so they volunteered to pick us up from the airport and take us to dinner before dropping us off at Geoff and Dave’s.
Airport pickups are a sign of genuine friendship.
Once we managed to squeeze all seven of us plus our luggage into their car we headed off toward a lovely Italian restaurant in Burlingame, one that promised good food and was able to handle the food allergy questions with alacrity when I called them the previous week. And they delivered – it was an excellent meal.
But meals are made by the company you enjoy them with, and by that standard it was, well, an excellent meal.
We were also able to visit Jen, John and Rain.
I had known Jen in high school but then lost track of her completely for about twenty-five years. Then through the magic of Facebook we started to get to know each other again, and it has been a lovely thing.
We caught up to them for dinner on our second day there – after we had plundered the Lefty Shop we trekked up to a place called Hot Spud and had baked potatoes and conversation. And then they joined us at Crissy Field and Fort Point as well, so bonus for us!
It was good to see Jen again for the first time since the mid-80s, and finally meeting John and Rain was lovely – they were good people to hang out and talk with, and we shall have to do that again as well.
It is a grand thing to have friends all over, and an even better thing to see them.
Now to convince them all to venture out to Wisconsin...
The main purpose of our trip was to see Geoff and Dave, but while we were there we were lucky enough to catch up to some old friends as well. And that made the trip just that much better.
Josh and Sarah were friends of mine back in college. There were anywhere from eight to twelve major student theater groups at Penn when we were there, depending on how you counted, and out of the nine thousand or so undergrads there were about a dozen of us who did theatrical lighting. We went from show to show to show during the semesters, feeding on cast parties like locusts. We got to know each other pretty well. I ran the lighting board or a spotlight for several shows where Sarah or Josh designed the lights, for example.
They live out near San Francisco these days, with their daughter Samantha who is a year younger than Tabitha and – as we discovered – cut from very much the same cloth. They hit it off amazingly well. We will have to get them together again as soon as possible, yes we will. They had family coming in for the holiday and still wanted to see us, so they volunteered to pick us up from the airport and take us to dinner before dropping us off at Geoff and Dave’s.
Airport pickups are a sign of genuine friendship.
Once we managed to squeeze all seven of us plus our luggage into their car we headed off toward a lovely Italian restaurant in Burlingame, one that promised good food and was able to handle the food allergy questions with alacrity when I called them the previous week. And they delivered – it was an excellent meal.
But meals are made by the company you enjoy them with, and by that standard it was, well, an excellent meal.
We were also able to visit Jen, John and Rain.
I had known Jen in high school but then lost track of her completely for about twenty-five years. Then through the magic of Facebook we started to get to know each other again, and it has been a lovely thing.
We caught up to them for dinner on our second day there – after we had plundered the Lefty Shop we trekked up to a place called Hot Spud and had baked potatoes and conversation. And then they joined us at Crissy Field and Fort Point as well, so bonus for us!
It was good to see Jen again for the first time since the mid-80s, and finally meeting John and Rain was lovely – they were good people to hang out and talk with, and we shall have to do that again as well.
It is a grand thing to have friends all over, and an even better thing to see them.
Now to convince them all to venture out to Wisconsin...
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
A Wisconsin Quinceanera
If we lived in Latin America instead of Wisconsin, today would be a huge party. As it is, it will just be us, and that’s actually okay with everyone.
Tabitha is now fifteen. She is one year away from a driver’s license, and three from being legally an adult. It’s hard to remember that last one sometimes, as she is more mature and responsible than many 40-year-olds and nearly all of Congress, and that’s just one of the things to love about her.
It is a lovely thing as a parent, watching your children grow up and turn into the kinds of people you enjoy hanging out with. It means something has worked well, and what that something was doesn’t matter so much as the fact that it was there in the first place.
We’re going to have a quiet night. Lauren is over at a friend’s house, Kim is still getting over a cold, and Tabitha’s stated goal for her birthday was to spend the day doing exactly what she wanted and no more, which in practice amounted to making Oreo fudge, painting, and having pancakes and bacon for dinner. Perhaps we will get up a round of Carcassonne while we ring in the New Year.
And that’s a wonderful way to spend a birthday, really.
Happy birthday, Tabitha.
Tales of the City, Part 1: Seeing the Sights in San Francisco
There are three cities in the United States that are not really part of the United States at all.
New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco all sit on American soil, of course. Their residents pay taxes to the federal government and hold American passports. But culturally, socially, and in many ways politically, they are their own thing.
The fact that they are all wonderful places to visit may or may not be connected to this.
We spent our Christmas in San Francisco, visiting Kim’s brother Geoff and his husband Dave. They live in the Mission District, right in the thick of things as far as the city goes, and it had been a while since we’d been there. But last month Kim and Geoff hit the magic half century mark, and so we decided that it would be a good time to get together.
San Francisco is a beautiful city, one pretty much designed for photographers. The light comes in at interesting angles and qualities, the scenery is amazing, and there is a lot going on. We tried to cover most of the city while we were there.
We started our first full day there by taking the BART down to the Exploratorium. We took the BART a lot while we were there, which is always a great deal of fun for me. I like cities and I like public transportation, because you get to see the city that way and you get to see the people of the city that way. It sometimes amazes me that there is a subway system in a place as earthquake-prone as San Francisco, but there you have it. If I’m on the BART when the Big One hits, I will probably never even know it.
The BART drops you off near the Ferry Building, a lovely structure that is now the home of any number of shops selling artisanal foods and which is surrounded by a raft of crafters and farmer’s market tents. So it took us a while to get to the Exploratorium, is what I’m saying here. But it was a warm, sunny day – almost uncomfortably warm for people used to Wisconsin in December – so we took our time and eventually found our way there.
The Exploratorium is an intensely interactive science and technology museum that moved over to the waterfront since the last time we visited. You can spend a lot of time there just messing around with things. This is Lauren’s definition of an ideal museum, and it held up pretty well for the rest of us, I’d say.
We took a break to have lunch at the Ferry Building, which is where I discovered that “artisanal” is a codeword for “tiny portions, artfully prepared.” It felt like being in the old Louie Anderson routine about being on two diets because the first one didn’t give him enough food. The food was tasty, granted, but given the amount of walking one does in San Francisco it was a bit disappointing that way.
The return to the museum more than made up for it, though – Tabitha and I spent a fair amount of time tracking the ships in the bay in real time on one of the displays – as did our subsequent walk down the waterfront to Pier 39, home of the giant Christmas tree
It also had quite possibly the best shop in the entire universe according to Lauren. It’s called The Lefty Store, and it has everything a left-hander could possibly need – notebooks with the spiral binding on the right so lefties don’t get wire marks on their forearms, pens with little ledges for your hand so they don’t have to smear ink across the page, pencil sharpeners with the blades reversed to accommodate the leftie spin, can openers that lefties can use without contortion, and so on. We cleaned the place out. I had a long talk with the sales clerk about whether right-handers were even allowed to work there. “Oh yes,” she said, “but they never last long. None of this makes sense to them the way it does to us.”
On Christmas Eve we had breakfast at a lovely place called the Crepevine, which was for the moment uncrowded. The time to go anywhere in San Francisco, we discovered, is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. There are no crowds, and parking is freely available. If you’ve ever been to San Francisco, you will understand why this is such a big deal. San Francisco is the original Place Where You Cannot Park, and for there to be readily available parking places is something of a Christmas miracle. Really, there should have been organ music and choral hosannas.
Not that we needed any parking. We did a lot of walking in San Francisco. It is an immensely walkable city, a rare and increasingly disappearing thing in this automotive nation of ours. So when we left breakfast we simply headed toward the waterfront on foot. You get to see a lot of things and make serendipitous discoveries along the way, such as the art supply store we ducked into for reasons that made sense at the time. It was such a great place that we ended up going back before we left town just to get stuff we didn’t get the first time. Because stuff.
We spent the rest of the morning at the Asian Art Museum, which Kim and Tabitha adored and which Lauren and I mostly walked through and entertained ourselves on our own. There’s a lot of art there, most of which is extremely impressive, but I find my Philistine streak comes out fairly quickly in art museums. Fortunately we split up so the enthusiasts could enjoy it while the skeptics could proceed at our own pace without feeling any pressure. And so a good time was had by all.
Geoff left after the museum in order to go home and prepare Christmas Eve dinner, which will feature in a later post, so Dave led us on a merry trip through the downtown.
Our first stop was City Lights Books. Back in the day this was where people like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg used to hang out and it still retains some of that feel. But mostly it’s a cramped and lovely book shop stuffed to the gills with the kinds of books that you don’t often see at the Barnes & Noble in the mall. The aisles are narrow, the shelves are tall, and if you slide past the registers there’s a staircase to more books in the basement. It was a wonderful place.
Then we went to Chinatown. We love Chinatown.
First of all, there is amazing food. We stopped in a Vietnamese place, actually, since Vietnamese cooking doesn’t have the nuts that Chinese cooking does, and on that grey, rainy day the immense bowls of chicken pho made us warm and cozy.
Second, there is just the most amazing array of commerce, humanity, and general bustle in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Dave led us up a busy street full of stores where nothing – not even the prices – was written in English, and we had a grand time poking into the various things for sale. Kim and Lauren did most of the exploring, emerging victorious with bracelets and other goodies, but I also found a few shops with stuff I enjoyed and even Tabitha got into it now and then.
Our other big excursion into the city was on Friday, when we went down to the Sharon Arts Studio to see Geoff’s workplace. He’s been doing a lot of ceramics recently, many of which are displayed throughout the apartment, and even though the studio was closed we could still peak inside.
After a nice walk through the surrounding park – including the AIDS Memorial Grove, which was peaceful and lovely – we headed over to Crissy Field and Fort Point.
This took roughly forever.
We were driving, since there is no convenient BART link between all of the places we’d hoped to go and it was too far to walk, and Dave and Geoff decided to take the more scenic route along the Pacific Ocean. And it was indeed scenic – gorgeous, in fact. We got to see both the Pacific and the Atlantic in less than six months, which is just the kind of nerdy accomplishment that makes me smile. But it was a lovely day, the day after Christmas, and everyone in San Francisco had decided that they needed to be in Marin County so the Golden Gate Bridge going north was jammed all the way back to the access roads along the Pacific.
But the scenery was, as noted, beautiful (it’s not like being stuck in traffic in Gary, Indiana, which we’ve also done), and Tabitha and Lauren had a great deal of fun signing back and forth between the two cars as we inched our way up and over the hill. You make the best of things, and they turn out just fine.
Crissy Field is a lovely little patch of greenery under and to the bay side of the Golden Gate Bridge. We met some friends there (more on the meeting of friends in a future post) and had a nice picnic lunch before heading up to Fort Point.
Fort Point is the old military post directly underneath the bridge, and it is a fascinating place to wander about. It’s a ring of brick structure surrounding an open 3-story courtyard, and you can go pretty much anywhere you want. It’s a great place to take pictures.
Lauren and Tabitha spent much of the time taking panoramic shots on Kim’s iPhone and cracking themselves up thereby, and if that isn’t what that feature is there to achieve then I don’t know why they even bothered to invent it.
We had a lovely time out in San Francisco, and a big thank you to Geoff and Dave for welcoming us into their city and home!
New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco all sit on American soil, of course. Their residents pay taxes to the federal government and hold American passports. But culturally, socially, and in many ways politically, they are their own thing.
The fact that they are all wonderful places to visit may or may not be connected to this.
We spent our Christmas in San Francisco, visiting Kim’s brother Geoff and his husband Dave. They live in the Mission District, right in the thick of things as far as the city goes, and it had been a while since we’d been there. But last month Kim and Geoff hit the magic half century mark, and so we decided that it would be a good time to get together.
San Francisco is a beautiful city, one pretty much designed for photographers. The light comes in at interesting angles and qualities, the scenery is amazing, and there is a lot going on. We tried to cover most of the city while we were there.
We started our first full day there by taking the BART down to the Exploratorium. We took the BART a lot while we were there, which is always a great deal of fun for me. I like cities and I like public transportation, because you get to see the city that way and you get to see the people of the city that way. It sometimes amazes me that there is a subway system in a place as earthquake-prone as San Francisco, but there you have it. If I’m on the BART when the Big One hits, I will probably never even know it.
The BART drops you off near the Ferry Building, a lovely structure that is now the home of any number of shops selling artisanal foods and which is surrounded by a raft of crafters and farmer’s market tents. So it took us a while to get to the Exploratorium, is what I’m saying here. But it was a warm, sunny day – almost uncomfortably warm for people used to Wisconsin in December – so we took our time and eventually found our way there.
The Exploratorium is an intensely interactive science and technology museum that moved over to the waterfront since the last time we visited. You can spend a lot of time there just messing around with things. This is Lauren’s definition of an ideal museum, and it held up pretty well for the rest of us, I’d say.
We took a break to have lunch at the Ferry Building, which is where I discovered that “artisanal” is a codeword for “tiny portions, artfully prepared.” It felt like being in the old Louie Anderson routine about being on two diets because the first one didn’t give him enough food. The food was tasty, granted, but given the amount of walking one does in San Francisco it was a bit disappointing that way.
The return to the museum more than made up for it, though – Tabitha and I spent a fair amount of time tracking the ships in the bay in real time on one of the displays – as did our subsequent walk down the waterfront to Pier 39, home of the giant Christmas tree
It also had quite possibly the best shop in the entire universe according to Lauren. It’s called The Lefty Store, and it has everything a left-hander could possibly need – notebooks with the spiral binding on the right so lefties don’t get wire marks on their forearms, pens with little ledges for your hand so they don’t have to smear ink across the page, pencil sharpeners with the blades reversed to accommodate the leftie spin, can openers that lefties can use without contortion, and so on. We cleaned the place out. I had a long talk with the sales clerk about whether right-handers were even allowed to work there. “Oh yes,” she said, “but they never last long. None of this makes sense to them the way it does to us.”
On Christmas Eve we had breakfast at a lovely place called the Crepevine, which was for the moment uncrowded. The time to go anywhere in San Francisco, we discovered, is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. There are no crowds, and parking is freely available. If you’ve ever been to San Francisco, you will understand why this is such a big deal. San Francisco is the original Place Where You Cannot Park, and for there to be readily available parking places is something of a Christmas miracle. Really, there should have been organ music and choral hosannas.
Not that we needed any parking. We did a lot of walking in San Francisco. It is an immensely walkable city, a rare and increasingly disappearing thing in this automotive nation of ours. So when we left breakfast we simply headed toward the waterfront on foot. You get to see a lot of things and make serendipitous discoveries along the way, such as the art supply store we ducked into for reasons that made sense at the time. It was such a great place that we ended up going back before we left town just to get stuff we didn’t get the first time. Because stuff.
We spent the rest of the morning at the Asian Art Museum, which Kim and Tabitha adored and which Lauren and I mostly walked through and entertained ourselves on our own. There’s a lot of art there, most of which is extremely impressive, but I find my Philistine streak comes out fairly quickly in art museums. Fortunately we split up so the enthusiasts could enjoy it while the skeptics could proceed at our own pace without feeling any pressure. And so a good time was had by all.
Geoff left after the museum in order to go home and prepare Christmas Eve dinner, which will feature in a later post, so Dave led us on a merry trip through the downtown.
Our first stop was City Lights Books. Back in the day this was where people like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg used to hang out and it still retains some of that feel. But mostly it’s a cramped and lovely book shop stuffed to the gills with the kinds of books that you don’t often see at the Barnes & Noble in the mall. The aisles are narrow, the shelves are tall, and if you slide past the registers there’s a staircase to more books in the basement. It was a wonderful place.
Then we went to Chinatown. We love Chinatown.
First of all, there is amazing food. We stopped in a Vietnamese place, actually, since Vietnamese cooking doesn’t have the nuts that Chinese cooking does, and on that grey, rainy day the immense bowls of chicken pho made us warm and cozy.
Second, there is just the most amazing array of commerce, humanity, and general bustle in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Dave led us up a busy street full of stores where nothing – not even the prices – was written in English, and we had a grand time poking into the various things for sale. Kim and Lauren did most of the exploring, emerging victorious with bracelets and other goodies, but I also found a few shops with stuff I enjoyed and even Tabitha got into it now and then.
Our other big excursion into the city was on Friday, when we went down to the Sharon Arts Studio to see Geoff’s workplace. He’s been doing a lot of ceramics recently, many of which are displayed throughout the apartment, and even though the studio was closed we could still peak inside.
After a nice walk through the surrounding park – including the AIDS Memorial Grove, which was peaceful and lovely – we headed over to Crissy Field and Fort Point.
This took roughly forever.
We were driving, since there is no convenient BART link between all of the places we’d hoped to go and it was too far to walk, and Dave and Geoff decided to take the more scenic route along the Pacific Ocean. And it was indeed scenic – gorgeous, in fact. We got to see both the Pacific and the Atlantic in less than six months, which is just the kind of nerdy accomplishment that makes me smile. But it was a lovely day, the day after Christmas, and everyone in San Francisco had decided that they needed to be in Marin County so the Golden Gate Bridge going north was jammed all the way back to the access roads along the Pacific.
But the scenery was, as noted, beautiful (it’s not like being stuck in traffic in Gary, Indiana, which we’ve also done), and Tabitha and Lauren had a great deal of fun signing back and forth between the two cars as we inched our way up and over the hill. You make the best of things, and they turn out just fine.
Crissy Field is a lovely little patch of greenery under and to the bay side of the Golden Gate Bridge. We met some friends there (more on the meeting of friends in a future post) and had a nice picnic lunch before heading up to Fort Point.
Fort Point is the old military post directly underneath the bridge, and it is a fascinating place to wander about. It’s a ring of brick structure surrounding an open 3-story courtyard, and you can go pretty much anywhere you want. It’s a great place to take pictures.
Lauren and Tabitha spent much of the time taking panoramic shots on Kim’s iPhone and cracking themselves up thereby, and if that isn’t what that feature is there to achieve then I don’t know why they even bothered to invent it.
We had a lovely time out in San Francisco, and a big thank you to Geoff and Dave for welcoming us into their city and home!
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