Ode to SF

First things first, thanks to those who recommended eating establishments. We ended up eating some fine Chinese food, some excellent sushi, and some burritos the size of my head. Advice was much appreciated.

As I suggested before, it was nice to be in a real city again. Standing on the corner of Mission and 16th, you can really understand why Bill O’Reilly and his ilk HATE San Francisco; it represents a challenge to their entire vision of what America is and ought to be. Part of it is the politics, yes, but the culture is more; it’s about being able to hear half a dozen different languages at one time and see people from, literally, everywhere.

For O’Reilly, San Francisco represents a rejection of America, which is to say a rejection of the set of imaginary traditions that social conservatives hold dear. The hopeful thing, I think, is that fewer people share O’Reilly’s vision than he believes; these charts seem to indicate that Americans, on the whole, are pretty tolerant of the cosmopolitan idea. I think that the failure of anti-immigration politics (in spite of the handwringing of folks like Mickey Kaus) to really gain much traction in the last couple of election cycles indicates that more people think about San Francisco in the way I do than the way that O’Reilly does. It makes me optimistic that there’s space for a genuinely (almost uniquely) American civic nationalism, even if that nationalism is at deep odds with those who most enthusiastically wrap themselves in the American flag. I’m also hopeful that, in twenty years, Cincinnati will become more like San Francisco than the reverse, and that we’ll all be the better for it.