Golden Gate Park

Gavin Newsom is running for President, er um, I mean Governor (you gotta take these things one step at a time). Maybe he’ll make it, maybe something will wreck his chances. It’s an interesting drama from the point of view of recent American history, as he follows in the footsteps of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and has surrounded himself with a retinue of advertising professionals… you know, those people who do nothing useful for society but are extremely well-paid to craft lies and deceptions and help the powerful stay on top. Newsom is a vacuous politician with no rudder or internal gyroscope grounded in any values other than what will get him on to the next stop of his political ambition. His advertisers (do they advise? I think they just advertise) are shrewd enough to keep associating the Newsom Brand with the innovative thinking and practices that are practically boiling out of political sight in San Francisco. But we cannot and should not think of him as an ally since his track record is demonstrably empty when it comes to doing what he says.

The Music Concourse in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is living proof of that ancient maxim dating back to the movie Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come.

Last Saturday, as I was pedaling through Golden Gate Park, alongside a glut of bumper-to-bumper cars, I kept thinking to myself, "Why did I come on Saturday?" It had been so long since I spent a Saturday in GG Park. The juxtaposition was disgusting to me: a gaggle of cars against the lush green of a national park. On the lower portion of JFK Drive, as it bends toward the Dutch Windmill and Ocean Beach, I watched the irate faces of a few impatient drivers, red with anger that a pedestrian dare cross the street in a park. "This is taking forever!" I heard one of them shout.