Comes word that Chesa Boudin, District Attorney of San Francisco, has been recalled, and the size of the vote leaves no question about the results.  Even San Francisco has had enough of the radical Left.

In 2013, in another life, business took me to San Francisco for a few days.  The combination of perfect location, staggering beauty, unbeatable climate, rich soil, vibrant population and what’s probably the greatest harbor in the world have made it one of the world’s great cities.  An article resulted, but wasn’t published by the newspaper I was writing for at the time.  I wrote:

It’s a famously tolerant place…One of the things that’s tolerated is a large population of homeless people wandering the areas frequented by tourists and business people.  They are dirty and ragged, many staggering or stutter-stepping from the ravages of drugs and alcohol; many clearly mentally ill, lost in their own little demon-filled worlds.  There seems to be an understanding with the police, though.  The panhandlers will ask for money, but when refused, politely wish you a good day and move on.  As long as they aren’t aggressive about it, the police leave them alone.

The juxtaposition of wealth and misery hit home one evening as I passed Union Square, in the heart of the city.  On the sidewalk, a gray-brown lump of a homeless man was curled up asleep – or passed out, no way to tell which.  On one side of the square was Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany’s, catering to the wealthy, while on the other side was Macy’s, catering to the upscale middle class.  The lump lay there undisturbed and ignored.

I don’t want to speculate too freely.  Tucked away in an upper-middle-class enclave a million miles from San Francisco, I’m too remote from the everyday reality of the place to know much more than what I read.  But I do have some first-hand experience, small though it is; and from what I witnessed almost 10 years ago, something was clearly wrong in San Francisco then, and in the time since, it went completely off the rails.  Cities have always been juxtapositions of wealth and misery, but the wealthy and powerful understood the necessity of keeping the misery under control; relieving it as best and mercifully as they could, while maintaining order by punishing and/or driving out the criminals, and confining the perpetual underclass to areas where the harm they could do was mostly to themselves.  That’s the harsh reality of life, and not just in the cities.  Every place has its slum and its slum dwellers.

Natural advantages are well and good; but they didn’t make San Francisco what it is today.  Think what you like about San Franciscans, but the fact is that the city was made rich through their brains, ambition and hard work, and the miracle of capitalism. Perhaps in San Francisco, the combination of natural wealth and self-made wealth finally produced a ruling class utterly convinced of its ability to make the world and the people in it anything they could dream it to be.  “If not here, where, and if not now, when?”  The ancient Greeks called it hubris, “pride above the gods”.  The gods, of course, knew better, and derived some of their more-creative punishments for the humans who forgot their place.  We call it “the Left”, a romantic and unrealistic vision of human potential and plasticity, which has been predictably failing ever since the French Revolution, and continues failing today wherever it’s tried.  And to ruin a place like San Francisco, you have to try awfully hard.

Well, thank goodness for democracy.  When things do go off the rails, it provides a way to peacefully set things right – although it’s perhaps better to say that it provides a way to get things moving in the right direction again.  After all, whoever replaces Chesa Boudin won’t be a MAGA Trumpista or a Reagan Republican.  He or she or some multi-cultural/multi-ethnic/multi-racial person of indeterminate and changeable gender will be, reliably, a person of the Left.  Just not the crazy, woke Left.  Probably.  But, then, this is California, where the ruling class knows best and is still made up of True Believers of the nonsense Boudin was trying his best to implement.  So we shall see.

In the meantime, Tennessee will continue to welcome people like a man of my acquaintance, a recent arrival from the Bay area.  He was born in Transylvania (yes, that Transylvania, not the county in North Carolina) under Communist rule.  His once-wealthy family, robbed of its possessions, escaped, and he made a good life for himself in California.  He and his wife left and moved here when, according to him, he saw the same things happening there that he had seen as a boy in his unfortunate homeland.  And, having made up their minds, they wasted no time, leaving “skid marks in the driveway”, as he put it.

To my new friend, and thousands more like him who have given up on what, not that long ago, was considered the quintessential American state and moved to a better place in Tennessee, I say “Welcome home.”  And to California and its people, I say “Sincerely, good luck.  You’re going to need it.”

• Kenneth D. Gough © 2022