Local Politics

Since low-rent impresario Chicken John is running for mayor of San Francisco, alongside a nudist, a professional clown, and a rather spaced-out homeless cab driver; I thought it would be good fun to attend the only mayoral debate in which the incumbent, Gavin Newsom, planned to participate. This took place last Thursday in the auditorium beneath the City's main library.

I was ten minutes late getting there. On the one hand, this didn't matter since Newsom was about ten minutes late himself, and the first half hour of the show was taken up anyway by a lecture about how San Francisco's new system of ranked-choice voting will work. --On the other hand, being late mattered a lot because the auditorium had already filled beyond standing-room capacity, and spilled into a short line outside. Guards were only letting us in when someone else left.

But I was #12 in line, and there was some movement happening; plus I had a book to read and some time to kill before I had another place to be at 8. So I waited.

I was well-buried in that book when a klieg light kicked in on me, and a thoroughly-groomed man was tipping a microphone into my face while introducing himself from CBS-5 and asking what had brought me to the debate.

Ambush!

Before anybody gets excited about the fact that I have the video clip below, be warned that (a) it's of abysmal quality - I mean, criminally bad. I VHS-taped the 11:00 news off of my little TV, tilting the rabbit ears into the best position I could (because yes, I can only watch TV with the help of rabbit ears); then transcoded it to quicktime for upload. And considering that (b) I am a catastrophic disappointment in the video (if not, indeed, a bit of a fool), I wouldn't even have gone through that trouble had it not seemed like an amusing tech experiment.

Yeah, I blew my big opportunity in front of the camera. I didn't say, "Why, I came to see Chicken John's agenda of art and affordability enunciated in the public square!" I did not say the truth, which was, "I came here to see whether a circus erupts!" Instead, I gave a numbingly dull good-citizen translation of that latter thought:

Anyway, I was finally let into the debate for its last 40 minutes or so. Some funny things were said. The cab driver, who calls himself Grasshopper, kept putting his hands into the "flying birdman" goggles position while other people were answering their questions (as per left, below). When answering questions himself, he just gurbled on in spaced-out tones about how marijuana and sex work should be legalized.


A candidate named H. Brown was giving Newsom a little hell, saying apropos of the new system of neighborhood security cameras, "If we'd had a camera in the mayor's office this past year, Newsom wouldn't even be in office today." --An evident reference to Gavin's affair with a top aide's wife, which is about the only piece of local politics I've actually heard anything about.

The nudist (who was, sadly, not nude) actually sounded level-headed enough. He just kept saying San Francisco should borrow more progressive ideas from major European cities.

Chicken John - at least while I was watching - ignored the questions he was asked about surveillance cameras and earthquake preparedness to hold forth about how the City drums out artists with its high rents, and that Muni buses should be run on coffee grounds. In his summary statement, he jabbed in the very funny line that, "San Francisco is not a city of zombies!" - funny, since there was a zombie flash mob slated to gather outside the library and attack the audience and candidates as they left.

And that's San Francisco politics for you, at least in an off-year like this one.

Before the batteries in my camera died, I was able to take one or two pictures of the zombie flash mob that were as bad as, or worse than, this one:

(If you click on it you'll at least be able to get some detail.)

Update: Jim Lamb has provided me the link to some much better documentation of the zombie attack.