CALIFORNIA
115
from the Los Angeles sprawl. Here the paranoia takes the form of an
earnest and resourceful imitation of that distant, normative civilization,
with an equally resourceful flair for coyness and self-mockery. The
belligerence that makes Southern California insist that it's a giant
cartoon - the willful vulgarity with which Los Angeles offers itself as
easy meat for satiric Eastern novelists with their fine discriminations–
is in San Francisco replaced by a general agreement that, as the game is
lost before it starts, one had better keep grinning to show it's all in fun.
I have never found a city so girlishly excited and charmed by its own
absurdity, or so calculating about inventing absurdity when it ceases to
generate itself.
Self-ridicule is, for example, the stock in trade of the San Francisco
Chronicle,
whose very copyboys must be Restoration wits. Thanks to its
unspeakable competition - Hearst's
Examiner
("Brand Ex" to the
Chronicle)
and Knowland's
Oakland Tribune
- the
Chronicle
is in–
escapable, and after a steady dose of its hallucinogenic style it's hard to
see things except in its curious colors. It's a paper that manages unerringly
to trivialize even its own instinct for good causes; editorials, columnists,
even sports stories and news reports are unabashedly slanted toward
surprisingly enlightened positions on Vietnam, Reaganism, hippies, drugs,
protest, civil rights, the whole controversial works, and yet nothing seems
to matter much when it has run through the
Chronicle's
machine and
come out as something like a report on the latter days of Pompeii by
La Rochefoucauld as told to Milton Berle. (A rare mood of moral
earnestness did come into the paper when some of its reporters were glee–
fully roughed up by the notorious Oakland cops at the recent antidraft
riots.) The tone is set by gossip-columnist Herb Caen, the
Chronicle's
liberal and brilliant Master of the Revels, who suspects himself of having
dreamed the city into being and now sustains its existence with his witty,
loving malice. No other provincial city could afford a columnist of
Caen's talent, or would feel uneasy enough about itself to tolerate him.
But while I read him every day and am always amused and impressed,
he seems to me to represent perfectly the limiting nature of the San
Francisco mood. He's afraid of no one, no pieties pertain, and this happy
freedom ultimately forbids him to speak seriously and straight without
seeming to lapse into the sentimentality he and this city fear above all
else. When everything is funny, comic invention becomes its own object,
and Caen really has no way of persuading you that his decent-minded
feelings about the war or Reagan point anywhere except back to the
whole indistinguishable comic mix that he finds his world to be. I take
a rather old-fashioned view of this, of course.
