The Mole People

The political establishment in San Francisco has its origins in a dedicated group of people who rallied around the prominent issues of the 1960's - civil rights, equal opportunity, peace, and the environment. Unfortunately, the lexicon by which their values were expressed has gone unchanged, and the currency of their particular style of advocacy has utterly evaporated. The primary battlefield for protecting rights in no longer the streets, but our legislatures, courtrooms and universities; the struggle for opportunity has been dulled by complacency; and history has shown that global conflict and disasters are now best handled by global management. We’ve had a hard time catching up with history.

Our political community is having a hard time getting and keeping "fresh blood". People get used up, burnt out, or scared off. This creates problems in and of itself. Most notably, the needs of the City's most important contributors to local economic growth - the growing class of knowledge workers - are increasingly misunderstood and ignored. The mostly twenty- and thirtysomethings who work in information-based industries are hard for politicians to pin down, for a number of reasons. For one, most do not hold to the same notions of race, ethnicity and class that their parents did. Yet overly simplified notions of race, ethnicity and class still mean everything to the dinosaurs in government and media who dominate political discourse in San Francisco.

In the current climate, to be an advocate for an issue, you must wrap it in the trappings of identity politics in order to be heard. Vexatious, single-issue-fixated zealotry is the order of the day. Whether the identity is based on race, neighborhood, property value level, or avocation (bicycle riders, dog-walkers, etc.), the discourse never seems to wander from the tired refrain of "more for me and mine and screw everyone else". This pervasive culture of extremism is not only a turnoff for most knowledge workers, it by its very nature makes the political system inaccessible.

If this seems incredible to you, perhaps you ought to spend time looking at who shows up to and takes up the most podium time during Public Comment at the Board of Supervisors. Only rarely will an ordinary person be found. Many of those who can be found are either lobbyists, retired people on pensions, or others who for one reason or another have too much time on their hands. Consequently, much of the rhetoric of this so-called "public input" process focuses on short-sighted, short-term, and self-interested strategies for solving policy problems. An exorbitant amount of time is spent on such esoterica as museum designs, public art, honoring obscure and irrelevant figures or events (Harry Bridges, Tinky Winky, The Zebra Killings), or offenses to the hypersensitive and blue-nosed (such as the sale of armadillo meat, cigarette smoking in cinema queues, people who wear perfume, making bicyclists stop for red lights, the stubborn insistence of scientists that HIV causes AIDS, people who want to live in condos, etc.). Often, relevant issues, such as quality-of-life matters, are championed in such a relentless and petulant manner that the personalities involved overshadow the policy problem. The result is that the system becomes devalued -- particularly in the eyes of people who routinely work up to 70 hours a week keeping up with their regular lives. Most normal people are so afraid of single-issue time-waster types in any setting that the arbiters of Web Culture have coined a name for them -- The Mole People.

THE MOLE PEOPLE was the title of a rather outrageous 1950’s horror film about archaeologists who discover a subterranean civilization based on an extreme form of mutual class exploitation. Much of the imagery and themes in this film are borrowed from the futuristic society described in the H.G. Wells story "The Time Machine", where the Beautiful People, or Iiloi, appear to dominate the culture’s means of production, but are in reality nothing more than food for the underclass, called the Morlocks. In the film, the Morlocks are so transformed by their societal role that they have evolved into frightening, mole-like humanoids; hence the film’s title.

THE ANALOGY FITS San Francisco politics well - because just as lobbyists and politicians often use our own variety of Mole People to remind Supervisors and Commissioners what they’re supposed to vote for, the Mole People, particularly if they’re precinct walkers, commissioners, or "merely influential friends", can sometimes make or break issues, elections, or political careers. More importantly, they have a tendency to survive - partially because they’re so concerned with one issue, and with one approach to dealing with it, that they never have to take the risk of becoming anything else.

THE END RESULT is that San Francisco, despite its liberal reputation, is actually a very institutionally conservative city. People say they want change, and instead vote for gridlock because that is what bellicose neighborhood bullies and "insiders" tell them to do. Indeed, whenever we are asked to vote for gridlock, it is often wrapped in the packaging of change. According to polls, San Franciscans are committed to affordable housing and are sensitive to the current housing crisis, yet attempts to build are still met by extraordinary institutional opposition. Every year, we still have many of the same problems, often connected to many of the same people.

THE QUESTION IS, "What to do about it?" The answer, at least for San Francisco’s political activists, may very well be to look at ourselves. It may be time for a little more civility, and a little more perspective. And if we think about Cleaning House, we may want to think first about which house to clean first - and how.