On the Avowed Left Coast, a Feeling of Being Left OutBy DEAN E. MURPHY Published: November 4, 2004
While the American heartland found great comfort in the president's re-election, there was melancholy and stunned disbelief in San Francisco and other cities along the avowedly left West Coast. "There is a sense of helplessness that we couldn't tip the election in any way," said Mayor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, who helped to push gay marriage into the national spotlight. "We couldn't do it rhetorically or in an actual vote. You feel powerless."
Across the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, the liberal First Congregational Church held an evening of prayer, meditation and reflection. The invitations said the intention was "either to celebrate or soberly reflect on how to best go forward from the election results." In Portland, Ore., a city so staunchly liberal that it is sometimes called the People's Republic of Portland, the outcome of the presidential race was absorbed with the levity of a mass funeral. Given the gravity of things, there was really only one thing that Wilder Schmaltz, a 25-year-old Portland artist who had refused to remove the anti-Bush button from his lapel, felt he could do. He called a friend and headed straight to the Red and Black Cafe, an all-organic, wheat-free, vegetarian coffee and food shop, which is run as a collective and is a popular hangout of the Socialist Party USA's candidate for president, Walt Brown. "I figured that in this place we wouldn't run the risk of being around any cheering Republicans," Mr. Schmaltz said. Upon entering the cafe, Mr. Schmaltz, who is Jewish, grabbed off the cafe's bookshelf "A Beggar in Jerusalem," by Elie Wiesel, and read it glumly over a bowl of vegetarian chili. "Something Jewish will do me good right now," he said. At the next table, Tchula Z, 33, an artist and part-time barista at her sister's coffee shop, who uses only Z as a last name, said she woke up Wednesday, learned that Mr. Bush had won and "smoked a cigarette and freaked out." She added, "You know, as Janis Joplin said, 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.' I think people should start using that line again." Her friend Tracy Conklin, 45, a freelance writer and photographer, was equally dark, concluding that there was no hope and only isolation for those on the left. "I am prepared to keep my head down, possibly for the rest of my life, under a totalitarian regime," Mr. Conklin said. If the gay weddings this year in San Francisco and Portland made the rest of the country think the West Coast had gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, the victory for Mr. Bush invoked in return another biblical reference, Armageddon. "We have been getting calls all morning from people who are angry and devastated and want to know where we will be," said Raeanne Young, 20, a volunteer with Direct Action to Stop the War, a San Francisco advocacy group. Some protesters did take to the streets, but many of the bleary-eyed dissenters looked like dazed zombies from "Night of the Living Dead," and more or less numb on the inside. Scores of them gathered in the light rain on the street outside the federal building in San Francisco, taking turns at a microphone to complain about things they had complained about before, including the USA Patriot Act, civilian casualties in Iraq and Vice President Dick Cheney's ties to the corporate world. "It just made me cry," Terry Mitchell, 54, an audiologist in Oakland, said of Mr. Bush's re-election. "I am sad that America is asleep at the wheel." For Ohioans living in on the West Coast, it was a particularly tough day. Jennifer Sloan, 29, was so incensed about Ohio's support of Mr. Bush that she had considered canceling her mother's visit. Ms. Sloan's mother was arriving in San Francisco on Wednesday from Alliance, Ohio, where she lives and where she voted for Mr. Bush. "I am depressed, but I am also just really angry at the rest of the country's ignorance," Ms. Sloan said. Down the coast in Santa Monica, another place often referred to as a people's republic, the mood was no better. A man named Jerry Peace Activist Rubin sat in his stockings in his dark apartment, flummoxed and disoriented, taking condolence calls from well-wishers and rank-and-file left-wingers. Mr. Rubin is the real-deal California liberal - part-time vegetarian, cat lover, sensitive to cigarette smoke. He says he has never owned a car, never had a credit card or a driver's license; he lists peace activist as his occupation. Mr. Rubin had been convinced that after four years of the Bush presidency, the country would come around and see things as he and other far-left coasters see them. Instead, he admitted with bitterness, the election appeared not to be a repudiation of Mr. Bush's foreign and economic policies, but rather values associated with hippies, gay activists, atheists and double-latte liberals who populate his city and many others on the lip of the Pacific Ocean. "Maybe I'm on the wrong side of the culture war," Mr. Rubin said.
Sarah Kershaw contributed reporting from Portland, Ore., for this article, and Charlie LeDuff from Santa Monica, Calif. |
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