And so the summer of love has become a winter with hobos. 

I speak of Berkeley, where a spring forum was held by the chamber of commerce to discuss a sit-lie ordinance – which would ban sitting or lying on sidewalks within commercial districts during work hours. 

It was based on a similar ordinance in San Francisco – but word got out, protests erupted, and everyone ran scared. 

See, the ordinance would have cleared the streets of dirtbags like me who clog sidewalks with aggressive panhandling. 

But now, because protests scared off it’s proponents, fearful students will now flock to safer places, rather than risk getting assaulted by meth-heads. 

And so here’s what happens when tolerance triumphs over safety. The end result is filth and lawlessness. 

And the rest of us flee. 

A survey of 1800 students found that half avoid downtown Berkeley because its dirty and dangerous. And women are especially fearful – perhaps because some creepy dudes want more than change. 

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Living in California and having as friends many artists, writers, and poets (all of them, to a one, blissfully, unreflectively liberal), I often have the opportunity to hear them wax poetic about the Golden Age of their lives: the late 1960s/early 1970s hippie scene centered around San Francisco/Berkeley. The drugs were amazing, the sex constant and unreserved, the spirit of joie de vivre and carpe diem all-encompassing.

After listening to these misty-eyed reveries, I usually press them with what, to anyone else, would be the obvious question: If it was all so great, why did they leave the Haight and the Castro and all of their associated communes and bong-fueled revolutions behind, and fall into a more conventional lifestyle elsewhere? Why not continue living in what was, according to them, the closest thing to paradise on earth imaginable?

The answer, boiled down, is usually some variant of “I realized the lifestyle was killing me — that if I didn’t get away I would soon be dead.” I’ve heard tales of bad drug trips, violence and paranoia, anarchism and terrorism, and any number of utterly disgusting and disease-ridden sexual perversions. Promising paradise and delivering nightmares is as good a definition of socialism as any (socialism, communism, liberalism, progressivism — call it what you will, it’s all the same poison, just delivered in different doses and by different means). Every few decades a new group of idealistic young fools attempt to stage a new revolt (“Yes, we can!”) in an attempt to overturn the wisdom of their forefathers and the immutable laws of reality, and each time they end up like Icarus, staging spectacular belly-flops into cesspools of unintended consequences.

Examine the cinema of the era, and you’ll see this whole thing play out again and again. Easy Rider, Billy Jack, Vanishing Point, The French Connection, Apocalypse Now!, and so many others glorified nihilism, hedonism, revolution, and hopelessness. Again and again we were treated to, on the one hand, liberal myths of heroes striving mightily to fight, escape, or ignore evil conservative society only to be mercilessly extinguished, and on the other stories of conservatives discovering the corruption and emptiness infecting their base values and ideals.

One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that I came of age not in the late Sixties, when America was descending into this chaos, but in the early Eighties, when Ronald Reagan was dragging us out of it. (more…)

In all fairness, some of the questions in the Berkeley video were tough.  Thus, I decided to think of the easiest possible questions regarding the Obama administration.  As per usual, you can’t even GIVE Obama-voters the right answer.  When only 34% of them can identify our Vice President, I start to think of P. Diddy’s “Vote or Die” campaign.  If given the choice, I think some of these folks should opt for the latter.

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So last Saturday I spoke at UC Berkeley, my alma mater. The city itself is as delightful as ever – a mix of fall leaves, bright sun and tramp feces. And with that combination of serene elements, I can’t think of a better starting point for my Gregalogue.

See, when I arrived at Berkeley as a freshman some 25 years ago, the city not only helped to transform my political self, but reinforced a cynicism already brewing inside me concerning the meaning of true rebellion. I was a punk in high school, for sure, and embraced generic left wing dogma – for it impressed teachers and even won extra credit in various classes. As a teenager, it also gave me what I craved: attention, some relevance, and a chance to get lucky with hippie chicks. That last desire was never achieved – because I had attended an all boy high school. But no matter, I practiced on the drama students. (more…)

**UPDATE 11/5** Obama drops painting, throws Alma Thomas under the bus.

Want to know the Obama Administration’s idea of what constitutes art?  There’s no better place to look than the newly-reconstituted White House art collection.  So what’s there?  How about this gem:

Yes, it is boring and banal.  It does look like your three-year-old’s recent construction paper cut-out from pre-school – the one she made with the rounded scissors.  It’s Watusi (Hard Edge), by black painter Alma Thomas.

Now here’s Henri Matisse’s The Snail (1953).

Notice any similarities?  How about now: (more…)

September 10, 2010

The Nobel Prize Committee announced today that it is awarding the Prize in Medicine to Jimmy Duncan, a senior at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, for getting a 97 on his bio-chem final.

“The Committee felt that Master Duncan has shown great promise with his outstanding grades,” said Dr. Leif Quisling, chairperson of the Nobel Prize Committee.  “It is our fervent hope that this award encourages him to do great things in the future, such as find a cure for cancer.”

The committee was first alerted to Jimmy Duncan when they came across a YouTube clip of Duncan’s class presentation on his career goals.

“We were particularly struck by his unbridled optimism,” said Dr. Quisling. “Duncan closed his passionate talk with these inspiring words:  ’And we can end cancer in our lifetimes if we all work together really, really hard!’  It is exactly those kind of empty platitudes that impress this committee. Far more so than anything so gauche as actual achievement.” (more…)