Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Hunter S. Thompson Would No Longer Recognize San Francisco

David Streitfeld writes:

I have on my wall a poster that Hunter S. Thompson, an early mentor, gave me when I moved to the Bay Area. Called “Open Letter: San Francisco, Oct. 25, 1960,” it is Hunter’s stream-of-consciousness portrait of a city soaked in booze and romanticism, a place of rebels and deadbeats and those who had run out of luck:
City of hills and fog and water, bankers and boobs — Republicans all. City of no jobs ... City of no money except what you find at the General Delivery window; and somehow it’s always enough ... San Francisco, edge of the western world, where you can drink all night and jump off the bridge to beat a hangover, where you can sell encyclopedias because no other job is available, where you refuse to sell encyclopedias because you have better things to do.
San Francisco is no longer that city.
Thanks in large part to the rise of Silicon Valley...Technology has moved the city from the edge of the world to the center.

3 comments:

  1. I was last in SF in the early 90's. I loved it then. Not sure what I'd find there today. Possibly just disappointment.

    But the center of the world isn't SF... it's DC "where the Shadows lie."

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  2. Got to wonder what Thompson would be writing if he was still alive today

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  3. Call me crazy, but I think if Thompson were alive today he'd be a Trump supporter. Not because of any policy, but because Trump infuriates so many people. Although the wall idiocy might turn him off.

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