Valorizes libertine, gay San Francisco circa 1965-85 as a Nietzschean escapade-cum-morality tale, flattening socioeconomic context and ignoring externalities. Whether or no these were the city’s animating spirits, Talbot reads as though the late 20th century’s progressive paradigm was inevitable rather than contingent on events that also included neighborhood reshuffling after 1989’s earthquake and the Internet boom of the next decade. Equally, why and at what cost should counterculture be not merely accepted but endorsed?
Narrating via sympathetic character sketch of local celebrities and leftist politicians, Talbot moves from Haight-Ashbury bohemians to Filmore’s music scene to city hall. The Sixties amounted to a cultural dialogue between metropolitan London, falling fast, and a depopulating northern California city of approximately 725,000, supported by Motown Detroit. Music, fashion, drugs, and sex surpassed the civil rights movement, welfare-state expansion, declining industrial and Keynesian economics, or the Cold War (save Vietnam).
Like other US cities, San Francisco’s wartime and postwar industrial heights were passing, families migrating to the suburbs (their commute aided by the unmentioned 1972 debut of BART), and violent crime rising. Talbot alludes to working-class neighborhoods, portrays the police as a corrupt, closed ‘Gaelic and garlic’ shop, and paints felonies in the colors of moral equivalence. Municipal administration improves with the election of George Moscone, trailed by the beatified Harvey Milk – both complicit in Jim Jones’ degradation of electoral politics. Amid the Dan White’s notorious assassinations, one learns the Board of Supervisors somehow remained a 6-5 majority of ‘moderates’. Who were these benighted voters? Why is Dianne Feinstein, quarterback to 1981’s $25 million bailout by California and praised for prompting a conference of American mayors to establish an AIDS task force, a ‘good government moderate’?
The 1950s are ‘dark days’ for labor activists. Reagan is seen to put a ‘genial face on callous policies’ as governor in the 1960s and president in the 1980s, when the city heroically responded to AIDs (originally GRID). The underdog 49ers are most laudable for being gay-friendly, unlike the hegemonic Dallas Cowboys, whose Hall of Fame but Christian coach exhibits an equally regional trait. And so on.
Talbot questionably reports Vincent Hallinan, an early hero, has an Olympic-size swim pool in his Marin backyard – most unlikely. Later one reads 15 percent of returning Vietnam veterans were addicted to heroin, without citation. Oral history without reference to other evidence, however readable, seems to sacrifice accuracy and balance.
Cities are ‘social enterprises built on the tacit compact that one racial or religious group or neighborhood won’t start warring on another’, Talbot writes. On what basis do they function well? He ventures:
By taking care of suffering men [during the AIDS crisis], San Francisco finally became a unified city. …The plague burned down to the city’s core, where one simple truth was revealed: we must take care of each other. No matter how sick or helpless or untouchable people are.
The contemporary left transforms Hobbesian individuals into Marxist/postmodern classes, whose claims are borne not of natural right but Rousseau’s compassion, demanding not only toleration but approbation. How to meet the costs of such as regime? The burdens of California’s Proposition 13, its latter-day capital-gains tax, and other scarcities endemic to the peninsular city disproportionately fall not on patricians like Feinstein or nouveau riches but working classes and families, the citizens who seemingly comprise Talbot’s ‘conservatives’.
Even as a cultural synthesis of how it felt to contemporaries, Season assumes that which is to be explained: that which might have been grounded in San Francisco’s up-and-down 150 years since the 1840s, or contrasted with contemporary American cities, is lionized in isolation. Season may serve as a standard treatment not as a treatment of any standard.