The Anger of Compassion

They Broke My Heart In San Francisco

In the second week of February, for the purpose of conserving copper wire and electric power, a directive forbade the running of elevators above the twenty-fifth floor. The upper floors of the buildings had to be vacated, and partitions of unpainted boards went up to cut off the stairways... The tops of the cities were cut down.

So wrote Ayn Rand in her 1958 magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, in which the great capitalists go on strike—Atlases shrugging—as collectivist ideology smothers civilisation.

Some critics dismiss the novel as outlandish; not just the strike, but the motivations and justifications through which the collectivists wreck havoc. But fast-forward 50 years and it doesn't seem so fantastic.

San Francisco's picturesque skyline would be dark at night under a first-in-the-nation law... that would mandate all skyscrapers turn off nonemergency lights after work hours.

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin said his measure would reduce the energy wasted in the city's downtown.

"Anyone who has passed through our Financial District after dark knows that many large financial buildings in the downtown keep their lights on throughout the night even when there is not work or janitorial service going on," Peskin said.

Peskin. Pesky. Rand would have enjoyed that name.

In the same San Francisco Chronicle report, we get this:

The idea for the proposed law came from a retired banker who lives on Telegraph Hill and photographically documented the lights on in downtown buildings at all hours of the night, seven days a week.

"As I got into it, it became clear there were not janitors cleaning the eighth through 24th floors of a building at 3 a.m. on Sunday," said Peter Overmire, the man who took the photographs.

"It just became increasingly annoying to see all of these at various times of night on various days of the week, so I took (the photos) to Peskin and said 'Dammit, can't we do something about this?'"

Can't "we" do something about what? The privately-paid-for power consumption of private companies? What has that got to do with "we"? Nothing, that's what. Further, he found it "increasingly annoying". That's quite a revelation, and it reveals the jerky, Pavlovian response mechanism that drives the it-takes-a-village mentality. Actually, it takes a concentration camp. And that camp is currently under construction in a great city near you.

It also exposes the anti-life, anti-capitalist black heart of the green meanies. Turn it off. Knock it down. Black it out. Blank it out. What sort of twisted satisfaction will that banker and his ilk feel when they look out of their windows to see the beautiful skyline of San Francisco chopped off at the knees? In some murky, unidentified way, they'll feel exactly as the savages in their caves felt on 9/11 as the World Trade Center towers crashed down. One is a metaphor for the other.

In the final moments of Atlas Shrugged, as the misanthropes give full and final vent to their insanity, Rand describes the strikers' escape from New York:

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations—and that the lights of New York had gone out.

The lights of Rand's New York went out amidst chaos and violence. San Francisco's look set to go out with a whimper.

Where's Tony Bennett when you need him?

The loveliness of Paris
Seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome
Is of another day
I've been terribly alone
And forgotten in Manhattan
I'm going home to my city by the bay

I left my heart in San Francisco
High on a hill, it calls to me
To be where little cable cars
Climb halfway to the stars!
The morning fog may chill the air
I don't care!
My love waits there in San Francisco
Above the blue and windy sea
When I come home to you, San Francisco,
Your golden sun will shine for me!

Posted by Ross Elliot at April 11, 2008 11:14 PM