San Francisco: City of Ambiguity (Yeah, That's It, Ambiguity)
By Benjamin Wachs
Yesterday a Chronicle headline proclaimed that our city has an "ambiguous attitude towards brothels" - because while it is the city's stated policy to close them, the city bureaucracy rarely does.
That's because of "an ambiguous attitude"? You really want to go with that, Chronicle?
By that logic, the city also has an extremely ambiguous relationship with homicides, because while it is our stated policy to solve them, we rarely do.
But that's nothing compared to our ambiguous relationship with budgets: every year we swear we'll stick to one, but somehow we keep breaking them. We're mysterious that way.
Our relationship to government waste is truly baffling - it's like a quantum particle. You can never simultaneously measure what a city program is supposed to do and how much money it's wasting. It defies logic - and auditors.
In most cities, this would be explained by incompetence, and the story would go something like this: "The city has a policy, backed by the mayor, to do X, but instead X never gets done: our city is run by wingnuts who can't complete simple tasks."
But here? It's "ambiguity" - what lesser city's accomplish through ineptitude, we accomplish through a sophisticated appreciation of nuance.
Take that, Middle America.
Of course ... alternatively ... there might be an explanation that doesn't involve us gazing into our navels.
It could be that the one thing that the city administration and the Bush administration have in common ... aside from a fixation on symbolic politics ... in their complete inability to manage stuff.
This may be the first rule of San Francisco government: never explain by forethought what can also be explained by incompetence.
There's nothing ambiguous about it.
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