Public Comment

Whole Lot of Stupid Going On!

By Marc Winokur
Thursday October 08, 2009 - 12:19:00 PM

For those who take pleasure in dismissing energetic local, social critiques as rants, raves or diatribes, they need not read any further. But for the rest of us, it’s about time to admit there’s a whole lot of stupid going on these days, and it is not confined to areas outside of Berkeley, California. Take the gourmet ghetto, North Berkeley’s venerated depository of designer food, and garrulous café bloviators with whom I have been happily participating with for many years (being one myself). Don’t get it wrong, I love hangin’ with the homeys over by the strip, and perusing the endless parade of beautifully tapered young women, self-important cell phone calls, the panhandlers, the cartwheelers, and the carnival of economic disparity that underwrites the whole scene. 

Yet, crossing the street between Cedar and Vine on Shattuck, you’d best have your A-Game ready to flag down the self (and often) cell-absorbed motorists who obliviously cruise, miles above the speed limit, by the crosswalk between the French Hotel and the Post Office. Best advice here is to stare down each and every a-hole on wheels as if you were about to call your lawyer when you see them barreling toward you. Better still, wave your arms in a spastic demonstration of hysteria before the vehicle gets within 30 yards indicating that you are a threat to society, and possibly armed as well. Usually that will stop the bastards in their tracks, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get a sheepish, pseudo-guilt ridden “my bad” smile from the driver who you just might have saved from several years of community service, or worse. 

Granted, at least half the drivers are courteous enough not to turn you into split-pea puree. But look out for the other twenty-five percent who are intent on ignoring your right to cross the street in peace, or the remaining twenty-five percent who just want to play chicken with a helpless pedestrian. 

For all the talk about Berkeley leading the way, whatever that means, there seems to be more concern with the occasional cigarette smoke wafting about a casual conversation than the more imminent threats of outright vehicular arrogance that go on right in front of everyone’s eyes. Nor is there a dearth of SUV’s darting past the intelligentsia, often on their way, single-occupant style, for the daily fix of designer drinks at the local dispensary, pummeling the already particulate heavy air. Haven’t seen any demonstrations lately taking on these offenses to our health and well being, yet god forbid you should light up a smoke in the midst of such environmental chastity! 

But the king of complacent stupidity, the summum bonum of commercial conceit has to be the mobile billboards merrily rolling along Telegraph and Shattuck these days, creating a truly dangerous distraction for drivers as well as pedestrians. Just to figure what these moped-powered, panoptic panels are trying to say will take enough time to get your steering wheel well into the trunk of the car in front of you, whose driver is, in all likelihood also gawking sideways at the ill-placed ads. As it happens, I, in my own distracted folly, ascertained that the billboard moving to my right was all about the wonders of some alcoholic product, and last I checked, beer was still booze. But by then I was a mere twenty feet away from a head-on—or shall we say head-off—collision with the poor jerk in front of me who also stopped to gape at the roving come-on. 

The billboards apparently co-sponsored by scootermedia.com, and the lager beer company—which I was, ironically, unable to decipher—did not seem to faze anyone when I brought it to their attention, including the Berkeley Police Department who basically blew the whole thing off as it was some concocted point of dissent by an over the hill 60s radical. Nobody impeded my freedom of speech in the city that proudly claims its genesis, but as I gadflied on about the aforementioned infractions to common sense and safety I could tell I was becoming a blight to the common complacency in the community that made its reputation struggling against the status quo. 

One might that add that the indifferent reaction to this incident is emblematic of a new narcissism embedded in a self-absorbed, epicurean revolution—the only real revolution that has gone beyond mere blabber, and earned the right to be so-named in Berkeley. I suppose that’s no small accomplishment. Hey, Chez Panisse is in the heart of the gourmet ghetto where one’s monthly utility bill can get you a meal that is as fresh and pure as San Francisco Bay, two-hundred years ago. 

But whatever your pleasure, don’t you dare blow smoke in a public, commercial zone! You might disrupt the chit and chat of a movement that in forty years has given way to instant gratification, on-demand media frenzies, twitter-tweeters, and pricey cuisine, but barely moving beyond its own rhetoric of tangible, social-political and environmental transformation. 

 

Marc Winokur is a Berkeley resident.