Yes, I live 20 minutes from Berkeley and have many stories about it. It's impossible to breathe in Berkeley without hurting someone's feelings.
quotation start: Once several years ago, I took a girlfriend to a movie in Berkeley and made the mistake of buying a box of popcorn. We ate our popcorn and I would say that we weren't chomping or making a lot of noise but the guy in front of me turned around and in a frustrated voice asked us to stop eating the popcorn because we were intefering with the movie. My date and I looked at each other and then ate very carefully and slowly so as not to make any noise. Again the person turned around and asked in a harsh voice that we move. quote end- ------------------------ sigh - Yes, there are a couple people like that in Berkeley, but really not too many of them though. I guess I'd say that those are liberals - they are probably the constituency that keeps Whole Foods supermarket open. Whole Foods has no advantages over other stores - it has dramatically higher prices and is famous for union busting, and merely has some produce labeled organic. They're the same people responsible for the situation in the Berkeley bowl parking lot where one almost gets run over by angry drivers fighting over parking spots nearly every time.
and with regards to lifestylists - hell yes Berkeley is the home of lifestyle anarchists. That is half of what it's all about. However, I've really come around since I moved here to start to appreciate them a bit more. I'm not talking about lifestyle liberals - who would be the hypocritical organic food nuts described above, but it is just a fact that lots of middle class white people who aren't particularly oppressed just could not understand or identify with the notion that the government doesn't have such good intentions were it not for their personal drug use or feelings of persecution for their aesthetic taste or sexual choices. When I first moved here a couple years ago when I was 23, my BF and I were equally turned off by the Long Haul 'infoshop' because there are these people who smoke marijuana there all day and they had the door locked and wouldn't let us in, and no ordinary Oakland person not in the scene would accidentally go in there, and it was such a pale comparison to the Black Cat Cafe of Seattle. My perspective was largely shaped by writing and helping out with Eat the State! in Seattle whose editors Maria Tomchick and Geov Parrish both have working class backgrounds in rural areas, and are totally with-it. Their newspaper is quite approachable for the not already 'nlightened' whereas Slingshot here is directed at people within the anarchist community. REcently though, I am spending a lot more time with semi-lifestylist groups such as Reclaim the Streets (whose actions I would rarely miss now) and critical mass etc - because they are able to get so many more people involved and they're fun, and they actually have won things when they ally with one cause or the other. The cyclists actually won a bike lane over the bay bridge which costs many millions of dollars, not to mention a tremendous local infrastructure for bikes.
Here are some pictures of something a week ago that captures about 1/3 of the local Berkeley nuts. the hippie with the 'stop the draft' sign is an exception to the rule - there aren't many hippies around here. He is the 'father of people's park' and he runs for office all the time and is a total acid casualty. He thought I was a conservative for my red coat and blue shirt. But all of this captures what Berkeley is like - first, notice all the white people - Berkeley is pretty expensive so serious political activists plus lifestylers tend to be middle class europeans, even though the university isn't so at all, nor is the city or region as a whole. Also, there is such an amazing concentration of wingnuts and mentally ill people here. Here is the web site for the SF Mime Troupe's Bay Area Patriot's association: http://www.geocities.com/bapasf my pictures (and yes, I realize I have a leering and perhaps inappropriate focus on mentally ill people burning flags and advocating front yard tipis) http://www.gelatinous.com/gallery/danh99
and this is perhaps the most rewarding link to click on of pictures: http://monkeydyne.com/photos/pics.phtml?d=bapa
City politics is pretty interesting here because so many of the councilmembers are almost deranged such as the mayor here: http://www.dailycal.org/article.asp?id=8044
They bicker a lot, and all these crazy people hang out at the council meetings. For instance, there is a $6 million k-12 budget shortfall, but they spend all their time arguing over whether to ban school field trips to a 'science center' near the university because the university has a tritium labeling facility - which seriously offers almost zero threat to public health. Yet, 6 miles north in Richmond there are a lot of oil refineries and chemical plants which have horrible accidents every 3 months or so which spew awful acid and smoke over a vast region, mostly populated by not european-american or middle class individuals.
Christine
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