By Amanda Witherell
OCTOBER 22, 2014 — The day the San Francisco Bay Guardian died, I was commuting to my corporate marketing job, stuck in construction traffic between the touristy beachside town of Mount Maunganui and its seedier chain-store cousin, Tauranga, in New Zealand. Pedaling my bicycle just enough to stay upright in the creeping crush of cars and trucks, I noticed that the back end of the SUV in front of me was completely covered in bumper stickers.
“Far out,” I thought, “I haven’t seen that since I was in the United States.”
That’s right: the most mainstream of counter cultural acts – to exert your personal identity over your corporate-built, non-renewable resource-reliant vehicle by festooning it with prefabricated philosophies, political statements, brands and logos – is shouting too loud in New Zealand. Exercising one’s freedom of speech, expressing one’s core beliefs, flying one’s freak flag, as it were, just doesn’t happen down here. I rarely see a single bumper sticker; encountering an entire hatchback covered with them was like running into a box of Corn Flakes in the International Food aisle at the grocery store, or walking by someone wearing a Boston Red Sox cap – instant recognition of a ubiquitous cultural norm and simultaneous surprise. You belong to me, but you’ve mysteriously disappeared from my world.
My partner and I sailed to New Zealand in 2010, and once I got over the initial excitement of being in an English-speaking country again after two years of non-stop travel, something about this place rubbed me the wrong way. It took me a long time to sift through all the complex impressions, misunderstandings, and revelations that form the day-to-day life of an immigrant trying to make it in a foreign country, but I finally realized what bummed me out – exactly what I was missing – and seeing an SUV encrusted with “Not all who wander are lost” and other hippie-esque bumper stickers, as well as a few Canadian flags signifying the driver was not a Kiwi, solidified it: New Zealand does not have a counter culture.
It doesn’t have a very active, independent media, either.
***
To be fair, there are counter-cultural folks here, but there’s no visible community. There’s no coalition, no political or social alignment behind a vision or a shared set of ideas. Activism exists, but it’s neither continuous nor established. It bubbles up when the government gets busy giving away oil drilling leases or comes up with a scheme to sell public assets, but it does not hum and simmer, toiling continuously at improving one or another aspect of a place like it does in cities and towns throughout the US, visible on community notice boards, in the aisles of local co-ops and markets and bookstores, on telephone poles and bar bathroom walls and the covers of free newspapers. All those places where it just might catch your eye and feed your mind a little nugget of curiosity or suspicion.
For San Franciscans contemplating the future in a two-newspaper city, I’m writing to you from what’s basically a two-newspaper country.
Nearly every publication in New Zealand is owned by Fairfax Media, Robert Murdoch’s Australia-based corporation that looked east in 2003 and saw a captive island market with a cheap price tag.
From North Island to South Island (a stretch of land roughly the length of California, and a tenth as populated), if you pick up a newspaper it was probably printed by Fairfax. That’s most of the major dailies, plus about 60 community newspapers, serving their slice of New Zealand by reprinting news from parent papers and kept alive by nationwide advertising deals.
Fairfax’s sole significant competitor, APN, is also an Australia-based corporation that owns – notably, strategically – the New Zealand Herald, plus about 20 smaller regional papers (including the Bay of Plenty Times in Tauranga, where I live). The New Zealand Herald functions as a national newspaper much like the New York Times does. It’s based in Auckland and only looks past its borders to cover issues of national significance, but mostly editorializes about the fate of Auckland. If it has anything to say about the provinces, it’s where they own a paper that can share reporting.
There are a few other independently owned publications, such as the Otago Daily Times and here in Tauranga, The Weekend Sun, which is a free weekly. It reports news along the lines of vintage car parades, photos of abandoned cats that need adopting, and meeting times for the local bowls club. It’s not questioning why a cargo ship was permitted to dock in Tauranga after it was kicked out of Australia for inadequate crew conditions. It’s not investigating the millions of dollars spent on an artificial surf reef that never got completed and now must be removed because it created dangerous swimming conditions. It isn’t asking why the few city cycle lanes aren’t connected. It doesn’t seem to care that the buses don’t run on Sunday afternoons.
It seems as if nobody cares because there’s no conversation going on in this community. There are no leaders swimming upstream, against the current. There are no publications raising questions, raising curiosity among the people who live here, raising hell.
They don’t even have bumper stickers here.
***
There are all sorts of reasons a person falls in love with a place – think of why San Francisco has a hold on you – and there’s a lot to admire about where I’m living. We have uncrowded surf breaks, miles of sandy beaches, hiking and hot springs and waterfalls within an hour’s drive and amazing weather year-round. The low population density makes it feel like there’s plenty of space. Six months from now, I’ll have been here long enough and completed all the paperwork to become a permanent resident – meaning I can come and go for the rest of my life; I can take advantage of the free national healthcare and government-subsidized retirement funds; if I lose my job I can go on the dole.
Instead, I’m preparing to leave — because after four years I’ve failed to connect with the people and their politics. There are people I agree with politically, get along with socially, and are inspired by personally, but there’s no community. Even if I focus on an issue I care about passionately, a minor thing that affects me everyday – cycling – I still can’t unearth the people who care about it, too.
I emailed the local cycling advocacy group when I moved to Tauranga, asking if they needed volunteers and offering to help – I was unemployed and had plenty of time to give. They said they’d be in touch. I never heard from them again and I’ve seen no signs of their existence in this city, the fifth largest in New Zealand. It’s as if they got a couple cycle lanes built and called it a day.
And I’ve never seen them mentioned in the local daily. But then, The Bay of Plenty Times’ recent approach to post-election coverage was to ask a bunch of kids what they’d do if they were prime minister. There are ten city councilors here, but I don’t know their names – they’re rarely mentioned in the paper, either.
A community that grows and thrives is one that continually attracts new people. What I’ve read, again and again in the memorials and messages from former Bay Guardian staff and longtime fans, is that discovering the Bay Guardian was like finding a niche, coming home, making a new friend. It affirmed for so many people that they were in the right place, and that it was a place that could accept them, or support them, challenge them or fight for them. It told people about its community, and the community grew around it.
Many people have said that San Francisco would not be the progressive city it is today without the Guardian. And the Guardian succeeded for so many years because it continued to be discovered and embraced by people new to the city, or to adulthood, or to local politics, or nightlife, or arts. It continued to create community and call people home.
Like hangovers, homesickness seems to get harder to recover from the older you get. The days since the Bay Guardian died, it’s been nearly impossible to do my meaningless marketing job and the most potent memories of San Francisco have been washing over me, especially in moments when I’m confronted again by the blandness and conformity of life in New Zealand. I’m more homesick now than I’ve ever been.
***
When I got to work that day and my supervisor, a digital marketing executive, asked how I was doing, I said, “Not great. The paper where I used to work just closed.
“Well, yeah,” he said, with a ‘duh’ look on his face. “IPads.”
I didn’t have the energy to unpack that topic, which begins with how the price point of an iPad is only the first barrier to news access, and ends with the too easily repeated tech toy mantra that “print media is dead.”
If print media is dead or corporate controlled, and online is where the free spirits and fierce fighters are supposed to go, how come I still can’t connect with my community? If I’m supposed to be liking local Facebook pages and googling “Tauranga Cycling Advocacy groups” and joining Meet-Ups, and following the Twitter feeds of journalists to find out what’s going on, how come I still can’t find the people I’m looking for, who care about the things I care about?
Because a community forms around the bold positions that it takes — and that’s a physical thing.
Consider when the Bay Guardian put a naked guy on the cover a couple of years ago. It got national coverage and yeah, it was a bit silly, but it was also asking directly, of anyone who looked, why is this aspect of human nudity so scary? What power structure are we sheepishly supporting when full frontal male nudity is something to hide and female nudity is not? That cover said something about San Francisco and the people who made that publishing decision for their community. It was a little bit of freak flag flying from the news boxes in the BART stations, on Muni seats and café couches, at the public libraries and in the public streets.
A naked guy on the internet does not have the same effect.
What the Bay Guardian did was more than just report news and list events and review local arts and entertainment. It created a community that cares about where it lives and it succeeded at that because it inserted itself into the everyday fabric and texture of the city, continuing to draw fresh eyes and ears, minds and thoughts.
Baynard Woods wrote in a Times op-ed earlier this year and Vauhini Vara quoted him in a New Yorker article about the Bay Guardian closing: “…An alt weekly is connected to a city in the way that a website can never be.”
Because it physically connects people to the city. A free weekly is an avenue to enter and understand a place – one of many potential recognizable touchstones, like community notice boards and event billings, street posters and street art. Bumper stickers.
A website can’t always do that. As more of life recedes into digital spaces, the texture of a place becomes a little smoother, a little more slick and polished, a lot less easy to hold onto, and a lot less interesting. Gone are the little surprises that catch your eye, the headlines or images that make you pause, the tiny connection you feel when you see someone reading an article you just read, or now want to read.
One of my fondest memories of San Francisco was the night of November 4, 2008. I was covering the local elections for the Bay Guardian, riding my bike from one election party to the next, hurtling down Valencia when suddenly, it was like some sort of explosion went off. The city went off. A collective shout came from above and beside and behind me and I could feel it, like a little POW in my chest, and I knew in that moment that Obama had won. The whole city told me.
I hope like hell the Bay Guardian finds a way to live through this. I wish like hell I could be at the rally on Wednesday because I miss my community and I miss being surrounded by people who want something badly.
But, if the Bay Guardian is going to live on, it’s going to take more than the people who shout about it. It’s going to take everyone else who recognizes that a newspaper is more than a place to see your pet cause in print – it’s a community-building device, a generator and aggregator connecting all these disparate lives by giving them a greater awareness and understanding of a place. You don’t have to agree with it, but your life may be richer if you hear it always calling out to you, telling you that it’s here.
That’s how San Francisco became the great city that it is. Without it, you may find yourself homesick for the place where you already are.
