As Alice the Anarchist and I walked toward City Hall in San Francisco the other day, she read aloud from a leaflet just received in the mail. On the cover Mayor Daniel Lurie was smiling and saying: “It’s time to clean up City Hall so it works for you, not the corrupt insiders.”
“The mayor wants to clean up City Hall. Why has he waited twenty months since he took office to say this?” I asked Alice.
“He doesn’t do house cleaning himself, I guess. He’s asking voters to do it through passage of Props D, E, and F this November,” Alice replied as we went inside the building.
Her motorcycle jacket pockets were carefully checked by the security guard, who first studied the red lettering on the back of her jacket that declared: “Anti-Fascist Social Club.”
“Can you tell us which room the corrupt insiders stay in?” Alice asked the guard.
“You think they’d all fit in one room?” he responded, “I don’t know where they are today, but you might start with Cafe Melange, ground floor, it’s open to everyone.”
No one was there except the barista. Maybe the corrupt insiders didn’t like City Hall’s coffee. Once we were seated with our drinks, Alice resumed her complaints: “If the mayor has his way, his measures on the ballot could result in fewer rules, fewer participants in some decisions, more signatures needed for voter initiatives, less democracy.”
I was intrigued.
“His leaflet never tells us who the corrupt insiders are,” I told Alice. “Maybe we should find the mayor and ask him.
“There are some names in the leaflet I’m quoting. It says it was paid for by a committee to which billionaire Michael Moritz contributed $2,493,095.78 and billionaire Chris Larsen paid $1,487,500. John Pritzker paid $1,000,000.
“But they’re not the corrupt insiders? They’re just the rich ones. It costs a lot to drive the corrupt insiders out of City Hall,” I guessed.
Alice then stood up and did her impersonation of Daniel Lurie: “It will cost millions to clean up City Hall. But I can afford to campaign for it, to campaign against corruption (which my opponents favor) thanks to some generous friends. Critics will tell you the city suffers from an affordability crisis; but there’s plenty of money to support my campaign for passage of Props D, E, and F.”
Alice sat down and became herself again. Her usual persona wasn’t much different from her mayoral act, but I could tell she speaking as Alice the Anarchist (it certainly wasn’t as Lurie) when she said: “We have a wealth-inequality crisis here, democracy endangered by billionaires, and San Francisco activists with fewer friends than the mayor has in the high-income bracket need to call for taxing wealth and A I windfall profits, raise the city’s income that way, and also arrange for autonomous car industry profits to subsidize mass transit and prevent Airbnb from further reducing the city’s affordable housing stock.”
Alice was herself again. She continued: “Lurie’s opposed to corrupt insiders, but the mayor himself could be one of them, corrupted by friendships with rich and powerful heads of high tech and A.I. companies and real estate development firms that sway his policies and fund his campaign mailers.”
A mayoral secretary told us Daniel Lurie wasn’t in, and she hadn’t seen the corrupt insiders either. We went back to Cafe Melange, which was still empty, placed our coffee cups in a trash bin, threw away a crumpled Wall Street Journal article someone had dropped on the table (“AI boom is supercharging SF rent prices”), and left the surface immaculate.
“We too are cleaning up City Hall,” noted Alice the Anarchist.
“Look at the bright side,” I mused as the security guard eagerly held the front door open for us to leave, “at least the mayor’s not calling for more corruption inside City Hall.”
Joel Schechter has written several books on satire.
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