h. brown: voice of the headless chicken

Left: online columnist h. brown



"Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world."

- Werner Herzog

San Francisco's political establishment likes their mascots. They especially like their mascots to be crazy and stupid. That's rather unfortunate, since it allows them to paint a disingenuous picture of the public as an ignorant rabble, when in fact we have one of the more intelligent - but unfortunately distracted - urban constituencies in the nation. Many local politicians love to trot out various mascots as fake constituents at press conferences, public comment at hearings and the like, because they serve dual purposes: they give the politicians the illusion of public support while genuine public voices are alienated from the process, due to their natural reluctance to be part of a freak show.

Left: Frank Chu, before the Adidas Contract

That may sound harsh: the fact is most of these people really do care about the issues facing this city. They just aren't smooth or savvy or in some cases, even sane enough to carry a coherent political message, so they get misled by various people who are known for being able to trot out 500 people at City Hall hearings in order to scare commissioners into voting against the pet peeve of the week. But if you've been watching this scene as long as I have, you know as well as I do that a lot of these people are nothing but brainless starfuckers, and some are just plain walking freak shows.


As such, it's refreshing to watch the fur fly when one of them decides to pull a real boner and show exactly how disconnected their mouths are from their brains. That's what the so-called "politics and art" blogger h. brown did over the weekend. In a column where he issues year-end grades for various members of the Board of Supervisors, he includes this precious jewel:


"Gerardo Sandoval, District 11 ... A-

For taking one for the team in fighting Donald Fisher pretty much alone. I feel almost responsible because I kept writing about the Jewish cabal of Fisher & Shorenstein & Blum & Goldman & Hellman and how they're playing Sim City with San Francisco. It's true that they think they're better than all of us. It's true that a big part of why they think they're better than us is because they're Jewish. That's all true. But, you better not say it if you have any property to lose. Or, a family to raise."

Of course, we all remember when Sandoval pulled a similar boner when he urged a crowd of labor protestors to "picket all the bosses' Bar Mitzvahs."

Unfortunately it is precisely this sort of eruption from the caverns of the banal that many insiders at City Hall like to throw in the face of the public. Keeping lots of shit around makes the eyes of the public water.