Here Comes the Fudge

The Usual Suspects has picked up on those teaser ads in the Examiner featuring a rather solemn-looking picture of somnolent former Chronicle columnist Ken Garcia. Apparently, we can expect the Zam to play host to the snot-nosed homilies of the whiny Garcia very soon.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the guy. Garcia had a great run at the Chronicle. He was a great international reporter, and he broke into the perilous venue of local political writing in the late '90s with a great series on the tribulations of Golden Gate Park. In those articles he did a great job of putting the misguided ideological concerns, bureaucratic inentia, infighting, and incompetence, and just plain bizarre crackpottery that complicate the process of maintaining and improving the Park.

Garcia's early editorial columns rightly focused on the perils of San Francisco's NIMBY culture and leftist tokenism, and how they often made the City ungovernable. But his later columns had an unfortunate tendency to reek of nostalgia for an ancien regime that never truly existed. The politics of district elections seemed to transform Garcia from pragmatic moderate to reactionary NIMBY. A lot of what he did made political moderates look just plain ridiculous and divisive.

In any case, here's to Ken. Welcome back to the Breach. Pray for no Geritol jokes.