If you've ever wandered past a New Age healing seminar, a UFO convention, or a blocks-long line for a Steve Jobs speech, you understand how embarrassing it can sometimes be to identify as a Northern California, middle-class white person. Last week in San Francisco it was mortifying. Cringe-provoking news came from all directions. First there was San Francisco Chronicle Internet columnist Mark Morford's strange explanation for his employer's decision to maintain a small city-size newsroom at Nevada's Burning Man festival while covering Hurricane Katrina's aftermath mostly via wire service reports.

In an apparent exercise in the recouping of sunken costs, the Chron kept six reporters, three photographers, a videographer, and who knows who else at a nudie dopefest near Reno while American history was unfolding on the Gulf Coast. This was one of those daily-newspaper anniversary-package deals -- Burning Man's been around 20 years -- that Chron shirts seemed to have been planning for months. Burning Man is a Nevada desert art festival in which project managers play at being free-love hippies for a week; the BM series exuded the smell of a newsroom management scheme to better reach out to a young, white readership.

The paper's brass apparently was unaware -- or didn't care -- that the Katrina disaster may as well have been a local story for many Chronicle readers. An important portion of Bay Area families has deep roots in the region hit by the hurricane, thanks to the World War II economic migration of African-American workers from the Gulf Coast during this area's 1940s shipbuilding boom. Many Bay Area residents watched Katrina reports seeking news about their relatives' neighborhoods.

Unfolding events on the Gulf Coast, however, somehow failed to alter the course of the Chronicle's awful journalistic storm. The paper's news columns kept filling with weirdly out-of-touch reports about Burning Man, while the paper covered the early, unfolding Katrina tragedy with one or two on-the-ground reporters, Associated Press and New York Times syndicate copy, and staff stories with headlines such as "Web Records Wild Interest in Katrina" and Burning Man "Festival-goers Unaware of Destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina."

Morford, who had until lately appeared only on the paper's Internet site, was featured in the actual newsprint version of the Chronicle last Wednesday to defend his bosses' judgment.

"We need this sort of 'trifling' Burning Man fluff more than ever, to act as spark, as beacon, as counterbalance," the columnist explained. "See, Burning Man is the place where perspective is most fluxive and liquid. It is the place, maybe, where you can best try to understand the place of the human animal in the grand scheme."

It pains me to say that this perspective -- that picking one's ass is an appropriate and aggressive response to national catastrophe -- is one my white brethren identify with quite comfortably. I just wish they wouldn't say so in public.

It's also embarrassing to be a white San Franciscan now, Smith writes (same column, linked above) because of the way local progressive hounded the diligent (and, as it happens, African-American) SF schools superintendent Arlene Ackerman out of a job, culminating with her unavoidable resignation last week.

San Francisco suffered another white-conceit spectacle last week in which our local leftists hounded out of office the city's corruption-busting, test score-improving school superintendent, Arlene Ackerman. White parents have abandoned public schools to the point that Caucasians constitute half the city population but only 9 percent of the public-school student body.

So when the extreme-left Green Party identified the school board as a place to try out its destructive version of experimental politics, there was none of the citywide outrage one might have found in cities where everyone has a stake in the schools' quality. The verdant leftists slammed Ackerman for "focusing on" -- ergo, elevating -- student test scores. They attacked her for overhauling and improving ghetto schools. They tut-tutted at Ackerman's record of rooting out a band of larcenists who had infiltrated school management and setting up accounting systems that would help end the S.F. school district tradition of criminality.

Yet Green Party members and other self-described progressives saw Ackerman's corruption-busting as trivial compared with her failure to open the schools to "public input" and "democratic processes" -- ergo, public meetings that run until 5 a.m. and produce feel-good resolutions that have no real policy effect.

These Green Party attacks were absorbed by greater San Francisco as entertaining political theater, rather than what they really were -- an assault on the future of the city's young. Ackerman quit last week, saying she was sick of the hectoring.

When alternative weeklies begin to link - quite presciently - overemphasis of hedonistic cultural theater such as Burning Man in The Chron to the entertaining "political theater" of SF Green Party harrassment blocking improved public schools, it doesn't take a Weatherman to tell which way the wind is going to be blowing. Give San Francisco 10 more years, and the tide will have turned back to the center, at least. I'm expecting the same up here in Seattle.

TECHNORATI TAGS: SAN FRANCISCO, BURNING MAN, ARLENE ACKERMAN

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