Spewing 4,500 pounds of confetti into the streets seems off-message for a city bound by a mandatory composting ordinance and well on its way to banning bottled water. What the rain and the souvenir-hunters haven't cleaned, a phalanx of Department of Public Works employees have. But what the hell. It's not every year the Giants win the World Series.
Just every other year.
For the first 52 years of their existence here in San Francisco, the plight of the Giants — and their fans — was neatly summed up by a 1962 Peanuts comic strip in which Charlie Brown sits on the curb and stares, morosely, into space for three panels. But, in the fourth, he's on his feet and wailing, apoplectically: "WHY COULDN'T MCCOVEY HAVE HIT THE BALL JUST THREE FEET HIGHER?"
Had Willie McCovey's screaming, two-out line drive — a ball he would later claim to be the hardest he ever hit — not plotted a course directly into Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson's glove, San Francisco would have won Game 7 and taken the Series. But it did. So they didn't.
That's what it was to live in this city and follow this team. It rained on the Giants' victory parade last week — but, in order to have rain on your parade, first you must have a parade.
Fans of an earlier era, steeped in failure, were encumbered with long memories of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. After the surreal debacle of 2002, your humble narrator phoned his oldest friend — whom he had lured and cajoled two decades earlier into following this team through that naïve and overpowering zeal only grade-school baseball fans can possess — and told him, "I'm sorry I got you into this."
And yet, this is no longer relevant. More than a million orange-clad fans last week descended upon Market Street to cheer on the three-time World Champion San Francisco Giants; it's quite likely most of these people have no idea who Willie McCovey is. They may not even know who Charlie Brown is.
That's what it is to live in this city and follow this team. To be a Giants fan now is to be unencumbered by any memories, painful or otherwise. Well, how fitting. Transformative success and living in the here-and-now is very much San Francisco's motif. In the same way that it's hard to be nostalgic when you can't remember anything, the Giants have provided instant gratification to anyone unassociated with the prior half-century of the utter and total opposite.
Are the Giants becoming more like San Francisco or is San Francisco becoming more like the Giants? These are the kinds of koans that pass through your mind when two-and-a-quarter tons of soggy orange-and-black confetti begins to weigh you down as the team rolls by in a championship parade. Again.
In the moments after Madison Bumgarner almost single-handedly willed the Giants to the title, San Francisco fans took to the streets. And trashed them. It'd be tempting to blame yet another municipal lowlight on arrivistes living the San Francisco phase of their lives and treating this city like a hotel and not a home (as the tech bro booting the local kids off a soccer field in a once-viral video put it, "Who gives a shit about the neighborhood?"). Too tempting: Sporting revelers behaved badly here back in the 1980s, when families could afford to live in this city and pushing a dog in a baby stroller would have been seen as a different kind of outsider behavior.
Sports fans have trashed nearly every city in which there are sports and fans. San Francisco's debauchery is only shocking in a vacuum; soccer brawling between Honduran and El Salvadorian fans actually helped spark a shooting war between those nations in 1969. (The aggrieved royal blue-clad army of Kansas City hasn't yet established a beachhead here in San Francisco.)
Bad behavior from San Francisco fans may not fit the disposable city metaphor, but it does work for another. This is a city that has, increasingly, become a victim of its own success. The Giants' glorious run induced municipal chaos. Our overheated economy and transcendent beauty has led to displacement, parodic housing costs, Third World-caliber social stratification, mass exodus, and a disturbing degree of tech hegemony commandeering civic government. It has also led to the aforementioned absence of memory.
But, when you're winning, memory is superfluous. The Giants are the team of the here and now, playing in the city of the here and now. This is, as ever, the place to come, make a bundle, and enjoy the fruits of that success. This is the ephemeral city. The only way to strike home that point a little more would be to build it on top of an earthquake fault.
When Pablo Sandoval squeezed the final out and collapsed into a roly-poly heap, he triggered outpourings of citywide euphoria and necessitated the purchase of that 4,500 pounds of confetti. San Francisco does euphoria well. We're trained for this.
What's less and less accessible to citizens of a city defined by its impermanence is the permanence of a sporting history. A lifetime of baseball memories cannot be discarded in the blink of an eye: Years of pain were the down-payment for days like these. Minus this context, the good times seem a bit hollow — just as, minus context, Citizen Kane is a movie about a man who wishes he had a sled.
Yet reveling in pain and failure is unproductive. Winning, as they say, is better than losing. Looking down upon naif Giants fans like a gray-muzzled old dog snarling at a puppy grows tiresome; curmudgeons annoy everyone, even themselves.
What a relief it is to no longer have this irrational passion of ours soured by a legacy of cumulative failure. What a surprise and a joy to grapple with the notion of cumulative success.
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