UNITED STATES—Graydon had always kept his eye on the ball, and even when he started hearing the Voice, it wasn’t voices and he didn’t say anything about it (not for fear of lunacy or the risk of being called a madman, because quite simply: not only was he at home in lunacy, it was his birth right) the voice was objective out of him and it came at times clearly as an instruction manual. It was as a radio tuned in to a single channel with great accuracy and eliminating static. The line that he saw along those counties, that was sure to be the southern border of the new geopolitical entity Miller had in mind.
“I must be out of my mind,” he said astonished, then the VOICE: “Get up now. Wash your face in ice cold water. Take a ride in the carriage around the French Quarter.”
On old spavined horse pulled the ornate carriage, festooned with gold and purple Mardi Gras beads and a top-hatted driver. The sound of the clopping hooves did him good. That was the city’s charm to hug you, and still hugged Sam Delaney in the dusky daze that followed Sam Jr’s fireball death ramming a fighter plane into the side of a Greek mountain.
The mail still came to the office and he’s taken out the letter opener. Inside might be a nice check in the mail, and it would temporarily assuage the hurt over that loss. Temporarily pull a woollen blanket over his cataracted eyes that still maintained their diamond intensity. After that the harsh outlines of tragic loss reasserted their primacy.
“Sam the Banana Man now must be playing golf and he just got back from a trip to Washington D.C.” Sam had this game whereby he imagined the life Sam Jr. ought to be having. But sooner or later the palliative effect wore off.
There’s a mighty power, like the music and the mathematics underlying all, take a powder. Best to subtly react and accept aleatory prompts, you will be the happier for it. All the plans focused on this homegrown rebellion on Washington State and the great Northwest, it was green like Martians and substantially white in its population. There were cells in unlikely places. Odd that San Francisco, the metropolis nearest to Graydon Miller’s birthplace was, it was two things: 1) it was his exposure to a great city, something greater than the small town 2) while there one cold brisk night as a schoolchild, there tickled in his breast such a giddy conviction, an a par with Jean Jacques Rousseau’s epiphany, that he, Graydon Miller, was destined for greatness, and that one day he would return in glory.
Yet, oddly as an adult, while he had had memorable times there and visits with friends who adopted it as their own, he had a kind of indifference to the place, the most charming and provincial capital one could imagine. Since his boyhood something had happened to San Francisco. But it was changed now into something almost unrecognizable.
It was official: the San Francisco Bay area had the greatest wealth inequality in the nation. The latest tech boom stretched the Bay Area’s income inequality gap to its widest level ever, according to a new study produced by the Rand Corporation. The new report didn’t arrive in a vacuum: the Brookings Institute found in February that San Francisco’s income inequality is growing at a faster pace than anywhere else in the country, and that “skyrocketing housing costs may increasingly preclude low-income residents from living in the city altogether.” And since when does “low-income” stand in for working class?
People wonder what San Francisco will look like in 30 years: Carmel, once an artists colony, now home only for vacation homes for the ultra wealthy and throngs of international tourists.
The Rand corporation’s research brief, the drily entitled, “Income Inequality in the San Francisco Bay Area,” found that average incomes among the highest-earning Bay Area households were 31.5 times higher than the average incomes in the bottom 20 percent.
“Both this brief and our recently released report on poverty in the Bay Area provide a comprehensive look at the low degree to which our region’s prosperity is shared,” said Jewel Messina, Joint Venture vice president and senior research associate for the Rand Corporation. On some metrics, San Francisco has more income inequality than developing nations, rivaling countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
The figure cited by the Examiner is the Gini coefficient, which measures income distribution on a scale of 0 (everyone shares wealth equally) to 1 (all of the nation’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of one person). Sweden landed at a .25, and Denmark came in at .24. The United States, per the World Bank, earns a .45, with San Francisco at .523—worse than Rwanda’s .508, and barely better than Guatemala’s .559.
It was hard to say how this metric, developed by an Italian economist in 1912 could predict the future, but there it was on this earth full of snakes, rats, and scorpions, and Africanized bees, and mosquitos carrying Dengue fever and West Nile virus and the captains of international trade.
“The whole world is against us. Our only ally is the dog,” Miller gave one of his coffee klatch talks in Cupertino. How they loved his dog that he always brought along. “My top advisor.”
To be continued…
