soapbox

December 09, 2003
8.15a

if you live in san francisco, please please please go vote for matt gonzalez today. it matters. a lot. you can vote at city hall all day. you can call his campaign headquarters if you need a ride. visit www.mattgonzalez.com for more info.

just go vote, no excuses, it's a half hour tops out of your day for the best possible reason: to ensure that our city is run by a real, honest person who can and will stand up for the little guy. hi, that's us.

government by someone who understands the people he's governing. what a concept! i want a mayor who shares an apartment with a roommate. i want a mayor who doesn't own a car. who loves art and plays music. that's not all there is to him, of course, which you know if you have read about his history as board of supervisors president and, earlier, public defender. i want a politician who can get things done AND still retain a soul while doing it. we have an opportunity for that in matt gonzalez.

here, david wrote this at 3am. it's funny and flip but that doesn't make it less true.

"After hearing that gore campaigned for newsom Im just so fuckin over this falsly digital demo-publican b.s., at some point battle lines must be drawn, take over the goddamn malls and MTVs and Hot Topics and aggressively market extreme civil liberties as a lifestyle accessory, make Thoreau the heiney-kicking avatar in all the Ninentendo games, show reality on reality television, dead iraqi babies on primetime, give Sex in the City AIDS, script the burnout and spirtual death of Buffy, Angel, 90210 or whatever the fuck people numb their skulls to as they all get laid off and have to work in Jack in the Box for a nincompoop played by GWB with no health insurance in the sad Days of Their Lives, remake the Prisinor miniseries starring Bobby Pyn, franchise I Left My Heart at Wounded Knee into a series of Disney Read-A-Long Adventures, turn the trail of tears into a scenic highway, make everyone take their trash to the dump, make ballot stubs the only lottery tickets, turn voting kiosks into a line of addictive, free videogames and install them into every liquor store, digitize all public domain works, force subsidiaries to have the same name as their parent company and incorporate it prominently into all packaged brand names, print net profits and political contributions onto nutrition information labels, print sweatshop worker's per-unit profit on all apparel labels, tax companies more than people, make wifi freenet a public utility and turn it into the new radio and post office, build IPSEC into IP, mandate anonymization of all financial transactions, hunt spammers like deer, put all government contracts on ebay for the lowest qualified bidder, include last years' proportions of taxes-paid to net income across the population in all tax returns, create a fourth branch of government which independently fact-checks the accuracy of all figures and statements quoted by any high-level city, state or federal employee including politicians and fines them per violation like speeding tickets..

"And if you CAN'T do all that, cause you're just a VH1-watching SLUG like all the rest of the fried burnouts, then at LEAST vote for matt gonzalez on tuesday.. which is today!"