There are the Red states that went for Bush and the Blue states that went for Gore. Then within the Blue states, there are the super-Blue enclaves like New York City. And finally, there's San Francisco, so far out it's off the color chart: a candy-colored island of misrule floating off the Left Coast like an urban pirate AM radio station, blasting content commercial stations wouldn't play.

It was ever thus. An anarchic, antiauthority strain burbles through the city's history, from the whacked-out gold rush to the depraved Barbary Coast days to the Beats, hippies, and today's Bush-hating vanguard, the lumpen proletariat of Valencia Street. There are more varieties of the culturally and politically disgruntled here than cafés serving low-fat soy decaf lattes: Taxi-driving Vietnam-era graybeards living in the Sunset, angry yuppie baristas in the Marina, sex workers who read Situationist tracts, Jews more radical than Abu Mazen.

If the dot-com delirium caused anyone to think our politics might have cut its hair, the second Gulf War and the ensuing protests proved we still have a luxuriant four-foot afro. So luxuriant that many left-wing locals began to complain that the protests had gotten out of hand. Many war opponents supported the massive, well-organized street-blocking protests that virtually paralyzed the city the day after Bush launched the war. But as direct action went on for days, enough was enough. Soon, liberals were saying the protests hurt local businesses, snarled traffic, irritated the undecided, and ran up huge police overtime bills—up to $3 million the first week after the war started—when the city faced its worst budget crisis in decades.

This schism between the far left and the left, those who embrace the life of a street-fighting man (or at least a garbage can- overturning man) and those who prefer to listen to Mick Jagger singing about it, goes back to the '60s. But it's widened considerably since then. San Franciscans can debate endlessly whether the city's grown more conservative—those who say it has point to the passage of Prop. N and the general rise of NIMBYism; those who say it hasn't point out that the west-of-Twin Peaks crowd was always here. But there's no denying that many more left-wing derrieres now reside on Pottery Barn couches than ever before. As progressive liberalism has become the default stance, the mainstream left has grown more sophisticated and comfortable—its ironic motto could be Leonard Cohen's line, "They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom / For trying to change the system from within." Hence, the disenchantment of many antiwar locals with their younger, woollier counterparts.

Despite the initial irritation with traffic jams and foolishness, it's hard not to
believe that the shared beliefs of this heretical city-state outweigh its differences. San Francisco's opposition to Bush's war and Bush himself is far deeper and more abiding than a disagreement over protest tactics. Mainstream lefties may find the

direct action protesters anomic and ill informed; they may criticize them for not acknowledging the horrors of Saddam Hussein's regime; they may believe their tactics are self-indulgent and impractical. But they also know the point of protests is to get attention—and nothing gets attention like 3,013 arrests in the nine days after the war started.

Watching the progressive sausage being made isn't always pretty. But most San Franciscans would rather live in a town that screams than one that meekly holds its tongue.