S.D. culture goes south ““ of border

Skalman, like you, enjoys backrubs and gum. E-mail him at
[email protected].

By Adam Skalman

The San Diego Tourism Board invites you to come and see
America’s Finest City. Don’t. Really …
don’t.

I was born and raised in San Diego, so I guess I should share
the overzealous love affair my neighbors have with their hometown.
But I can’t bring myself to utter the superlatives that are
so shamelessly tossed around when a native describes our hamlet to
the uninitiated. “America’s Best Weather.”
“America’s Finest Zoo.” “America’s
Loveliest Coastline.”

America’s Biggest Load of Deleted Expletive. I apologize
to all those faithful six-one-niners who can’t wait to get
home for winter break, but as a people we need to come terms with
our city’s mediocrity, inadequacy and shameless disregard for
cultural relevance.

San Diego is like Ashley Judd: beautiful, dumb and
overrated.

And like all those True Hollywood Stories, L.A.’s sleepy
neighbor to the south has some serious skeletons in its closets,
secluded ravines, shallow graves and moonlit alleyways. In the
spirit of journalistic integrity, I want to bring to light a few
important facts that you might not read in your AAA TourBook.

Clear skies? Yes. Pretty beaches? I’ll give you that. A
world-famous zoo? Sure, but its still just a zoo. (And if you
sunburn easily but still want to watch animals mournfully pace
their cages, there is now Night Time Zoo).

But did you know San Diego is the mass murder capital of the
country? Some crazy in the ’80s shot up scores of people in a
McDonald’s just north of the S.D.-Tijuana border. It’s
still on record as the largest single mass killing in American
history. But what’s one vigilante bordertown slaying when
it’s 75 degrees in February?

San Diego is also witness to the largest mass suicide in
American history. I’m sure you remember Heaven’s Gate.
A cult living in the richest suburb in America took their own lives
by eating poisoned Jell-O. They wanted to board an interstellar
spacecraft bound for another galaxy, and who can blame them? They
lived in the same neighborhood as Jewel.

Random acts of death and violence aside, San Diego still sees
its share of pedestrian crime and filth. It’s the drug
capital of the country, with literally tons of cocaine and heroin
coming across our border every year. I lived in East County, which
is the methamphetamine capital of the world. One of my favorite
pastimes was sitting at our picture windows and watching crack
houses go up in flames down in the valley. What else is there to do
in San Diego?

For the sixth biggest city in the country, San Diego is a
cultural vacuum, an intellectual wasteland where the government
would rather build a ballpark than a library. Our symphony went
under for lack of funding. The local music scene is a joke, with
only Blink-182 to carry our tattered banner. Other major artists to
come from S.D.? I can only think of Iron Butterfly.

There is only one solution that I can compute for this vast and
embarrassing deficit of relevant culture. People in San Diego
don’t really care. They have the Padres and the Chargers.
They have a handful of lame night spots and ’70s cover bands
that satiate the Wonder Bread appetites of the populace.

The city’s downtown consists of a few good Italian
restaurants and a big shopping mall. Everyone is home by midnight
because nothing is open that late. The only 24-hour establishments
are Kinko’s. I love color copies just as much as everyone
else, but what good is having a place to make fake IDs if
there’s nowhere to use them?

Forgive me if I feel embarrassed by my city, but I can’t
imagine how three million people can collectively decide to shut
themselves off from all the important and exciting things that make
a major city an interesting place to live.

All our great ambassadors of culture scrammed as soon as they
could scrape together plane fare. Cameron Crowe moved to Seattle
with Eddie Vedder. Dennis Hopper took off for New York. Scott
Weiland hightailed it for Betty Ford. Even Michelle Williams found
a way out of Dodge, not that we’ll miss her too much.

So what’s good about San Diego? I can think of only one
example in support of our fair city. We have Tijuana, a seedy stop
somewhere between B-movie noir and acid-trip funhouse. It’s
dangerous, corrupt and disease-ridden, but I love it.

You can buy a carton of Camels for 15 bucks and a Corona for 50
cents. You can sit in some trashy dive for hours and almost feel
like Hemingway. You can buy plaster busts of Bart Simpson dressed
as the Virgin Mary, Rolecks watches and Kade Spate handbags for
pennies on the dollar.

I think San Diego’s soul slipped out the back door and
crossed the border in the middle of the night, found a place
without pretense, without SeaWorld, without hordes of
“Friends”-addicted, Expedition-driving Qualcomm
zombies. A place where you realize that a city is more than just
pretty things and perfect weather.

The lights never die in TJ, but God bless San Diego. I
don’t think it will ever wake up.