After my Saturday morning haircut I caught one of the vintage San Francisco street cars on Market near the bottom of Haight in bright chilly weather. This particular car originated in Italy and still carried its original number plate affixed to that adorable two-tone wood paneling.
And just as that dignified enamel number plate suggested a world where traditional crafts remained alive, so the peeling plastic sticker on the window suggested our more recent world where flimsiness prevails.
Macy's was advertising big sales when I entered the store. Even so, the clerks clearly outnumbered the customers. I replenished my stock of Clinique, that old-fashioned skin care line to which I remain loyal even though its shelf space in department stores continues to shrink. (Ah, yes. Twenty years ago there were large purpose-built Clinique counters staffed by two or three earnest "counselors" costumed in lab coats. But no more.)
Took a coffee break in Union Square where I stood for a while admiring the carved Roman capitals (dated 1901) on the plinth of the central monument. Also wondered fruitlessly about the story behind that rectangular patch in a slightly different stone intruding on the right-hand side of the inscription. Seemed to me that the lettering on the patch matched reasonably well in form but had been cut visibly deeper, revealing itself in that detail as a later imitation by a different hand for those bits of the lost original lettering. Just like Macy's, Union Square seemed subdued and depopulated. But then a crowd of demonstrators charged up from Powell Street waving placards like this one.
They were handing out four-page fliers printed on heavy, gloss-finish paper stock, and it was the feel of that paper that set me immediately to wondering who these people were? There was clearly a good deal of money and planning behind this "demonstration" – but whose? The spectators, including me, were well outnumbered by the placard-wavers who were mostly neatly-groomed white males in their thirties and forties, very far from my mental image of the typical San Francisco street agitator. Mormons on the loose?
The flier did not identify a sponsoring organization. Three out of its four pages were devoted to a long dialogue, the purported transcript of a phone call between one Dan Benham and a Mr. Ron Supinski of the Public Information Department of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. Dan Benham prefaced the transcript with a note that "this is an abbreviated account of that conversation (dated 2002)"
Gee, I thought. A Platonic Dialogue! And just as Socrates always got the better of his interlocutors, so Dan Benham invariably confounded Mr. Ron Supinski (seven years ago, on the telephone). Mr. Ron Supinski ended up all but confessing that the Federal Reserve System is in reality a Deliberate Fraudulent Gigantic Scam that has gleefully been actively fleecing the American public for the past 96 years.
After the three pages of question and answer, there was a a short discussion on the last page about Why it matters and What we can do about it. The answer turned out to be extremely simple. All financial problems will solve themselves as soon we restore a reliable system of money based on gold and silver, as required by the Constitution.
Gee, I thought. The Gold Standard! I used to hear good ole boys taking this line back in the 1950s in Nowheresville Illinois where I grew up. Today events came full circle and I encountered the grandsons of those good ole boys marching through Union Square.
Back at home I still had no idea who or what had organized this odd little event that I happened to witness so I checked out the flier's #1 Web Resource: endthefed.us. There I found all kinds of things, including many radiant paintings of Jesus Christ and The Holy Bible and The Stars & Stripes. But the bulk of the site, it turned out, was devoted to the thought and writings of Ron Paul, who ran for the Republican nomination for President in 2008 as a candidate way to the right of Bush himself, and is headed for another try in 2012 on a platform of isolationism and privatization. Along with the Fed, he wants to end Social Security. But that might not play so well on placards. At least not in San Francisco.