Conservative Survival Guide to San Francisco

Book excerpt: For the English poet Rudyard Kipling, the city of San Francisco has only one drawback – ‘tis hard to leave. Author Thomas Moyer, a conservative by choice, couldn’t agree more as he calls The City by the Bay his home yet finds it quite different from the city he imagined it to be over a decade ago. In Conservative Survival Guide to San Francisco, he takes readers into the dual facets of the Paris of the West --- the city with lush greenery, panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean on one side and its band of hippies, drug addicts and liberals on one end. More than just a literary piece tackling the division of the world into being conservative or being liberal, this highly insightful work of Moyer is part travel guide, part personal memoir, and part political commentary. Like Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War dark comedy, “Dr. Strangelove”, Moyer stays true to his ideals of doing the best he can under less-than-ideal condtions while most of the people around him are a bit crazy, weak willed, or downright odd. “To be clear then, just as Mandrake loved the world of Strangelove, I love this city. It’s my home here, now and forever. But I have some serious misgivings about San Francisco’s politics,” Moyer wrote in the introduction. “My intention in writing this book is to bring to light the good, the bad, and the wacky aspects of San Francisco. If you’re a conservative of any shade or degree who’s planning on visiting or moving to the city, or even the Bay Area, more generally, I’m going to be your tour guide on your trip down into the rabbit hole of San Francisco. And I’m going to show you how to manage to keep your conservative morals intact when surrounded on all sides by the exotic lunacy of this Strangelove-like world.” Moyer provides a conservative insider’s perspective into San Francisco in Conservative Survival Guide to San Francisco —its people, culture, politics, and what it’s really like to be a “Mandrake” inside the most liberal city in America. More importantly, he shows conservative readers how he learned to stop worrying and love the city. Conservative Survival Guide to San Francisco is more than just a looking glass into the bipolarities of the cool grey city of love. It also takes into account the author’s experiences in the most liberal city in America and is meant to show a snapshot into the life of a conservative. At turns striking and original, this eruditely crafted piece is the ultimate guide to the rabbit hole that is San Francisco.