Terror in the Skies

Take that, Tree Huggers!

It’s Fleet Week in San Francisco! The Blue Angels are in the house! Grab your earplugs, civilians!

You’ll want to block out the deafening noise, the incessant roar, that horrifying sound that makes you want to crouch under your desk in fetal position until it’s all over.

And I’m not talking about the jet noise.

I’m talking about the whiiiiining.

“They’re so looouuudd!”

“We’re waaaasting taxpayer dooolllaaars!”

“I caaan’t wooork! The noise makes it impossible to coooncentrate!”

“Why do they have to come every yeeear?”

It is the great San Francisco pastime, a Blue State merit badge, the mark of a true progressive intellectual, to bitch about the Blue Angels. You either love them or you hate them, and if you care about our country and our planet, you hate them, of course. It's the first thing they teach you at UC Santa Cruz. A vote for the Blue Angels is a vote for the Other Side, or at least a big red flag drawing attention to your blissful ignorance. Right?

Not so fast, hippies.

I vote Democrat. I take Muni. I give money to progressive causes. I think George W. Bush is a smirking, brainless chimp.

But I love the Blue Angels. Like good coffee and the Gay Pride Parade, it’s one of those things that makes living in San Francisco such a gift. That’s right, the Blue Angels and the Pride Parade. And I know I’m not the first one to think of them both in the same paragraph.

I savor my peace and quiet as much as the next working mom of two, but the Blue Angels are just cool. They are fast! And shiny! And they do cool stuff! There is something to be said for primal audiovisual gratification. Come on. Is San Francisco really so far up it’s own ass that we can’t come out for two days and have a little fun? Let’s leave our agendas inside for a few hours, shall we?

I hear you. They pimp for the Navy. They glorify war. They burn fuel. They could crash into one another over downtown and take us all down in a flaming ball of hellfire. Blah Blah Blah. Having armies and fighting wars? Not the same thing. I wish our armed forces were doing something besides fighting a brainless war for oil, but I still appreciate them. Personally, I am happy to see the Blue Angels are here trick-riding over the Bay and not out shooting folks. (I know, they don’t shoot folks, but as long as we’re all making blanket generalizations…)

True, those planes burn a shitload of fuel. It's wrong. Tell you what: Why don’t you leave your cars at home and take the train down to the Valley to go to work, and maybe turn your computers off for a week, and not fly down to Disneyland twice a year, and pick your kids up by public transportation instead of driving them to and from school and the soccer field every day, and then we can talk.

Frankly, between the deterioration of third-world infrastructure and the population explosion and the global warming and the overfishing and the greedy warmongering, I think we are so far fucked in so many other crucial ways that grounding the Blue Angels for a weekend is really not going to do the trick. There are many other things I'd put the kibosh on first--No Child Left Behind, Dennis Hastert's franking privileges, at least one of our stupid wars...let's not cut out something that's actually entertaining and doesn't harm anyone.

Then there's the NOISE. Oh, the humanity. You can’t work? It’s too loud? Both of my kids were, well, kids during Fleet Week, when the Blue Angels flew directly over our house during naptime. Did either of them even twitch, much less wake up? I THINK NOT. So cowboy up; if the kids can sleep through it, so can you. Pin your ADD on something else.

Ahem. I apologize. I’m not a hawkish jackass. And I love you all. Really. But please, people, you live in a beautiful place. You’re not in the Midwest. You walk outside and you see sun, and mountains, and ocean, and yes, the Blue Angels. Life is good. All I have to do is look at my 6-year-old son staring at the sky with an expression of wonder on his face and say, anything that makes my kid that happy can’t be all bad. Until he drives down the block in his SUV to mail his application to Halliburton, I’m going to keep my head up and enjoy the show.