Many readers outside of California will not have heard of Governor Gavin Newsom. But if you need to summon up a mental image, imagine Marie Antoinette without that late Queen’s sense of self-awareness.
Newsom has been uniting opinion in California ever since he took over as Governor last year — against him. He had previously been Mayor of San Francisco and during his tenure there had helped to turn one of the world’s most beautifully-positioned cities into one of the first world’s most shameful slums. Since his election success last year, he appears to have tried to establish whether he could replicate this success on a state-wide level.
During his time as Governor, as during his tenure as Mayor, homelessness has skyrocketed. This isn’t accidental; it has been encouraged. The state’s subsidies mean that it has become a magnet for homeless people, so that in California, as in San Francisco, people can essentially live wherever they wish to pitch their tent or shopping cart. There are now over 150,000 people living homeless in the state, the highest such proportion anywhere in the US. This is now one of the major reasons why so many Californians are leaving and heading elsewhere.
But in recent days, Newsom has been making wider headlines because he has transgressed one of the cardinal rules of politics, specifically “Do as I say not as I do”. For many months, California’s Covid restrictions have been among the most stringent anywhere in the United States, and at present if you travel around the formerly great state you can see the results of the policies that Newsom and his colleagues have instituted.
Among the most visible trends is with the state’s restaurants, which can remain open only so long as they transfer to a sort-of open-air, vaguely tent-like structures in parking lots and other spaces adjacent to the state’s restaurants. The whole thing has the air of a permanent state-wide celebration of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The diners of California now pay top whack to have the pleasure of eating out in a parking lot.
But Newsom has not been content with simply instituting that piece of communal inconvenience. Until the start of October, the state forced you to wear a face mask on entering a restaurant and heading to or from your table. But you were allowed to take your face-mask off (as on aeroplanes) when you were actually eating. Then, at the start of October, Newsom’s office issued updated guidance, so that diners in California would henceforth be required to keep their mask on at all times other than when they were actually taking bites. The governor’s office advised: “Don’t forget to keep your mask on in between bites”. So during a meal you would have your mask on throughout, whip it off to allow yourself a forkful of food, and then as soon as the food was in your mouth you would have to put the mask back on.
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