During the two decades I lived in the Bay Area, the Mission District was the hippest neighborhood in San Francisco. It had a wealth of restaurants, including more than a dozen taquerias. It had beautiful Victorian architecture. It had ethnic diversity, with a large Latino influence. It had live music venues, edgy bars, a lot of young explorers, artists, and activists, art studios, used bookstores, independent coffee shops, and hundreds of murals.
Tech money and the runaway greed of real estate parasites have diminished the Mission's cultural cachet somewhat since that time, but one outpost of the old, bohemian Mission continues on: Artists' Television Access (ATA). ATA is a small, social justice-oriented movie theater/performance space which shows independent films and shorts, generally around a specific theme.
On the Saturday night recounted in "Roasting the Pigs of War," ATA served up a whole host of videos about the Iraq War. While much/most of the rest of the country continued to sleep walk through that time, buying Bush Administration lies about WMD's, Saddam Hussein's purported ties to Al-Qaeda, or the fairy tale that the invasion was done for the good of the Iraqi people, we were exposed to one harsh truth after another about the lies we had been fed, the true motivations for the invasion (o-i-l), the horrible human wreckage Bush had unleashed. Walking away from the event, I had the feeling I often had throughout the Bush administration: shock at the ignorance and gullibility of red state Americans and gratitude that I lived in a city where critical thinking skills and concern for the long-term public interest generally held sway.
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