Commentaries : Does San Diego Stand a Ghost of a Chance? : Future: A nocturnal visit that might have been paid Susan Golding offers the mayor-elect some possible answers.

It was late, well after midnight. The moon cast an evanescent glow across the rippling waters of the bay. The tall towers downtown stood like so many stacks of poker chips at Vegas. A smattering of cars hurtled along the sinuous freeways. The city was quiet and the suburbs slept.

Susan Golding, however, was still awake, leaning over her desk, rereading the speech she would give tomorrow after being sworn in as the 37th mayor of the city of San Diego.

The mayor-elect was tired. It had been a long and bitter campaign. It was time now to heal the wounds and prepare for the four arduous years ahead. But first . . .

She rested her head on the desk. Only for a minute, she thought.

“Hello,” said a voice. “You’re napping on the job, I see.”

“What?” The mayor-elect looked around with bleary eyes. How long had she been sleeping? Had she even slept?

Hovering before her was a vaguely corporeal cluster of triumphs, failures, dreams, folly, hope and depression--in short, all the abstract ingredients of the life and times of a major city. The strange creature’s eyes were ocean-blue and tranquil and its face was alight with natural beauty, but the rest of its impalpable form seemed to be a noxious mixture of waste, greed, pollution, scandal, crime and Transient Occupancy Taxes.

“Do you know what I am?” asked the spectral being.

“I think so,” said the mayor-elect, who was up on her Dickens and could shatter an allusion with the best of them. “The Spirit of San Diego Past, Present and Yet-to-Come, right?”

“Precisely!” said the spirit, pleased that she had hit the doornail dead on the head. “You’ve passed the first test: Apparition Recognition.”

“Test? What test?” the mayor-elect asked testily. As a seasoned politician, she was instinctively skeptical. “Are you working for Peter Navarro?”

The spirit flashed an urbane smile. “I’m a nonpartisan non-being. I’m here in a purely educational capacity.”

As an educated woman, the mayor-elect naturally wanted more information before drawing any conclusions. “What sort of education do you have in mind?”

“A civics lesson, of course,” the spirit said. “Come!”

Before the mayor-elect could protest, the phantasm grasped her in its municipal clutches. As they took off out the window and up into the night, she felt the swirling mantle of bureaucracy envelop her like a noxious blast of fumes from a departing bus.

The mayor-elect coughed and blinked and looked down on the city below. She blinked again. And again.

There was nothing there.

“San Diego’s vanished!” she cried. “What happened?”

“Don’t worry,” the spirit said. “You’re just looking at my past. The past doesn’t matter, therefore it doesn’t exist.”

The mayor elect, who knew a few things about history and whose father had once been president of one of the city’s universities, was aghast. “How can you say that?” she asked.

“I can say that for the same reason one of my former mayors who was convicted can get his record wiped clean and wind up sitting in the catbird seat on a radio talk show,” the spirit said with a wink. “You see, people here don’t care about yesterday, only about today and tomorrow. That’s why they elected you, you know, to help bring about what might be.”

The mayor-elect stared bleakly into the dark void. “You make it sound as if San Diego’s a transient, rootless, culturally backward, anti-intellectual city,” she said.

“Does that really surprise you?” the spirit responded. “Look at the gutting of SDSU and the ballooning cost of UCSD. Look at the perennial struggles of the arts organizations and the woeful state of the city’s public library system. And look at the debacle in local journalism--from three daily newspapers to one in a single year. Let’s face it, I may be America’s sixth-largest city, but I’m no mecca of knowledge or culture.”

“But you could be,” the mayor-elect said hopefully.

“I’d hoped you’d say that, but it won’t be easy to accomplish,” the spirit said. “Look.”

The void had disappeared, and in its place lay a sprawling metropolis nestled against the shining sea.

“Now that’s more like it,” said the mayor-elect.

“Don’t be so sure,” said the spirit.

They flew to City Hall, where a meeting was in progress. A crowd of frustrated constituents watched as the City Council debated an important item on the agenda.

“You interrupted me!” shouted one council member.

“No, you interrupted me!” another shouted back.

“No, both of you interrupted me!” shouted yet another.

“I’m sorry, but you’re all interrupting me, and I’m sick of it!” screamed the outgoing mayor.

“What’s going on here?” asked the mayor-elect, incredulous.

“Business as usual,” the spirit said, whisking her away.

They soared high over the city again, the spirit pointing out every detail, the mayor-elect taking it all in with widening eyes. She saw the lost jobs, the empty offices, the darkened businesses, the failing banks, the overpriced real estate, the crumbling schools, the gangs and drug dealers on the corners, the jails jammed like sardine cans, the homeless wandering the streets and parks and canyons. She saw the flight of the hopeful across the border, the flight of the frightened to the suburbs and the flight of the hopeless to points beyond. She saw the agony of the poor and the sick, and the complacency of the rich.

The mayor-elect gulped. “Is that San Diego Yet-to-Come?” she asked the spirit.

“Goodness, no. That’s San Diego As-It-Is. This,” the spirit said with a sweep of an insubstantial arm, “is what’s to come if we continue with business as usual.”

It was like a bad science fiction movie. A heavy cloud of smog choked the city. The parched landscape begged for water. Toxic waste stained the beaches and Los Angeles-style gridlock clogged the freeways. Criminals roamed the littered streets, preying on children and senior citizens.

“It’s horrible!” the mayor-elect cried. “Nothing’s been done at all!

“There’s no new landfill, no new airport, no new housing for the poor, no new libraries, no new schools, no new parks, not enough mass transit, not enough recycling, not enough health care, not enough police protection and not enough water. What can I do to prevent this terrible future?”

“You said it yourself when you announced your candidacy for mayor,” the spirit said. “ ‘San Diego Grows Green’--remember?”

“Of course, but what are you implying?”

“Be a good gardener. Pull weeds and plant seeds. And don’t be afraid to go to Sacramento and Washington to get the green.”

“I understand,” the mayor-elect said with a somber nod. “Any other advice?”

“Sure,” the spirit said, and rattled off a list of precepts. “Always ask more of yourself than of others. Something is always better than nothing. Learn from yesterday, and use today to work for tomorrow. Avoid people who take themselves too seriously and who plant their feet firmly in midair. And listen to the children. They’re the ones who are depending on you the most.”

The mayor-elect smiled. “Speaking of children, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

The spirit grinned. “America’s Finest City.”