High Art Amidst the Civilizational Rubble
Is it worth venturing out to the ballet with children, amidst complete cultural chaos?
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Ever since I was a little girl, I dreamt of having a daughter. This should come as no surprise to my Russian-speaking readers: the Russian version of the game House is actually called Mothers-Daughters, and boys are not allowed — more so than American boys are not allowed into the pastimes of American girls. I didn’t learn about cooties until I spent a few years in the US, and I was a teen then, but I always suspected that the other sex carried some icky illness. So girls only it was.
My imagination painted pictures of future motherhood in pastels, all rosy cheeks and bow ties. I especially liked thinking about going out to see ballet — it would be just like what my mom did with me!
As years went by, I had to keep reminding myself that of course there is no guarantee that I would, in fact, have a daughter, let alone that she would like all that girly stuff.
Well, as it turned out, I did have a daughter, who, not unlike the absolute majority of children, is delightfully gender confirming. Only we are not going out to see ballet.
The Lay of the Land
We live in greater Oakland, and there are a number of ballet companies around here. It’s not New York, of course, but when, as a young adult, I decided to settle in San Francisco Bay Area, I thought this corner of the world would do. It’s a major metropolitan center with world-class cultural institutions, so, when the time comes, I thought, I will be able to dress up my fairy princess in fluffy tulle and take her out to see The Nutcracker. Observation confirmed this. One December, when I was still new to the States, I noted a string of families with girls in chic coats and shiny little slippers heading towards the War Memorial Opera House. I wanted to be a mom in one of these families. That was decades ago.
I did take my daughter to see the Christmas classic in 2016. It was a rather rare treat for the upper middle class housepoor like ourselves. I was able to talk her into seeing Frankenstein last season, and my intent was making it to one performance a year. Alas.
Money, however, is not the main reason we quit high culture. A few days ago, I got the 2019 seasonal brochure for San Francisco Ballet. I thought we could pick a show to attend.
“No offense mommy, but this is not worth it,” said my daughter, now eleven.
She was deeply disturbed when the two of us, plus my mom, had to walk up to the War Memorial Opera House in 2016. The Opera House stands a few blocks away from the Civic Center BART station, in the heart of the Tenderloin district, the ground zero of unabated heroin use and public defecation that has been, in the last decade, making grossed out headlines on every continent, including, I’m sure, Antarctica.
Probably not the best place for a nine-year-old to walk. Or for anyone to walk. Probably not the best place for a civic pride-themed ballet either.
San Francisco Ballet’s The Nutcracker is all about civic pride. The way they do it is so cute, I almost want to eat it. The action is set in turn of the century City by the Bay. In the opening scene, the audience watches a group of nuns hurrying down an iconic San Francisco street lined by Victorians, and uncle Drosselmeyer performing magic tricks in Chinatown.
All of which, to be sure, should not be allowed, because Orientalism. Even without the local changes, the ballet is plenty orientalist. Did Tchaikovsky think Chinese people are all jumping acrobat dolls with fans?! And the classic featured a variety of ethnic dances, including the Russian dance, which my contemporaries would recognize as the Ukrainian Hopak. Perhaps the great composer is somewhat justified in producing this travesty being part Russian, part Cossack. Tchaikovsky was a homosexual, too, which should count for something, intersectionally.
And, oh, the humiliation of the very talented Asian girls lining up to audition for Clara! Where will the white supremacy end?
But I digress. Unfortunately, the homeless of San Francisco (none of them Asian Americans, strangely) made a greater impression on my nine-year-old than the leaping Cossacks and the twirling ballerina snowflakes. As I mentioned above, I was able to talk her into checking out another ballet. She liked it, and she liked the story it was based on; she even wrote a paragraph about it in class the next day. But dragging her out once again? She put her foot down, and I can’t blame her.
I am the kind of parent who teaches my kids to trust their gut: if something seems wrong, stay away. Plenty is wrong with decrepit men with ashen faces walking around, dazed, with broken foreheads on the tile covered with excrement. She is right to be wary because mental illness is often unpredictable, and the homeless, especially the Bay Area homeless, are known to be aggressive and violent. In the last week alone a total of three homicides have been linked to Bay Area Rapid Transit. Am I supposed to train her to suppress her intuitive sense of danger for the sake of theater arts and political correctness? And have her be another girl saddled with regret because she went along to get along? This is how that regret happens.
The Status Quo Serves No One
We, in the Bay Area, have been cooked like that frog in the slow heating water, gradually learning to accept more and more depravity. Some of us have been browbeaten into becoming enthusiastic YIMBY’s, or Yes, In My Back Yard types, but most have simply resolved to put up with the fact that the vast swaths of the city are, quite literally, toxic, and that nothing will be done about it.
Homelessness has been a problem here for a half a century. The Summer of Love brought runaway kids to Haight and Ashbury district and notoriety to The City. Open air drug deals in plain view of the cops have been normalized decades ago. From time to time San Franciscans felt pangs of consciousness, feeling that maybe something should be done about the downtrodden the metro has been collecting. They gave the mayorship to Gavin Newsom who, in 2002, sponsored the Care Not Cash program for the homeless. At best, it put a small temporary dent in the problem.
Other eccentricities present themselves in The City. Nudists, most of them men of retirement age, popped up in the last decade… and started doing the dirty right on the streets. When I posted about nudity and chronic homelessness on San Francisco streets on my old blog, one individual stopped by to leave the following comment:
Don’t want your little johnny or josie exposed to the hardcore reality of poverty try taking them on a stroll through the bronx sweetheart! don’t want your poor, innocent little tykes seeing nude men(or women) then try relocating to an amish colony! Reality is what it is sweethearts.
That’s from 2012, a few years prior to the freestyle pooping crisis, but I have no doubt that my correspondent, like many other San Fransicans, still adheres to his believes about hardcore reality of city life.
Weird. I grew up in a big city, second largest in Ukraine, but I never saw naked people walking around in public, and we had no need of a “skid mark law”. There were drunkards lying on the street, true, but even they would be picked up by cops sooner rather than later. Dog owners didn’t know to clean up after their pooches, but an animal defecating on the street is far less disturbing than a human being because we don’t expect it to feel shame. They often do, by the way, (mine prefers to go in some back corner), which signals existence of a higher order than that of a San Francisco bum who leaves his feces right in the middle of Market Street, at the entrance to Starbucks.
And mind you, I do not advocate Soviet methods of dealing with the homeless. The Europe I knew — and I realize things changed in recent years — had very low tolerance for public displays of depravity. Those were viewed as a problem, and dealt with accordingly.
The city where I grew up was a cultural hub full of kids. That’s what a successful city should be: it should contain in itself the highest achievements of civilization to be celebrated, and treasured, and further advanced, and the next generation should be inculcated in it.
San Francisco is notoriously child-free. There are more dogs than children in San Francisco. Kids live in surrounding suburbs, and refuse to visit The City.
Children crave fairy tale. The streets of San Francisco are horror.
Contrary to the insistence of my old correspondent, horror is not reality. The streets of San Francisco are a grotesque manifestation of social problems that exist in any large population center. Moreover, the atrocities on display are not naturally occurring, but engineered by decades of relatively consistent actions by all three branches of the local, state, and federal governments. Especially the local.
Note that the individual quoted above challenged me not to improve the conditions of the homeless and help the drug addicts recover, which he knows full well is not going to happen, but to put up with them.
This attitude is neo-Mediaeval. In the Middle Ages, paupers served a purpose; they allowed those who were better off to show mercy. The causes of their condition were never addressed because, as indigents, they had a role to play in society. Similarly, the residents of American cities allow propagation of human misery because they feel themselves to be tougher, more enlightened, more compassionate than those opposed to proliferation homeless encampments under every onramp. We may say that the pro-homeless crowd is engaged in virtue signalling.
Unfortunately, neither our collective backyard, which is not at all a backyard, but the main square facing City Hall, which was designed to be populated by newspaper-reading seniors and involved mamas buying ice cream for youngsters, nor the homeless themselves are better off for all our efforts to accommodate them. There is more of them, not fewer, and their material condition has deteriorated drastically.
San Francisco has no solutions to the problem. The newly elected mayor London Breed, for instance, said that the city-funded homeless advocacy groups will now be required to inform their clients that they need to clean their excrement. If I were her, I would cut out homeless advocates altogether. They are enablers. Start enforcing drug laws, too; since marijuana is legal now, we have no excuse not to. Enforce all laws, actually. Pass more laws to enforce as needed. If these laws blocked by the courts, fight long and hard to keep them in place, because right now, we are moving to lawlessness.
It would be nice to begin cooperating with ICE as well. Time to admit that collecting vagabonds from the world over doesn’t do any favors to the individuals in questions. They would be better off in their home countries, really. Recently NBC Bay Area surveyed human waste and needles lining the streets of the picturesque city, and showed them to infectious diseases specialist at UC Berkeley Dr. Lee Riley. Her verdict?
Based on the findings of the Investigative Unit survey, Riley believes parts of the city may be even dirtier than slums in some developing countries.
“The contamination is … much greater than communities in Brazil or Kenya or India,” he said. He notes that in those countries, slum dwellings are often long-term homes for families and so there is an attempt to make the surroundings more livable. Homeless communities in San Francisco, however, are often kicked out from one part of town and forced to relocate to another. The result is extreme contamination, according to Riley.
Also, many of the third world slum dwellers are stuck in their residencies for economic reasons. They want to be well. The junkies and schizophrenics that occupy prime real estate of this once charming town, do not. They had already reached the rock bottom, and they are quite content with their condition.
I don’t expect San Francisco magically cure itself from debasement by electing a black female mayor. Insufficient display of enthusiasm for Breed gets one labeled a fascist around here, but it’s pretty clear that she has no solutions for the city’s most urgent ills. She proposed potty training, clean up, and constructing affordable housing, in other words, channeling money into outlets that are not addressing the problem in its root.
The City already had a female mayor and a black mayor. Clearly, the lack of ethnic and sex diversity is not our problem. The lack of common sense is. Unfortunately, San Francisco places proper political pieties above basic sanitary. Like its homeless, the City has reached the rock bottom, and is quite content with remaining there.
Some conservatives, like Shoshanna Weismann, are doing necessary and creative work trying to appeal to urban dwellers with common sense small government initiatives, such as licensing reform. And yet, the issues suffocating the great American cities are same as they were decades ago: crime and homelessness.
Civilization is hard. It’s complex, it needs nurturing and defending. Every work of art can be shown to be incorrect for some kind of ideological reason. Why bother clearing the way to the Symphony and the Opera House, if they mostly propagate the achievements of dead white men? On the other hand, being tossed around by influence groups, be they homeless advocates or pussy hats, is easy. There is not going to be a solution to what ails San Francisco in coming decades.
