So it looks like, if there is in fact a sufficiently fair election that the votes even matter, the result will come down to whether the Republicans are able to sell the notion that Democrats = cities and cities = terrifying.  “Lookit! Mob rule! Total chaos! Democrat agenda!”  Will it work?  Clearly it strikes a chord with those who have spent the past twenty years filling up the comment sections of news sites with the exact same rhetoric.  Long before Trump became a political figure, Duncan Black was referring to his neighborhood in Philadelphia as “the urban hellhole” after seeing residents of the exurban and rural parts of the state repeatedly use that phrase while gibbering about how they would never, ever consider heading into the city for fear of their lives.  Black would post photos of handsome rowhouses, tree-lined streets, and hip cafés with the mocking caption “Life in the Urban Hellhole”, and his readers would chuckle in the comments section about what the benighted residents of Walmartistan were missing out on.  If only they’d set aside their prejudices and see for themselves how wrong they were!

The problem is that they’re actually not entirely wrong.  It was easy for me to roll my eyes while reading apocalyptic descrip­tions of San Francisco and Oakland when my experience of those cities was a matter of tutoring at some hilltop mansion and then stopping off for a kouign-amann or some saffron risotto cakes on a swanky foodie street before heading home.  But venture outside those enclaves, like when I went to the Poppy concert, and yeah⁠—I was indeed hopscotching over piles of human excrement and skittering away from menacing characters bellowing “Ogg-bla-bla-blah!!” just like the guys in the MAGA hats warned.  True, a lot of those people’s comments were pretty transparent about the fact that they were bigots who were mainly afraid of encountering people with skin any darker than the old “flesh” Crayolas, and obviously fuck that noise.  But the fact is that big city life is for a select few.  I lived in New York for a year.  When visitors would fly in and I would show them around, it probably seemed awesome.  Hey, want to have the best meal of your life?  Oh, strapped for cash?  Okay, want to have the best meal of your life for under ten dollars?  All right, now what?  Want to hit a world-class museum and see immortal works of art?  Want to do that every day for a month?  But then the visitors would fly back home.  Whereas for me it was back to being stuck on a sweltering subway platform, waiting an hour for the bone-jarring shriek of the long-overdue train.  Trying to read in the meantime, until someone would come up and snatch my book out of my hands.  Cramming myself into the stinking mosh pit of the train that did eventually arrive, getting elbowed and shoved around as it rattled along the track, until it would stall out.  Perhaps it would be at this point that someone projectile vomited.  And then the train would skip my stop and I’d have to walk for a mile to get back to my apartment, past cars being used as gigantic boom boxes at eleven at night.  And I had it pretty easy⁠—I’m not female, so I generally didn’t have people groping me on the train or catcalling me as I walked down the street.  I did have a guy deliberately try to mow me down in his car when he decided I was taking too long in the crosswalk, and I did get mugged in front of my apartment building.  My students would snicker at my complaints and say, “You gotta toughen up!”  But, no, I actually didn’t.  I just had to get out of that goddamn city.

I wound up moving to the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, which is one of the best places I have lived: it’s basically a cluster of college towns, so there were enough urban amenities (which to me chiefly means restaurants) to keep me happy without the constant assault that is urban life.  Still, the weather was terrible, and I never stopped feeling like an expatriate, so when I split up with the girlfriend who had brought me east in the first place, I moved back to the Bay Area.  People in Massachusetts kept referring to this as me “moving to San Francisco”.  I had no plans whatsoever to move to San Francisco.  I wanted to move to Berkeley.  Initially I had to settle for San Leandro, and for the past ten years I’ve been in Albany, a one-time corner of Berkeley that seceded over a garbage dumping dispute.  I would have considered Lafayette or even San Rafael.  San Francisco?  No thank you.  Ellie does live there, but she lives in one of the less urban parts, with no skyscrapers or landmarks, so it feels more like Greater Daly City than like the neighborhoods, good and bad, that most people associate with San Francisco town.  I don’t mind driving out to her place every week.  The fact that I can drive out there is no small part of why I don’t mind it.  I would love to be able to drive to the Ferry Building, but I can’t.  There’s nowhere to park.  So when I ran out of Stonehouse olive oil and decided to take advantage of the single six-hour window per week that the Stonehouse retail outlet in the Ferry Building is still open in these times of pestilence, I had no choice but to take my first train ride in months.  I’m focusing on trains here because they’re a key emblem of city life⁠—there is a real distinction between the sorts of urban spaces where a car is necessary to have an appreciable quality of life and those where a car is actually a detriment.  Cities are everywhere, but “the city” is where you really don’t want to be driving.  That’s why a lot of urbanites like the city⁠—cars, after all, are destroying the planet.  But they’re also very pleasant.  Unlike bikes, they protect you from the environment (and from overexertion), and unlike mass transit, they protect you from other people.  Because without that protection, you end up with the train ride I had to take to get my olive oil.  Unmasked people coughing all over their neighboring seats, guys smoking cigarettes… you don’t actually have a functioning transportation system if people can’t get around without being exposed to this kind of thing.

The fact that policing throughout the U.S. is infected with racism has led some to call for the police to be defunded or abolished altogether.  For some, this is a gleeful prospect.  Others are less enthused, and not all of these are on the political right.  Ellie has told me many tales of woe on her pre-covid bus commute⁠—a guy loudly ranting about the government creating HIV, multiple guys openly masturbating, a guy slamming his skateboard on the seats next to people to make them jump, a guy getting in the faces of all the women aboard, screaming that they were bitches⁠—and has pointed out that the only thing that ever got any of these guys to stop was other passengers warning them that they were calling the cops.  What happens without that deterrent?  The defunding advocates have responded by explaining that shifting money from policing to social services will solve a lot of these problems before they even start, and there’s a lot to be said for this.  Getting people into drug and/or mental health treatment before they end up harassing people on the streets or in the buses and trains is far better for everyone involved: for the addicts and mentally ill people who are spared a confrontation with police that in some cases could be deadly, for the police who have been tasked with social work for which they are not equipped, and for the citizenry who less frequently find themselves in the middle of shitstorms.  On a grander scale, adopt a sufficiently progressive tax system (for both income and accumulated wealth) that you get people into homes with plumbing, and astonishingly, you no longer have to worry about human feces on the street.  But this only goes so far.  No amount of economic justice, no dazzling array of well-funded social programs, will stop some asshole who wants to smoke on the train, or who shrieks that mask mandates in a pandemic constitute tyranny.  These things probably don’t even stop the skateboard guy.  As we have seen over the past four years, mere norms are not enough to keep a social system functioning, especially when it comes to people like the current president whose chief delight in life is flaunting their impunity.  Laws have to be enforced.  No, we can’t go on having the enforcement done by officially sanctioning and arming the racist, retrogressive, and reflexively violent among us⁠—or training those who aren’t to become so.  But I cannot get on board with any alternative that has no solution for the guy smoking on the train.  The police state and the Land of Do-As-You-Please are both flavors of dystopia.

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