By Peter Lawrence Kane
As San Francisco’s urban specters go, the alleged Public Library Peeing Vandal is way less titillating than the Bernal Heights bikini jogger or Bush Man. But the recently arrested Aton Joni Cole – aka Mike Alabobo, aka the guy who allegedly pissed on some $3030.79 worth of library books and was detained with $4600 in cash on his person – is now officially on the lam, having 23-skidoo’ed before his scheduled arraignment.
Our poor Main Library. It’s been shredded to ribbons in the New Yorker, and outed as a shockingly dangerous place to work by theExaminer. Understaffed and underfunded, violent, home to disgusting bathrooms even when people aren’t urinating in the stacks, and generally regarded as a quaint anachronism by San Franciscans with an internet connection, it’s become something of a de facto social services center as a secular temple of learning. Sadder yet, it was supposed to be a shining civic-minded beacon of 21st-century library science; having been erected after the 1989 earthquake – the old library is now the Asian Art Museum – it was built to endure. It’s outlasted Candlestick, at least.
It’s easy to forget how radical a public library really is – and not just because librarians are not all mousy shushers but actually tend to be super-duper-left-wing civil libertarian First Amendment absolutists. (Even noted librarian Laura Bush is a closet liberal). However dated and paternalistic it sounds now, the 19th-century elites who built the library system were essentially far-sighted progressives whose goal was to educate the populace partly at the expense of their own power. The goal was to transform the rabble from illiterate ragamuffins who would pee on books into informed citizens who might actually write them.
If only today’s elite shared a similar vision. Walk into the SF Main Library and you will find lots of homeless people sleeping there because there are few other enclosed public spaces that don’t cost anything for them to hang out in. And some people hate this – certain start-up CEOs, in particular. Greg Gopman of AngelHack got into a bit of hot water for his intemperate remarks, claiming that the Civic Center has the “degenerates [who] gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy [and] act like they own the center of the city.” Such contempt echoes the was the language that lost Mitt Romney the election – talk of the 47% of the population who are unproductive spongers and such – except it comes from someone who quite possibly thinks of himself as an enlightened liberal Democrat.
Tech evangelists are at the vanguard of those who laugh off the very idea of public libraries. Gopman’s icky list of sins might also have included something like, “And those sub-humans not only have the audacity to not contribute to the gross domestic product, but they’ll even pee on knowledge itself!” But he didn’t mention the library. There’s no need. He didn’t talk about “disrupting” the government monopoly on quiet places to read without having to buy anything, because everyone knows the internet already did that just by being the internet, no additional seed capital required.
People do weird things in libraries. They live in them and look at kiddie porn and anoint themselves guerilla librarians who take it upon themselves to re-shelve stuff. People do weird things to books. They sniff out expensive first editions and scrawl margin notes in them as if defacing the Mona Lisa, and theystuff thousands of dollars between the pages. They also relieve themselves on books in libraries because libraries are suffering from malign neglect. They’re institutions on borrowed time, like overdue books. People who hate government’s inefficiency and lack of a profit motive hold some serious sway, and see little point in maintaining libraries. They’re just dusty, unoptimized warehouses of outmoded analog text that may even have pee all over them. Once San Francisco is fully gentrified, the library might have slightly cleaner restrooms. Or it may just quietly die.
Photo by dno1967b