{"id":194531,"date":"2026-06-21T15:22:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T23:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194531"},"modified":"2026-06-21T15:24:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T23:24:25","slug":"the-hero-system-of-san-francisco-columnist-emily-hoeven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194531","title":{"rendered":"The Hero System of San Francisco Columnist Emily Hoeven"},"content":{"rendered":"

For years a man carried a machete through Jefferson Square Park<\/a>. The police logged about fifty encounters with him after 2014. Two restraining orders. Cycles of jail, treatment, release, the same park, the same blade. The neighbors waited for the day the cycle ended in blood. The city had no answer, and Emily Hoeven<\/a> wrote that down. She did not write that the man was a monster. She did not write that he was a victim of capitalism. She wrote that San Francisco could not say what to do with him, and that the not-knowing had a price, paid on a few paths by a few families who used that park.<\/p>\n

This is the work she does. She finds the place where the city’s stated values meet the sidewalk, and she reports the gap.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924\u20131974) argued in The Denial of Death<\/i> that a man builds his life against two terrors. The first is death, the body that rots and ends. The second is insignificance, the suspicion that his days leave no mark on anything. A hero system is the culture’s answer to both. It hands a man a set of sacred values that, lived well, let him feel he counts, that he rises above the meat and the dirt and earns a kind of symbolic life that outlasts the animal one. The hero system feels like reality. It is the screen a culture puts up against the void.<\/p>\n

For the civic writer the two terrors take a local shape. Death arrives as decay you can see. The boarded storefront. The needle in the planter box. The man with the machete who returns and returns. The sidewalk becomes the place where entropy stops being an idea and starts having an address. Insignificance arrives as futility, the fear that the column changes nothing, that she is one more voice scolding a city too far gone to hear, that the writing is noise dressed as judgment.<\/p>\n

Her hero system answers both. The answer is clarity. To see the decline and name it from inside the liberal family, without flinching into sentiment or into cruelty, holds off the first terror by refusing to look away from the rot, and the second by claiming a use for the looking. She earns her standing by seeing. The credential carries the system: Penn in three years, summa, Phi Beta Kappa<\/a>, Cambridge on a Thouron fellowship, Virginia Woolf<\/a> and the female literary tradition, a year of French in Ch\u00e2teauroux, then three years grinding out a daily newsletter on a state most of the country cannot govern in its imagination. She studied narrative and power and gender, then turned the training on a city. Storytelling, she has said, is a way to understand the world and to change it.<\/p>\n

The sacred word in this system is works. A city that works. The phrase does the moral labor while sounding like plain description. And here the system tells a story about how it reached such plain ground.<\/p>\n

Charles Taylor<\/a> (b. 1931) named that story. He called it the subtraction story. Strip away the illusions, the religion and the superstition and the tribal loyalty, and what is left is reality, shared and neutral, the thing any reasonable man can see once the distortions come off. Taylor’s point in A Secular Age<\/i> is that the story is false. You never reach bare ground. You reach another full vision of the good, wearing the costume of no vision at all. The moderate tells a subtraction story about the city. Take away the progressive’s sentiment. Take away the reactionary’s contempt. What remains, the story goes, is what works, neutral and pragmatic, what any sensible person already knew. Becker and Taylor return the same reply. What remains is not bare reality. It is a hero system with its own gods and its own devils. Its gods are competence, accountability, and the normal. Its devils are dysfunction, sentiment, and the unserious. The milquetoast. The man who closes ranks around a candidate with no platform. The supervisor who would rather feel righteous than fix the streetlight.<\/p>\n

Now the word. Works is not one word. It shifts meaning with the hero system that holds it.<\/p>\n

To Hoeven, and to the downtown merchant, and to the family that crosses Jefferson Square, a city works when the sidewalk is clear, the store is open, and the man with the machete sits somewhere he can be helped and can harm no one. Order is mercy. The clean street is proof that someone holds the wheel and that the one holding it cares.<\/p>\n

To the organizer who came up through tenant defense and the jail-support line, those same clean sidewalks read as a crime scene. A city works, in her system, when it stops sweeping the poor to soothe the people who can see them. Order is the violence. The cleared encampment is the dysfunction. Her share of symbolic life comes from refusing the comfort of the clean street and standing with the swept.<\/p>\n

The word travels worse than that. To a market trader in Lagos a city works when the current holds long enough to run the freezer and the constable can be paid to leave the stall alone. To an engineer trained under a planned economy a city works when the plan meets its targets and the trams run on the timetable whether or not a soul boards them. To a Trappist under a vow of stability the city need not work at all, since the world is passing and the only labor that counts is prayer. Same four letters. Four gods behind them.<\/p>\n

San Francisco carries a hero system older than any of these, and it owns a claim on the word too. The city of the Beats<\/a> and the bathhouses and the cheap rooms south of Market took its pride from being the place that did not work, the harbor for the man who fits nowhere else. In that system the functioning city is the enemy. A city made safe for capital and legible to the spreadsheet has killed the thing worth saving. The sacred value is freedom, the room to be strange in public, and the hero guards the refuge against the people who want to make it safe. To this system Hoeven’s clean sidewalk reads as a funeral.<\/p>\n

Beside it stands the old charity, the Catholic Worker<\/a> and the soup line at St. Anthony’s<\/a>, which feeds the man on the pavement without asking whether he will improve, because the dignity sits in the feeding and not in the outcome. To this system what works is the wrong question. Mercy keeps no ledger of results.<\/p>\n

Hoeven knows more of this than the pose permits her to say. She trained in narrative. She understands that a column persuades by making its values feel like common sense, by setting one hero system in the reasonable middle and casting the rest as failures of nerve. She has read enough Woolf to know that the calm describing voice is the most powerful voice in the room. But the moderate’s authority rests on not naming the frame as a frame. The day she writes that what works is her hero system and not the neutral floor beneath all of them, the column forfeits the standing of the center. So the suspicion she brings to power and to gender and to the literary canon she turns only part way onto her own seat. She grants that the supervisor tells a story. She is slower to grant that she tells one too, with a heaven and a hell of its own.<\/p>\n

The subtraction story is sincere. The man who tells it believes he stands on bare ground swept clean of illusion. Becker’s whole argument is that the belief is the buffer. To see your own hero system as one system among many, all the way down, is to feel the terror it was raised to hold off. Few writers can work from there for long. The ones who try tend to go quiet, or strange, or both.<\/p>\n

Her hero takes the shape of the clear-eyed diagnostician, the young writer who earns her place by naming the city’s decline from within and surviving the naming, heroism as lucidity that asks for no exile. The rival she fights without naming is the progressive who calls her functioning city a homeowner’s city and her order a softer word for removal. She argues with him on every page and seldom grants him the rank of rival, treating his vision as a lapse in seriousness rather than a competing account of the good. And the cost her ledger cannot price is the man for whom the broken city was the only city with room. Her accounting runs on outcomes. Beds filled, blocks cleared, the machete gone from the park. It keeps no line for the love some have always carried for San Francisco for the opposite reason, because it did not work, because it sheltered the people no working city keeps.<\/p>\n

The man with the machete is still the test. A city that works has to do something with him. So does a city that refuses to. Hoeven writes from the first city and reports that it has not found the something. The older San Francisco answer was to let him be and to call the letting freedom. She has read that answer. She does not believe it. The honest line in her ledger is that she knows it is an answer, and that some people loved the city for giving it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For years a man carried a machete through Jefferson Square Park. The police logged about fifty encounters with him after 2014. Two restraining orders. Cycles of jail, treatment, release, the same park, the same blade. The neighbors waited for the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,1029],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-san-francisco"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t