I want to make it clear from the start that I have not yet seen the new documentary film, “Wood Street,” premiering July 14 at the New Parkway Theater. All I know of it is what Oaklandside reported yesterday. But here’s what I do know: it’s a sympathetic look at the Wood Street housing slum, the city’s worst, which Oakland began cleaning up—against the wishes of its 300 inhabitants—last year.
If you never saw it, Wood Street would shock you. Block after block of the dirtiest, most disreputable encampments you’ve ever seen. Abandoned, burnt-out vehicles; structures made of cardboard and oilcloth; endless piles of rotting junk; tunnels like rat holes through which zombie-like humans scurried; and, of course, the occasional fire, which threatened nearby neighborhoods and freeways. Wood Street was truly a disgrace that never should have been allowed to exist. Any normal city would have brought in the police, public works and medical professionals and torn it down immediately, but Oakland is not a normal city. Instead of ending this unnatural situation, Oakland’s pro-housing radicals welcomed the tramps and squatters, celebrated them as if they were national heroes, allowed the drug-dealing and criminality to continue unabated, and acted as if Wood Street were a national model for the homeless to run their own community.
Well, it was anything but. They pretended to be “Wood Street Commons,” as if it were a fancy-new village in West Oakland run by college professors and philosophers, when it was a smelly, dangerous dump where criminal activity went on 24/7 and the city refused to deal with it, until they absolutely were forced to. Sheng Thao was mayor at the time, and when she wasn’t posing like a prom queen for the cameras, she was defending the right of homeless people to live anywhere they wanted, under any condition of filth and degradation. That was Progressive Sheng, who helped drive Oakland into the ground as a failed city and is now facing prison time for bribery.
Now, according to Oaklandside, there exists a permanent record, this documentary, of the “tight-knit community,” told from “the Wood Street Community’s perspective” through “moving personal stories.” Says the documentary’s filmmaker, Caron Creighton, “I just knew there was a deeper story there.”
Yes, there always is a deeper story. In this case it was the utter ineptitude with which Thao and her band of incompetents fiddled while Oakland went down the toilet, destroying a century of progress. Why not tell the real story—of how Thao deliberately sold the city out, of how a raving bunch of far-left maniacs like Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas worked secretly with unions including SEIU to impoverish Oakland so that their constituents—poor people—could continue to live here, even if it was in ant colonies like Wood Street. The real story is how insanity, ideological hallucinations, hatred of the police, anti-White racism and old-fashioned greed and corruption took a city, turned it inside out, skinned it alive, and left it for dead. The real story is of how a generation of idiots created the world-embarrassment of a city on the dole, at the brink of extinction, a symbol of murder, violence, poverty and filth? For those are the horsemen of our particular apocalypse. As a matter of fact, if Creighton wishes to remake her little documentary, might I suggest she retitle it “Oakland Nuremberg” and film a cinema verité of when we bring Thao, Schaaf, Bas, Fife, Kaplan and their cronies to trial and charge them with city-cide: the deliberate murder of a once-thriving American city. That’s a movie I’d pay to see.
Steve Heimoff