Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/051892/0518640.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 6KB | 116 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 84

Los Angeles Is Not La-la Land


By Stanley W. Cloud

    [STANLEY W. CLOUD is a native of Los Angeles. From 1982 to
1986 he was executive editor of the L.A. Herald Examiner. Today
he is Washington bureau chief.]


    Every generation or so, the real Los Angeles intrudes
itself into the palmy myth preferred by the outside world. The
riot two weeks ago was such an occasion. Suddenly, La-la land
-- with its beaches and movie stars, Rolls-Royces and Evian,
its Italian suits and car phones, its upscale shopping malls
and matching, coke-sniffing boy-girl bimbos -- was gone. In its
place were wasted landscapes and hard people whose anger and
alienation seemed for a while to know no bounds.

    An immediate good that may emerge from the rioting is that
the world will finally begin to lose its sense of Los Angeles
as primarily a city of careless rich people. It was never that,
isn't today and, if demographic trends continue, never will be.
In the past decade, the number of Hispanics and Asians in Los
Angeles has nearly doubled. The new immigrants came to the
largest manufacturing center in the U.S. not to sell movie
"proj ects" but to find jobs. The truth is thus the very
antithesis of the myth: at its core, Los Angeles is a
blue-collar and workaday town. Its residents tend to drive
pickups or subcompacts, not Beemers and Rollses. They wear jeans
and baseball caps and speak in accents redolent of Oklahoma or
Texas, Ohio or New York, Mexico or El Salvador, Vietnam or
Korea. Few Angelenos have ever seen a movie star. Many have
never even seen Rodeo Drive, much less shopped there. Black,
white, brown and yellow, they have created little communities
that frequently resemble the places they left behind. In the
poorest of those communities, the streets may not be as mean as
those in, say, the South Bronx, but they are every bit as tough.

    Many of the big dealers of Bel Air and Hancock Park have
good intentions where the city as a whole is concerned. They
are liberals, and they want to be involved, but they -- even
more than their counterparts in other big cities -- are an
enclave of such rare privilege that it is quite possible for
them to avoid contact with Angelenos of, let us say, a different
stripe. Even when they venture out, with eyes straight ahead on
the freeways, most of them never even see the problems they
care so much about.

    So what? So this: for better and worse, L.A. is the city
of the future. It is the first major metropolis in history in
which everyone is in a minority. A place that has no majority
culture is a place, paradoxically, in which the West's old,
traditional promise -- that, if you can get there, you may have
a new beginning, regardless of bloodlines or station in life --
is most likely to be kept. That promise, however, is not
fulfilled in the "when you wish upon a star" myth; it is
fulfilled by the Okie strawberry picker who survived the
Depression and bought a farm, by the New Yorker who built a
chain of car washes, by the Vietnamese refugee who worked his
or her way through Cal State Long Beach and became a physicist.
In stressing its most trivial and least typical aspects, we miss
the lessons that L.A. has to teach about how modern urban
societies should -- and should not -- be organized.

    The "should" is the tarnished but still real promise (plus
such unique Los Angeles contributions as multiple urban centers
instead of a single downtown and, pace Woody Allen, right turn
on red); the "should not" is in the promise's failures. Cities
of the future should not, for example, be without effective
systems of mass transportation, as L.A. has been since the
1950s. Modern cities should not encourage the kind of
uncontrolled urban sprawl that destroys a sense of unity and
shared experience in its citizens. And modern cities should not
stress growth over the environment as they plan for the future.

    And what of race? Los Angeles is rapidly becoming a city
of multiple ghettos. The blacks are in their place, the whites
in theirs. The Vietnamese are here, the Koreans over there, the
Japanese in the middle. The Salvadorans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans
and other Latin Americans may all be Hispanic, but they too are
increasingly likely to be separated along national lines. The
phenomenon is not new. Watts has been a black ghetto for 60
years or so. Indeed, what was once a relatively small and
discrete area around Central Avenue has grown until it is now
defined more by the color of the people who live there than by
actual geographic boundaries. Seen in this way, the city of the
future becomes a vast continent of warring states.

    Which brings us to the matter of the police. Under Daryl
Gates, the Los Angeles Police Department became an army, not a
police force. With its battering rams and paramilitary uniforms,
its choke holds and Taser guns, it set the hard-nosed, Magnum
Force, make-my-day standard for urban law enforcement through
the '70s and '80s. In the process, it became so muscle-bound and
senseless that it was unable to cope rationally with a traffic
hazard named Rodney King, let alone with rioters and looters.
Here too L.A. takes us into a Blade Runner future.

    Usually, when the problems of U.S. cities are discussed,
the focus is on older places -- New York City or Detroit or
Chicago. Los Angeles was always, well, Lotusville. With the
Watts riots of 1965 quite forgotten by most, if L.A. had a real
problem (besides freeway traffic and smog), it was how to
protect pedestrians from the roller skaters at Venice Beach. Now
the world knows better. L.A. is what lies in store for everyone,
unless Americans stop wishing on a star.