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Before_We_Wake
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1994-10-02
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_________________________________________________________________
10. Before We Wake
Finally, leaving behind all the Burgessian diagrams and analogies,
what will be the real fate of Los Angeles? Can emergent technologies
of surveillance and repression stabilize class and racial relations
across the chasm of the new inequality? Will the ecology of fear
become the natural order of the 21st-century American city? Will
razor- wire and security cameras someday be as sentimentally redolent
of suburban life as white-picket fences and dogs named Spot?
A global perspective may be useful. Los Angeles in 2019 will be the
core of a metro-galaxy of 22-24 million people in Southern and Baja
California. Together with Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and Shanghai,
it will comprise an new evolutionary form: mega-cities of 20-30
million inhabitants. It is important to emphasize that we are not
merely talking about larger specimens of an old, familiar type, but an
absolutely original, and unexpected, phyla of social life.
No one knows, in fact, whether physical and biological systems of this
magnitude and complexity are actually sustainable. Many experts
believe that the Third World mega-cities, at least, will eventually
precipitate environmental holocausts and/or implode in urban civil
wars. Indeed, the contemporary "New World Order" certainly offers
enough grim examples of total societal disintegration -- from Bosnia
to Somalia -- to underscore realistic fears of a mega-city apocalypse.
If Tokyo proves an exception, despite inevitable natural disasters, it
will only be by dint of extraordinary levels of public investment,
private affluence and social discipline (and because Japan is
culturally a highly urban rather than suburban society). In the recent
past, however, Los Angeles has begun to resemble Sao Paulo and Mexico
City more than post-modern Tokyo-Yokohama.
It may be theoretically possible, of course, for a Democratic
administration in Washington over the next decade to begin to reverse
American urban decay with massive new public works. But it will remain
extraordinarily difficult to secure Congressional support for
reinvestment in the Bos-Wash and Southern California urban cores as
long as the Reagan-era deficit remains the dominant issue in domestic
politics. Indeed the principal legacy of the Perot movement -- the
most successful electoral insurgency in 75 years -- may be precisely
the fiscal Gordian knot it has managed to tie around any resolution of
the urban crisis.
If hopes of urban reform, now guardedly raised by the Clinton
landslide, are once again dashed, it will only accelerate the dystopic
tendencies described in this pamphlet. For in the specific case of Los
Angeles, where recession has already wiped out a fifth of the region's
manufacturing jobs, there is little private-sector help in sight. Even
the most traditionally optimistic business-school econometric models
now predict a "Texas-style" regional slump lasting until 1997, while
forecasters at the Southern California Association of Governments talk
about steady- state unemployment rates of 10-12% for the next twenty
years.
As the golden dream withers, so also may faith in non-violent social
reform. If last year's riots set a precedent, anomic neighborhood
violence may begin to be transmuted into more organized political
violence. Both cops and gangmembers already talk with chilling matter-
of-factness about the inevitability of some manner of urban guerrilla
warfare. And in spite of all the new residential walls and scanscapes
-- even the future police eye in the sky -- sprawling Los Angeles is a
metropolis uniquely vulnerable to strategic sabotage. As the examples
of Belfast, Beirut and, more recently, Palermo and Lima have
demonstrated, the car bomb is the weapon of anonymous urban terror par
excellence (or, as one counter-insurgency expert once put it, "the
poor man's substitute for an airforce"). Car bombs have reduced half
of Beirut to debris, wiped out a neighborhood known as "Lima's Beverly
Hills," and massacred Italy's most heavily guarded public officials.
If the British Army, uniquely, was finally able to prevent car bombers
from entering Belfast, it was only after years of effort and the
construction of an immense security cage around the entire city
center. A comparable preventive effort in Los Angeles -- e.g. closing
the freeways and heavily fortifying all the public utilities, oil
refineries and pipelines, and commercial centers -- would not only
cost tens of billions but also dissolve the city as a functioning
entity.
The Los Angeles freeway system, in effect, guarantees to the future
urban terrorist what the tropical rain forest or Andean peak offers to
the rural guerrillero: ideal terrain.
lf we continue to allow our central cities to degenerate into
criminalized Third Worlds, all the ingenious security technology,
present and future, will not safeguard the anxious middle class. The
sound of that first car bomb on Rodeo Drive or in front of City Hall
will wake us from our mere bad dream and confront us with our real
nightmare.
_________________________________________________________________
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