🚀 go-pugleaf

"Charles P. Hobbs" <transit@primenet.com> wrote:

>amk@bway.net (Andy Katz) wrote:
>>
>>Should this latest attempt at saying 'fuck you!' to everyone else,
>>'I've got my little piece of suburban heaven!' succeed, the problem
>>remains of where to put the newly liberated San Fernando Valley.
>>Clearly it cannot remain in such proximity to the city it scorned. 
>>
>[...]
>So, where are you posting this witty remark from?

Brooklyn Heights, Chuck.

But you can run with me, okay. I was born in L.A., raised in Tujunga,
and lived most of my adult life in the Valley. I left LA--most
unwillingly--in the middle of '94, first for San Antonio, then NYC. 

Chas, one reason LA will never be as great a city as New York is that
it is filled with small minded people who choose to look no further
than their own backyards. When chief Parker told Angelinos he could
maintain order, keep the blacks in South-Central and the Mexicans in
East LA, all for the price of policing Mayberry, Angelinos (white
ones, that is) accepted his vision uncritically, permitting the
creation of a tiny, elite appearing police department staffed by
officers who personally despise Los Angeles, wouldn't live in it, and
feel perfectly comfortable threatening not to do their jobs--but will
still accept city paychecks--if they aren't worshipped with sufficient
fervor. 

Then there was Prop 13....

One of the most striking differences between New York and LA is that
here is very much a sense of shared destiny: Good, bad or indifferent,
New York's boroughs are going where they're going together. We do not
hear suggestions that the Bronx, for all of its problems, be cut loose
to sink or swim or explode as it will. Police, and other emergency
professionals, know how to interact with real people in real
situations. They are not handsome, dangerous automatons.

What LA needs, more than anything, is greater civic pride, a sense of
shared history (and it's very much the fault of easterners who
relocate to LA and environs and who claim LA has no history or no core
that we lack this sense) and, mainly, a sense of shared destiny. How
to provide that sense is beyond yours truly. Perhaps it will never
occur, any such impulse lost amid the howling clamour of short sighted
sectarianism. And this is LA's greatest tragedy. It can be a great
city, greater than New York, or any that has come before. But its
denizens, by and large, can see no futher than their own geraniums.

Ironically, or not, Chief Parker died in 1965, the very year his
policies and philosophy were proven tragically wrong. New municipal
borders will not prevent those who Valleyites fear the most from
someday avenging themselves upon the elite who left them behind. 

Because the Parkerite ideals of conformity, obedience and penurity are
endemic to the Valley, it's difficult to imagine how Valley residents
could create a municipal entity even marginally better than what LA
offers now.

Andy Katz




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