Poor Little Malibu

Feeling sorry for Malibu’s frustrated effort to incorporate is a little like feeling sorry for Donald Trump when a hotel deal falls through. There are mixed feelings involved.

On one hand those blessed with an abundance of wealth know pain even as you and I, but on the other hand it seems somehow less severe because they’re rich. When the pain is gone, the money is still there.

Similarly, Malibu is not the kind of community that evokes a lot of sympathy from little people.

They figure that anyone who lives there is either rich or a wise-ass punk celebrity who deserves whatever bad luck has befallen him.

That’s partially true. The average single-family house in Malibu sells for about $700,000, and the average family income is higher than that of Beverly Hills. They’re not hurting.

The wise-ass punk charge also has validity. Young men whose show biz salaries are greater than their ability to reason rip about in hot cars and act out their aggressions by beating up beautiful women and short agents in trendy bars.

But there are also, as actress Ali MacGraw likes to say, “real people living here--like CPAs and telephone workers.”

That is also true. I know a telephone worker up Rambla Pacifico who has never once starred in a movie, punched out his wife or partied on the French Riviera. The closest he has ever come to Beluga caviar is a tuna casserole.

And now the Real People of Malibu are combining with the unreal people in a quest for cityhood that threatens to turn ugly. They have begun, God help us, to shout and stamp their feet in public.

This occurred Wednesday at a meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission, which was to have voted on a Malibu cityhood application. The commission decided instead to delay its action because Deane Dana, the county supervisor who represents Malibu, was in Hawaii.

After two years of being kicked around by boards, courts and commissions, the cityhood advocates, who until now have been fairly dignified, stood up, shook their fists and shouted “Vote, vote!”

That may not seem especially violent to you, but “Vote, vote” in Malibu is the moral equivalent of “Kill, kill” in Pomona. The people are madder than hell, I mean heck, and not going to take it anymore.

“We’ve been too soft,” Walt Keller said after the meeting. He is co-chairman of the Malibu Incorporation Committee and, as a retired engineer, qualifies as a Real Person.

“The people are angry and I don’t know what they’re liable to do,” he said, hinting darkly that civil disobedience may be in the offing.

One envisions an army of pretty celebrities in designer sweats jogging grimly toward the County Building, their faces set in the angry determination of Sigourney Weaver stalking the gorilla-killing scum of Africa.

Awesome indeed.

Charly Anderson, who is in the Ordinary Housewife branch of the Real People Movement, was one of those who shouted “Vote, vote!” at the Formation Committee meeting.

“There’s just so much you can take,” she said later, still angry. “They’ve been beating us down for two years and we’ve had it. Deane Dana is like Noriega. I hate his guts.”

The fight centers on Malibu’s sewage, which in itself seems an unlikely area of contention for a community known more for its excesses than its effluence.

Many of Malibu’s homes are on septic tanks, and the county wants a new sewer system in the works before it allows a vote on incorporation. The outmoded tanks may be polluting the seashore and damaging the ducks and surfers.

Walt Keller argues that Dana wants the sewer system only because he is an anti-environmental oaf who is in bed with the land developers. A new system, Keller says, would enhance the prospect of increased development, which in turn would translate into greater campaign contributions to Dana from grateful land speculators.

Keller and others are therefore asking the county to stop mucking about in Malibu’s sewage and allow them to determine their own destiny.

That seems only fair. There are few more identifiable communities in the world than Malibu, and it ought to be up to the people, both real and unreal, to decide if they want to rot in their own slime, if indeed slime becomes a problem.

It’s probably not a pleasant way to go, but then that’s Malibu for you. Anything to be different.