Innocent Abroad Returns to Quite a Mess

The good friend who sat our house with Tender Loving Care while we were in Europe also piled three weeks of The Times in one corner of our living room.

We had asked her to do this, but when we returned home, I had some serious second thoughts. While my wife went through the pile with cavalier speed, I circled it warily for several days, telling myself to pitch out the papers and start with a clean slate. I knew that if I ever cracked that pile, there would be no middle ground; I would be irrevocably hooked with all sorts of cataclysmic results. Current work and reading would go to hell, and I would be instantly behind in everything--perhaps for the rest of my life.

Well, I cracked the pile, of course--and it was really the fault of the California Angels. Although I was able to follow the baseball scores through the Herald Tribune in Europe, details were lacking. This is extremely painful for someone who studies the box scores for half an hour each morning, six months of the year. I simply had to know how the Angels could possibly have had 20 runs scored against them in one game. The line score in the Herald showed that 13 runs had been scored by Milwaukee in one inning. Was that a misprint? I had to know.

So I looked. It was true. And I was hooked.

I may never dig out of this hole, but it’s really a good thing I didn’t throw those papers away. Because now I know that nobody minds the store when I’m gone. The bad guys have a field day.

I’m not nearly through the stack yet--which, I discovered, isn’t chronological--but already two Orange County records have been set. Both the Costa Mesa City Council and Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) topped themselves--something I didn’t believe possible--in the few weeks I was away.

The Costa Mesa council had already compiled a stunning record this year, coming up with one decision that had to be reversed in Washington by the secretary of Housing and Urban Development himself. Not very many American city governments can claim the distinction of being that spectacularly wrongheaded. The Costa Mesa council also managed to shut down--even if briefly through a forced move--a privately funded social agency that was doing what the city should have been doing and thereby saving city taxpayers many thousands of tax dollars while ministering to multitudes of desperately needy people at the same time.

So you’d think the council would rest on its oars, content with its achievements for the year. Not on your boondoggle. No sooner did I get out of town than the Costa Mesa council decided to protect us from obscene artists as well as from the sick and needy and homeless. Apparently with no more urging than one letter from a local couple who later admitted they had never seen a performance at the South Coast Repertory theater, the council members decided to lay their bodies fearlessly into the breach between you and me and obscene art by putting strings on the support funds for SCR--recognized by its peers as one of the finest regional theaters in the nation.

Both Calendar and The Times editorial page have taken strong issue with this action--and with subsequent threats to other art activities supported by the city--so anything I add is probably redundant. Except this. A recent Times Orange County Poll--also taken while I was gone--discovered that 57% of Orange County citizens disapproved of the federal government setting artistic standards based on obscenity or controversy. (Only 32% supported creation of such standards.)

OK, so I got carried away and don’t have much space left for the other aberrations that took place in my absence. Let me deal with a handful of them quickly.

I sometimes wonder if Rep. Dannemeyer is putting us on. “Let’s take a look around,” he seems to be saying, “and latch onto some icon that is unimpeachable. Then let’s attack it. That should get some attention”--and also ensure Orange County’s reputation for sending primitive representatives to Washington. Well, I no sooner get out of the country than Dannemeyer makes a speech on the House floor denouncing Nelson Mandela’s appearance before Congress as a “national disgrace . . . that heaps shame on this body. . . . Mandela should be condemned.” Way to go, Bill. Even J. Danforth Quayle praised Mandela as a “symbol of freedom.”

Jumping around, I note that the seven-year legal fight between Irvine Co. Chairman Donald Bren and Joan Irvine Smith was finally settled with both sides claiming victory. That’s OK with me. I find it hard to get worked up when two multimillionaires are fighting one another. What appalls me is the cost of this litigation. The lawyers will walk away with about $30 million. Just stop for a moment and think how much low-cost housing might have been built for a lot of desperate Orange County residents with that money.

I see that Newport Beach has paid $1.5 million to a black Liberian immigrant who was shot and almost killed on the beach by a police officer who says he mistook a portable radio the immigrant was carrying for a gun. The officer, of course, was cleared of any misdoing by the district attorney. Newport Beach has grown accustomed to buying off the victims of the excesses of its police force. But this one also sets a new record. And should. One wonders when the citizens there--wealthy though they be--will say “enough” and rein in their police.

Then, of course, there’s the Laguna Niguel City Council member who signed away 99 acres of parkland to a developer, and the hastily rescinded statement by the director of the new Nixon library that journalists such as Bob Woodward who don’t show the proper reverence for Richard Nixon won’t be allowed to do research there (this also made the Herald Tribune) and the “destitute” former savings and loan executive who is living in a multimillion-dollar spread in Newport Beach. Routine stuff, I suppose, for Orange County, but it all surfaced while I was gone.

There’s so much more, and I’m hardly halfway through the pile. One development that gives me pause is the super-speed train that is now apparently going to be built between Orange County and Las Vegas. The escalating air fare between here and Las Vegas made it a lot harder for me to try out my new blackjack system. A train that will get me there in 75 minutes for less money worries me a little, since the system still has some wrinkles in it. But I have a few years of grace on this one.

Meanwhile, I’m going to have to figure out shorter trips so the county doesn’t fall apart again while I’m gone.