Seattle vs. Los Angeles: It’s a Battle of the Columnists

Perhaps the only way for Angelenos to save Los Angeles from itself is to move to smaller cities and Los Angelize them.

Los Angelize is a verb invented by San Diegans a few years ago, I believe, when that city was first seized by a growing awareness that it was becoming like us.

About 15 years ago, someone in Oregon, probably a journalist, coined the word Californicate, to describe what Californians (mostly from Los Angeles) were doing to other cities in the West.

In recent years, Seattle columnists have been bashing Los Angeles regularly, blaming runaway Angelenos for Californicating their city.

The latest attack comes from Don Williamson, an editorial columnist for the Seattle Times. His column was sent to me by Barbara George of South Pasadena.

What makes Williamson’s anguish especially poignant is that he lived in San Diego before moving to Seattle, and he despairs at how San Diego, despite its avowed determination to avoid Los Angelization, is rapidly being infected by that very curse.

Here recently for a convention of journalists, Williamson evidently was barely able to survive in our environment. His prose reaches new peaks of invective, even for Seattle writers.

“The air is different here in the City of Angels. It’s thick--as if it were drawn with purple-brown chalk. . . . I have never liked this city. It has always been too dirty and too crowded with too much traffic and not enough real people. For the two years I lived in San Diego, I came here only when it was necessary.

“L.A. is glitter and pretense and phony people who live off hype and insincerity. Feel-good movies are made, and millions are spent on cinematic and video nonsense while hundreds of thousands of area residents choke in their own despair and desperation.”

Williamson is certainly right that Los Angeles is dirty and overcrowded and has too much traffic and that the air is often purple-brown. He doesn’t even mention the daily murders and drive-by shootings. In some neighborhoods it isn’t safe to walk down the sidewalk or sit on your front porch.

San Diego, he complains, has abandoned its vigilance against Los Angelization and is rapidly taking on the appearance of Los Angeles, with overbuilding, traffic congestion and its consequence, smog.

Williamson fears that Seattle is on its way to the same disaster and he blames its residents for the very sin that has caused the degeneration of Los Angeles and San Diego--greed.

While Seattle deplores Californication, Williamson says, it keeps going on. “Construction is everywhere. Blocks that had 10 or 12 single-family homes suddenly are bursting at the seams with 10 or 12 multiunit dwellings and more cars and people than the neighborhood was ever meant to handle. Fast-food joints, convenience stores, dry cleaners, antique stores and a host of other businesses soon follow to meet the demand. . . . We keep wringing our hands about how terrible it is--all the way to the bank. . . .”

The fact that Williamson recognizes greed as being at the heart of the problem suggests that in calling Angelenos phony and insincere and subject to glitter and hype he fails to see that people are the same everywhere.

Now that Seattle has been discovered and is becoming overcrowded too--many of its newcomers with pockets full of cash from the sale of inflated Los Angeles real estate--Seattlites are learning that they can be corrupted by money too. It’s the national disease.

Where Williamson falls into the old cliches, though, is in alleging that Angelenos are phony and insincere, love glitter and pretense and live off hype. Oddly, those of us who live here know few people who fit that description.

Of course, there is a touch of the phony in all of us; all of us may sometimes be insincere; but few of us are any more dazzled by glitter than the residents of Seattle; and few of us are victimized by hype any more than any resident of the United States who is exposed to many hours of television every day.

Blaming Los Angeles on “feel-good movies and millions spent on cinematic and video nonsense” makes the old mistake of confusing Los Angeles with Hollywood--or the film industry. “Feel-good movies” and cinematic nonsense are made for marketing throughout the world. Hollywood gives them what they want.

I have an idea that feel-good movies (whatever they are) are just as popular in Seattle as they are in Los Angeles. Movies and television tend to homogenize the nation, so that a teen-ager living in Fargo, N.D., wears the same clothes, likes the same music and acts pretty much like a teen-ager living in Los Angeles.

And Williamson needn’t worry about Angelenos contaminating Seattle with phoniness, insincerity and greed. I’m sure they have plenty there already.

I urge Angelenos who want to get in on the boom to go to Seattle now.