DOWN IN THE DUMPS : Just Because They Take the Trash Away Doesn’t Mean It Goes Away

Political campaigns all share a certain silliness, but the winning campaign that now seems silliest is the one that propelled Tom Bradley’s predecessor into the mayor’s office.

Sam Yorty was an assemblyman--then as now, an invisible position in state government--with a nasal voice and a funny name. He campaigned against this newspaper’s role in civic affairs and spoke for the Valley’s fear that it wasn’t getting its fair share of the goodies from City Hall.

But his Big Issue, the one that cut across class and race and mountains and made people call him “His Honor,” was garbage. Yorty ran on the platform that “housewives” shouldn’t be required to separate recyclable metal trash from garbage. For some reason, the City Council had approved a separation-of-trash ordinance, but it was buried in the wake of the Yorty landslide.

Just consider how many canyons we’ve filled up with crap since that election in the dawn of the ‘60s. Whole ravines have been dedicated to the task of preserving, in a big, brush-covered pile for the archeologists of the future, a nicely layered record of our changing tastes in fast food, baby hygiene and junk mail. Now, long after Yorty pledged to keep the trash mass whole, we’re beginning to recycle, possibly because the landfills are almost full.

How was Sam to know--unless he had listened to people who could count in tons--that Los Angeles would soon be running out of space to dump its junk? What Yorty did know was that we were hung up on convenience. We still are. The time is coming when we’ll fight a war, not for oil or territory, but for man’s inalienable right to heat and serve.

More than the love of convenience made the earlier L.A. believe in the Yorty Plan for solid-waste disposal. We’re believers in the notion that when you throw something away, it actually goes “away.” This is probably a remnant of our childhoods, when, whatever we upended or broke, it ended up going . . . away. We might have had to endure a good yelling, but we didn’t wake up the next morning in a fermenting pool of yesterday’s spilled apple juice.

Adulthood hasn’t converted us from this illusion because the garbage trucks really do seem to take stuff out of the picture. They disappear from sight. Where they, and the toxic-waste disposal trucks, end up going is a mystery best left unsolved. Garbage trucks need a landfill thermometer painted on their side panels--the kind of thing you see on the front lawns of churches during fund-raising drives. This would tell us where they’re taking our stuff and how close that place is to topping out. We could get prisoners to paint the thermometers on the trucks at no cost to the taxpayer.

As anyone who knows me can attest, I’ve done my part to whittle away at the solid-waste dilemma. I never throw anything out. The country as a whole, however, is going a different way. Record companies didn’t stop making LPs because demand had slipped drastically, it now appears, but because vinyl records didn’t inspire nearly as large a volume of instantly disposed packaging debris as CDs do. More jobs for somebody; probably not prisoners.

CDs are, at the very least, more convenient than records. And nuclear-power plants are more convenient than other types of facilities in the short run because they leave the sky so darn blue. We are encouraged to believe that the trucks will eventually take the waste away. Unfortunately, governors can now get re-elected just by promising that they will not let their state be the “away” where the nuclear waste goes to live for the next 300,000 years. “Away” has the nasty habit of turning out to be located right here.

We do something else as children that we forget at our peril. Kids love to drive adults crazy by asking, at the end of a story: “And then what?” We know that endings are commas, not periods, that--contrary to the title of last year’s most popular demi-idea in Washington--there is no “End of History.” But somehow, we grow up to believe the four least believable words in political advertising: once and for all. Waste is a problem to be solved, once and for all, not a fact of life to be lived with, like a chronically sick pet.

Two things would work; less dangerous waste could be packed into fake office towers, much like the ones that hide oil derricks in West L.A. We could get junk out of the way and bolster the skyline simultaneously. As for more hazardous material, we should just blast it all into space. If the universe really is expanding, it’ll be a long time before we see that stuff again.