A CITY IN CRISIS : Of Us, Them and a Myth Exploded

On the morning after the verdicts, a television had been placed behind the counter of the Kountry Folks coffee shop. As they ate their eggs, the patrons could watch Los Angeles burn. They watched with the detached bemusement of a zoo crowd.

“Look at them,” one man said. “They are just burning out their own.”

Them.

“I heard,” a counter-mate said, “they’re coming over the hill to burn us.”

Us.

I was commissioned, in the hour of nervous paralysis that followed the verdicts, to ponder what it all might say about California. That’s my standing charter, to explain this state twice a week. Usually, this consists of chirping about a mystical land of sunshine and promise. There’s not much to chirp about today.

One staple of the California fable is the notion of suburban paradise. In poetic moments, we sing of back-yard pools and two-car garages as totems of a golden dream. In truth, they represent something less grand. They represent escape, the wagons circled, the line drawn. One reason people move to the outer limits of the metropolitan whole, to places like Simi Valley, is to place maximum distance between themselves and the sort of people who would loot--and, in some cases, the sort of people who look like Rodney King.

Simi Valley is standard-issue California suburb. It sits almost literally at the end of a new freeway. Everything about the place is new. New housing tracts--row after neat row of pink stucco walls and gleaming adobe roofs, with names such as Canyon Club Villa and The Groves. New parks--clean, safe, graffiti-free. New shops. New car dealers. New banks.

It was in Simi Valley’s new courthouse that the King verdicts came down, and in the ensuing rage, this suburb-town has been derided as a bastion of redneck crackers, a breeding ground for David Dukes and Tom Metzgers. This may or may not be true. It is more important to understand that there are Simi Valleys all over California. Go north of San Francisco, to Contra Costa County. South of Los Angeles, to Irvine or Mission Viejo. East of Sacramento, to the El Dorado Hills. It’s all pretty much the same. The same gleaming new houses. The same white faces. The same distinctions between “us” and “them.”

On the day of the verdict, the Simi Valley Enterprise happened to publish an editorial applauding new statistics that showed this city to be one of the nation’s safest. “As we look over the hill into Los Angeles,” it said, “ . . . we can be proud of the society we have built here and the institutions we have incorporated to keep our city one of the best places in the country to call home.”

Over the hill. Us and Them.

The King case has spoken to this suburban equation at every turn. One of King’s mistakes was to create mischief in the wrong neighborhood, to cross the line. He was a “them” on a street that belonged to the suburban “us”; the cops made him pay. At the trial, it was explained that this was part of the pact between Los Angeles and its police force. The defense talked incessantly of a thin blue line, of cops standing between “civilization and chaos.” Of course the jurors bought it. They mostly came from cities that are monuments to the premise.

At the first sign of riot, a frantic lament flew from the lips of every television anchor: “Where are the cops? Oh, where are the cops?” They spoke for everyone. After a year of hand-wringing over an out-of-control LAPD, the city now wanted every baton out on the street and working overtime. It might have been laughable--if it was not all so ugly.

I don’t mean to oversimplify. Just as most residents of South Los Angeles abide by the law, those who live in places like this are not necessarily malicious bigots. Many are simply pragmatists. Sensing the city cannot be saved, they save themselves.

Unfortunately, the salvation is not lasting. The downside of building shiny new suburbs on the premise of escape is that the cities left behind don’t disappear. Ignored, they fester, boil and, in the present case, explode. In the end, the riots will only lubricate the mechanism of flight. To many Los Angelenos, Simi Valley looks a lot more attractive today than it did a week ago. Cheap irony, perhaps, but true nonetheless.

To cut and run seems to be the only urban solution we have mastered. As long as that is the case, as long as it is a matter of us and them, you can shelve all the fancy talk of a multiethnic megalopolis and the jewel of the Pacific Rim. Los Angeles will remain just one more city dying in its middle. And California, just another cracker state.