Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : NEW YORK : Welcome to L.A., the reality.

To put the matter in filmic terms, the L.A. riots have established that, for the foreseeable future at least, the image of the city that most people outside its boundaries will conjure up when they hear its name will be Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” not Steve Martin’s “L.A. Story.” Such realism was certainly long overdue.

If Los Angeles ever really was a city of dreams, the one great American metropolis where one could live a life simultaneously urban and idyllic, that place disappeared long ago. But its aura has persisted, and it is a testimony to the force of Los Angeles’ image as a mythic paradise----the place where one’s dreams, whether they were erotic or pecuniary, would surely come true----that people in the rest of the country, and, for that matter, in many parts of the world, are particularly shocked that the first great American riot of the 1990s took place there.

Had Harlem gone up in flames, or North Philadelphia, or Chicago’s South Side, the sight would doubtless have been infinitely saddening, but it would not have carried the same charge of surprise and disappointment that tinged reactions to the burning of South L.A. It must be 20 years since anyone has called New York ‘Gotham’ with a straight face, or imagined that life in the capital of the Midwest was anything but harsh. Whatever imaginative investment outsiders had in those cities has long since been written down, rather as bankers wrote down the Latin American debt. But L.A. was supposed to be different. After all, it was the home of Hollywood and Burbank, the manufacturing center, as it were, of the American dream. And for boosters of Los Angeles the business capital, the city was also destined to become one of the capitals of the Pacific Rim.

It is easy to see through the hype now that the riots have taken place, of course. But it is also worth remembering that these fantasies of L.A. were not simply concocted by outsiders who didn’t know the difference between Hollywood the neighborhood and Hollywood the industry; they were energetically put forward by all sorts of influential people in Los Angeles. As recently as 1990, for example, the L.A. 2000 Committee’s final report could trumpet that “just as New York, London and Paris stood as symbols of past centuries, Los Angeles will be THE city of the 21st Century.” To believe otherwise, it seemed, was to give in to what one of L.A.’s most energetic contemporary boosters once described as “the angst of the Atlantic world.”

And businessmen in Osaka, Japan and tourists from Germany and envious New Yorkers--to a greater or lesser extent--all chose to believe in some version of this optimistic construction of what L.A. was all about. Such faith testifies partly to the understandable need that people everywhere have to believe that somewhere there really is a golden place where the living is easy, and, more prosaically, to the fact that most outsiders rarely visited any part of L.A. except what lies to the west of Highland Avenue, with, perhaps, the odd careful foray to the Music Center, the MOCA or Japantown. And why should they have had any experience of the East Side, or South L.A., or Temple-Beaudry? It is not as if many white Angelenos had any deeper experience of these places than the occasional trip to an “ethnic” restaurant. Even in more peaceful times, the sheer size of L.A. discouraged contacts between different parts of town, and the immiserization of the slums and the barrios have done the rest. It would have been unreasonable to expect outsiders to have an experience that even middle-class locals largely avoided.

Besides, the whole attraction of L.A. was as a capital of pleasure and as a place to grow rich. Before the riot, it was common for people like myself who live in New York but spend a great deal of time in Los Angeles to be told by Southern California friends that New York had now become “too rough.” Sitting in a garden in Brentwood Park or a beach house in Malibu and contrasting these versions of luxury with, say, Park Avenue in Manhattan and its cohorts of panhandlers and feral youths, it was tempting to agree with them. It seemed that the sheer size of L.A. meant that one could insulate oneself from the dangerous classes with whom even the most pampered New Yorker regularly rubs shoulders. What the riots have demonstrated, however--particularly by the fact that the rioters did not simply burn down their own neighborhoods but took a stab at the Beverly Center and Culver City as well--is that there are no such refuges from the difficulties of urban life, not even L.A.

No one with any sense can be glad that the riots happened. But now that they have taken place, it is possible to welcome the death of Los Angeles the myth and start confronting Los Angeles the reality. Doubtless, the tourist business in Southern California will suffer, as will the fantasy life of countless people in other parts of the United States and other parts of the world. But if this leads to some serious effort to address L.A.’s problems----unlikely as that may be in the current political climate----then whatever losses that are entailed, both psychic and material, will be worth it. After all, people outside L.A. will survive, whereas people in Los Angeles, unless they start seeing things as they really are and try to make improvements, may lose not just one neighborhood but their whole city.