PERSPECTIVE ON THE RIOTS : Faster Than a Speeding Bromide : The ‘progressives’ find their posture powerless against the mob; our ‘Metropolis’ awaits rescue from itself.

Metropolis is in trouble. But where is Superman? Evil Lex Luthor, who is plotting to blow up Los Angeles if he doesn’t get his ransom, has plenty of helpers. Police Chief Daryl Gates, Mayor Tom Bradley, the City Council, the Nation of Islam, Judge Stanley Weisberg (who refused to move the Rodney King trial to Alameda, so far, far away from his Brentwood home), Judge Joyce Karlin (who fined a demented Korean shopkeeper $500 for blasting out the brains of the 15-year-old African-American schoolgirl Latasha Harlins), the insanely ambitious D.A. Ira Reiner (who more or less deliberately screwed up the prosecution of the Simi Valley Four), LAPD Sgt. Stacy Koon (who does neo-Nazi Tom Metzger’s work under color of authority), L.A. County’s tens of thousands of gangbangers, the thugs who brained the white truck driver Reginald Denny and the “community leaders” who demand amnesty for them, Korean shopkeepers rude to their black customers, the black and Latino robbers of Korean merchants murdered in impressive numbers before the riots, and Pacifica station KPFK, which thinks the whole thing was started by the FBI in unmarked cars. The list of Luthor’s evil little helpers marches into hyperspace.

But what about us poor souls who live here?

We put up with an awful lot of bushwa. Just listen:

“It’s impossible for white people to feel what we (African-Americans) feel,” insists Bishop E. Lynn Brown of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Or, “In this rebellion there were no criminals,” says another Watts-based minister. Or, “unlike the white middle class . . . (middle class African-Americans) understand why (the riots) happened. To them, it was inevitable, driven by an anguish so deep it cried out for something extraordinary to be done in response,” write black journalists Sandy Banks and John Mitchell. Or, “of course, the underclass rejected ruling class ideology as expressed in the Rodney King verdict, and revolted,” opines a visiting English Marxist scholar. Or, to quote more than one Beverly Hills friend, “If I were young, black and poor, I’d burn and loot, too.”

Chorus, all: “When you’re in that much despair, what else can you do?”

My favorite riot graffito, scrawled in blood-red paint on a charred Korean-owned butcher shop on Vermont Avenue, spelled it out much more honestly:

“(Screw) What’s Right!”

The collusion between African-American leaders, their progressive white allies and the mob to gain our attention might disconcert even Clark Kent. Superman, silly dolt, actually believes that a tut-tutting lecture on plain Yankee morality (plus a little arm-twisting) can pacify even the most snarling human beast. But what if Lois Lane talked like Maxine Waters or Diane Watson or even Angela Davis. Even old Superman might have second thoughts.

Second thoughts are in order.

A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, it’s said. Well, L.A. has been collectively mugged, and among my friends there is a discreet groundswell of shamefaced fact-facing. Almost every liberal and leftie I know in Los Angeles has had to confront his or her own powerlessness--and racial feelings not a million miles away from Archie Bunker’s--because the despised Los Angeles Police Department abandoned us to the mob. I’m not the only one who was grateful for the presence of the National Guard, or to think about buying a .357. “They” came right up La Brea, Fairfax and La Cienega to my doorstep, stopping just short of Beverly Hills. You would be surprised how many West Side liberal-progressives bought a gun or lamented, “Why didn’t they burn our neighborhood instead of their own--that would have been the smart thing to do,” or did both simultaneously. White, affluent pathology can be as murky as black double-think.

I live in West Hollywood and work in South-Central, and these days when I drive south of the Santa Monica Freeway into the heart of burned-out darkness I keep my eyes rigidly straight ahead, because even before the riots there was a lot of vehicular nastiness (like sniping). I practice gunning the gas pedal at red lights, just in case. The great mob-beast breathes quietly--for the moment.

Conventional wisdom says that the three-day orgy of lawlessness was a revolt of the underclass and that, like any natural cataclysm, it will recur unless we cure the “underlying causes”; more sophisticated analysts point out that large-scale civic disorder is part of a transnational epidemic of “global misery.” Peru’s Shining Path option, of organized mindless violence, starts to look attractive to masses whose American Dream has soured. Or, as a white preacher in South-Central told me, the riots symbolized an “existential valley of the shadow of just plain human suffering.”

Give me a break.

“To the brothers and sisters out there: don’t be disheartened that a few businesses were burned down. It was nothing but urban renewal,” jeered a participant on KCRW public radio. Did this guy ever look at South Los Angeles, really look? Excluding a few real holes like the Nickerson Gardens, Jordan Downs and Imperial Courts housing projects, the area bounded by Central Avenue, La Brea, Imperial Highway and Washington Boulevard isn’t a bad place. Would I rent or buy there? Sure, if you sent the criminals to Devil’s Island first. South-Central is not Harlem, is not my devastated old Lawndale neighborhood in Chicago, is not East St. Louis. A young Kareem Abdul Jabbar, when he first arrived in Watts from Harlem, exclaimed (more or less): “This you call a ghetto?”

Let’s be careful with facts. South-Central is not one place nor is it homogeneous. Watts, South Los Angeles, Central City, Pico-Union and Mid-City--the area that many people vaguely call “South-Central”--will be two-thirds Latino in a few years. For every crack house and “tenement of despair” there are many more graceful artisan-built or Greene Brothers-copy California bungalow classic homes with well-kept lawns and hedges cut by paid labor.

The great unreported story of the riots was women. Men rioted, some women supported them as followers. The vast majority of African-American and Latin women who did not loot and burn . . . thought what?

And for every berserk rioter, how many in-work women and men sat it out behind locked doors and iron-barred windows, scared to death and praying that their children weren’t involved? This silent majority, terrorized by youth gangs and brutalized by the LAPD, has yet to be heard from.

Tomorrow: Los Angeles, bedeviled by its impossible ambitions, for years got the police it asked for. Now we have a chance to make a revolution, if we can all keep our nerve. Welcome and good luck, Willie Williams.