Liberal Fatalism Lit the Fire; Use the Heat to Forge Revolution : Riots: A culture of violence collided with this whole city’s disappointed hopes and star-envy.

“It’s impossible for white people to feel what we feel,” the black bishop said.

Really? Fact: I have yet to meet a single white Angeleno (except one Austrian immigrant), including the most conservative San Fernando Republicans and Canyon Country rifle-in-the-rack pickup-driving NRA members, who was not nauseated and outraged by the Simi Valley verdict. Few whites seem to have changed their minds as a result of the deadly post-verdict violence. There is a fantastic amount of goodwill toward the afflicted area and its residents by Southern Californians of all politics and species. The morning after the riots some scorched streets had more outsiders cleaning up than locals. (On that Saturday morning, I did see truckloads of Revolutionary Communist Party stalwarts race through South-Central, red flags flying in the smoke-soiled breeze. Unlike the guilt-stricken petit bourgeois volunteers with their palliative, reformist Band Aid solutions who streamed, by the hundreds, into the areas around Florence and Normandie the RCP-ers carried no brooms and shovels, only leaflets proclaiming that the riots proved capitalism did not work.)

South Los Angeles suffers. It is in pain. It is caused by something over and above the statistics about the loss of blue-collar industry, the “black flight” of upwardly mobile African-Americans, the (sometimes justified, often not) “proning out” of young black men, double-standard “race justice,” dropout rates, discomfort at the growing presence of alien “Hispanics” and hatred toward “Orientals” (Koreans) who cheerfully return the compliment.

To the culture of violence, which the incoming police chief Willie L. Williams has identified as a core fact of life in South-Central precincts, we must add Los Angeles’ widespread culture of disappointment.

The violence that blacks and Latinos act out on the streets is the physical equivalent of an inner violence, of disappointed hopes and embarrassment at our inability to measure up to L.A.’s impossible promise, felt not only by minorities, as a result of social indices we know only too well, but by many whites who come West for a rebirth of self. It is hard for outsiders to comprehend how many Angelenos really believe they were fated to star or work in movies. The “American Dream” here becomes a Hollywood Nightmare that poisons as it enlivens our peculiar, celebrity-driven ethos. Star-envy, which paralyzes some of the smartest, nicest people I’ve ever met, was also on the minds of the brave souls who, in torturing Reginald Denny, cut up for the camera hovering overhead.

All of this happened in Los Angeles, not Newark or Chicago. Until the riots, many out-of-staters saw us as wigged-out Martians living on another planet. Watch any Woody Allen movie, go into any middle-American home and catch the cracks about “Hollyweird.” To leave where we come from for “L.A.”--40% of Angelenos are foreign-born and most of the rest of us seem to come from Topeka or Tuscaloosa--was always an implied criticism of hometown. The kids I grew up with in Chicago never completely forgave my relocating to California, along with millions of other post-World War II G.I. Bill vets. We came for a “second chance,” a new start, and felt our decisions were validated by the easy climate, plentiful jobs and wide-open spaces defined by beach and mountains--a “lifestyle” dominated by back-yard barbecues and a sense of always being properly dressed in shorts.

But forget all that nonsense about nonconformist or flaked-out L.A. Until April 30, 1992, we were a jumped-up cow town with Confederate sympathies, deeply nervous as only spiritual Midwesterners can be that something about Los Angeles might unlock our crazier impulses. Who would control us? Hence, the Devil’s pact with the LAPD--a policeman to curb our walk on the wild side. The LAPD seriously issued tickets for jaywalking: Does this happen anywhere else in America?

Our police chiefs have been our governors. If the modern LAPD began as an anti-labor, anti-radical, anti-immigrant tool of the Los Angeles Times and the Merchants and Manufacturers Assn., it soon grew into the most visible arm of city government, a high-school principal in a flak jacket. Police paramilitarism suited the city fathers, the labor movement, the Chamber of Commerce, small business, the suburbs--almost everybody except blacks and Mexican-Americans. Before the LAPD ravaged the African-American community, cops freely beat, shot and framed the pachucos and and “wetbacks” who were seen as the greater racial threat. The first story I ever wrote as a journalist was about the LAPD murder of a young Latino named Augustine Salcedo.

Now that it’s safe to do so, everybody is dumping on Daryl Gates, a cunning, stupid, awesomely mediocre clerk-savior in blue. After Watts in 1965, he promised and delivered a surgically clean, hi-tech, SWAT-focused police force that was widely disliked by whites as well as blacks. Long before Gates, I was frequently proned out by “pro-active” L.A. cops for driving with a busted rear light or because I was idle on a street corner; one night on Wilshire Boulevard, two cops forced me to my knees and one of them made me eat his service revolver while the other came on to my date. Privately, people had few illusions about the gangster ethos of the LAPD. Publicly, no civic leader dared argue with it. Tom Bradley, Zev Yaroslavsky, Nate Holden and the other City Council members probably feared the rumored police spy files. What they feared more was the kill-the-king sacrilege implied in even lightly criticizing the police proconsul who somehow held us together as a city. Now, in Williams, the LAPD has a hope of joining the human race, and the other American urban police forces whose best men were truly shocked by the Rodney King verdict. Cops are not beasts unless, at some level, we ask them to be.

In other words, the “pathology” of rogue cops links up with the “pathology” of South Los Angeles, of Beverly Hills, of Hollywood--whose liberal-feminist-Democratic movie makers still don’t get it about the connections between screen and street violence. What the hell do they think a Blood or Eight-Trey Crip does when he reads Malcolm X (OK, listens to Ice Cube)and then watches “Terminator” or “New Jack City”?Probably the same thing as cops who rent videos of “Dirty Harry.”

Some of us whites do feel what blacks feel: a huge sense of injustice at how things have been ordered in Los Angeles up to now. We are all complicit. Not least African-American leaders who vie with the mob in violence-producing rhetoric, or Westside liberals pouring kerosene on the smoldering fires with cheap talk about “inevitability.” Liberal fatalism lit a match to the Aquarian Book Store, America’s oldest black-owned bookshop, as surely as cries of “No justice--no peace!”

Despair and rage are not exclusive to African-Americans. Life can be a bitch for many of us. The industrial “genocide” of the white, blue-collar working class, across the nation from the Monongahela Valley to Flint and South Chicago and now L.A.’s own Bell Gardens and South Gate, is as real to its victims as racism is to African-Americans. Unhappiness does not necessarily cry out for extraordinary violence to others. Some blacks’ claim that whites cannot know their pain is false as the claim by feminists, or the disabled, or fat people or Jews with Holocaust memories to exemption from normal judgment.

The riots were not “inevitable.” They were “caused” as much by South L.A.’s politicized culture of chaos, in which the self-destructive is sane and madness is normal. Thinking consequentially is a virtue lacking equally in black school dropouts who father multiple children, runaway corporations like GM that destroy a community like Van Nuys once it has served its profit purpose, a black mayor who sells the city to developers and ignores South-Central until it is too late, and those of us who were ready to pull down the justice system because, before the riots, a black postman who shot a dog got jail time and Mike Tyson went to prison but William Kennedy Smith did not.

Perhaps it is sloppy to suggest we were all responsible for what happened April 28. Most of us stayed home and gawked at television. But then, something important happened to L.A. and to me, too. Distances closed up; the city became mine as it never had before, as London and Chicago now belong to me, a place in the heart as well on my driver’s license. Since the fires burned out, I have been volunteering like crazy, mainly to be with or near African-Americans and their kids. Sometimes I’ve been rejected, even laughed at. It is not racial masochism to persist even in the face of insults. I refuse to have my spontaneous feelings of goodwill soured.

L.A. has always prided itself on prophecy, on being on the edge of style and change. We profited from this image when the living was good; now, things are tough, but it’s no time to hedge our bet. The roulette wheel we came to play is still spinning. A new American revolution, outlandish as it seems, could start in the burned-out heart of South Los Angeles if the rest of us keep our nerve.

Poor Superman never had to deal with a Metropolis like this. Up on Krypton, as in the America of my generation, you worked or starved. His mother did not blame the system if she couldn’t afford $150 Reeboks. Adolescent girls at Krypton H.S. didn’t use a child as a passport to being supported by the state. Boys married girls they got pregnant or they were chased out of town by fathers with horse-whips. Is Superman--a.k.a. Willie Williams--ready for us, and do we deserve him?