COLUMN ONE : Optimism Flickers on the 4th : Many in Los Angeles have become disillusioned in the wake of riots and a bleak economy. A year after fervent celebration, the city has emerged a far less inviting place.

Only a year ago, Doreet Hakman’s pride in America was at a fever pitch. U. S. soldiers, having crushed Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, were storming through Hollywood in a dazzling victory parade.

From her Snow White Cafe, Hakman watched the flags, the crowds, the fighter jets whizzing above Los Angeles. It was like a fairy-tale--one golden moment of unity, optimism, sheer love of country.

“There was so much hope,” Hakman, 42, an immigrant from Romania, remembered. “I was so proud. It was such an indescribable kind of feeling.”

But for many, all that patriotic fervor has fizzled like a damp fuse. Today, as a more troubled nation celebrates its independence, Hakman is among the growing ranks of the disaffected.

Angry over a woeful economy, crime and homelessness, broken political promises and social upheaval born of the ever-widening chasm between rich and poor, Hakman now talks of abandoning the American Dream, fleeing riot-scarred Los Angeles for foreign soil.

“This country’s going to the dogs,” the cafe owner, a mother of two young children, said bitterly. “If there was any hope, it vanished. It cannot be worse than what it is.”

To be sure, opinions vary widely, and patriotism still flourishes in Los Angeles as it does from sea to shining sea. Across the city and the nation, millions of families will hang flags and mark the 216th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence with back-yard barbecues, picnics and fireworks displays. But this year--in Los Angeles, especially--there is a more subdued tone to the celebrations, absent the chest-pounding pride of a year ago.

Once touted as a jewel of the Free World, a melting pot of extraordinary prosperity and tolerance, Los Angeles has emerged, in one tumultuous year, as a far less inviting place--a strife-torn city where many of America’s most deeply felt problems are laid bare. To be an American in Los Angeles these days is to find one’s belief in flag and country challenged by the buffeting crosswinds of guilt, fear and confusion.

Scarcely two months after the Rodney G. King verdicts touched off the nation’s worst riots in this century, a dark cloud of rancor has settled over much of the landscape. The vibrant spirit of a year ago has given way to a harder look at what Los Angeles really is: a powder keg where Bel-Air mansions coexist with rock houses and Skid Row lean-tos; where homicides and racial tensions are daily facts of life; where vital health-care programs and school districts teeter on the brink of insolvency.

In a rather sullen time of self-analysis, the Fourth of July stumbles into town like a man in a harlequin suit, a glad-handing Uncle Sam who--this year, anyway--doesn’t quite seem to fit. He draws as many shrugs as salutes. He vows to fill the sky with exploding rockets, while all around him--especially in black and Latino neighborhoods--anxious citizens recall nights when Los Angeles burned like a Roman candle.

“The firecrackers came early in Los Angeles this year,” remarked Gloria Romero, 36, an assistant chairwoman of the psychology department at Cal State Los Angeles. In the aftermath of the riots, Romero has been studying student attitudes toward law enforcement and American society. Though the results are still being tabulated, the overall responses are “really quite disconcerting,” Romero said.

“There is a growing cynicism, a growing alienation,” Romero said. “The economy looks bleak. Students are graduating and saying, ‘What’s next?’ There is really the notion that the (American) dream has been deferred.”

The bitterness is deepest among blacks, followed by Latinos and whites in three sample groups she is studying, Romero said. “What you see now in people’s eyes in certain sections of the city is a depression,” Romero said, “which is really anger turned inward. It’s a mess out there.”

Not everyone exhibits such anguish. The proud light of freedom still shines brightly among many citizens, even in poor and ravaged communities where the American Dream might seem only a flicker.

“I’m still an American, and I’m still patriotic as an American,” declared Kaffie Powell, 60, a Korean War veteran of African heritage who resides in Los Angeles’ crime-ridden 77th Division police precinct, a dozen square miles pock-marked with riot-charred buildings, including one at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues where some of the riots’ worse violence occurred.

“I know there are many problems (in America), but they’ll be worked out eventually,” Powell said. “It doesn’t change my feelings about being an American.”

Rachel Reyes, 47, of East Los Angeles celebrated gratefully last year when her son Timothy returned unharmed from the Gulf War, and she plans another big bash today. About 100 members of her extended family--all dressed in red, white and blue--are going to the park for an evening of games and fireworks.

Never mind that Los Angeles--and all of America--seems to have found itself on “shaky ground” in ways that cannot be measured on a Richter scale. Reyes is a die-hard Republican with abundant Yankee optimism.

“I wouldn’t stand under no other flag if I was put before a firing squad,” Reyes said. “First and foremost, I’m an American, and then a Hispanic.”

But for many others, patriotism is a word that leads to soul-searching. Many draw painful distinctions between the elegant constitutional ideals and creative genius of American forefathers and the myriad, seemingly insurmountable problems of the day.

Chilton Alphonse, a former Black Panther member anS. Navy man who runs a program for inner-city gang youths, calls America “the greatest country on the face of this earth.” But Alphonse is angry, afraid that American leaders are “writing off” minority youths by failing to provide adequate job opportunities and education. He struggles to reconcile his belief in the system with the despair on the streets.

“It’s hard for anybody to celebrate when their pockets are empty,” Alphonse said. “Unless the greedy quit being so greedy and help the needy . . . the whole ship is going down.”

Among many blacks, the Fourth of July sparks little in the way of patriotic reflection. “Who was being set free? Who was independent?” asked Jamil Shabazz, a Muslim father of three who owns the Crenshaw Cafe. “It wasn’t us. We were slaves. We didn’t come over here on a cruise ship, man.”

Shabazz, like many others, is more concerned with issues at hand--the King verdicts, in which four white police officers were found not guilty of beating a black motorist; the Latasha Harlins case, in which a Korean-American shopkeeper was given probation last fall for shooting and killing a black teen-ager.

“From what I read in our Constitution . . . justice is supposed to be served,” Shabazz said. “(But) there are a lot of atrocities going down. It’s like the government has forgotten about George Washington--what those (founding fathers) stood for. This government is definitely not government ‘for the people’ anymore.”

But the Angst of unfulfilled expectations is not limited to minorities, nor to the poor; it spans the social spectrum. Even the wealthy are feeling the insecurities wrought by a changing world order--the sense that past prosperity is vanishing, the fear that our once-thriving nation is becoming tattered and directionless.

Gila Yashari, who cruises Beverly Hills in a white Rolls-Royce and sells multimillion-dollar homes, is celebrating the Fourth as usual--by baking a flag-shaped cake trimmed in blueberries and strawberries. Her loyalty to America is unwavering--”This is the greatest country one can live in”--but she fears for the nation’s future.

“Right now, I think we’re headed for a revolution in this country,” said Yashari, who arrived 22 years ago from Iran. “There are too many people suffering.”

As a real estate agent, Yashari is a wheeler-dealer of the $5-million and $10-million homes of families who can no longer afford the mortgage, where marriages are crumbling like the faces of Mt. Rushmore. Congress, she complained, keeps shelling out “zillions” of dollars in foreign aid.

To many middle-class Americans, such complaints are old news, along with problems of rising crime, inflation and deteriorating schools.

Thomas Caldwell, 48, a disabled baker born and raised in Highland Park, is one of those who claim that America has been in decline for years. He became so disillusioned with national politics when John F. Kennedy was assassinated that he still does not vote.

In Caldwell’s view, Highland Park--never a Camelot--has become particularly troubled in recent years by gang shootings, drug-dealing and robberies. They even got his VCR the other day.

“It’s getting worse and worse and worse,” Caldwell said bitterly. “You can’t even sit on your front porch and enjoy the doggone sunset because of the doggone killings and robberies.”

As the economy has slowed, such feelings of disaffection have become more widespread, not only in Los Angeles but throughout the land. In a nationwide Gallup Poll conducted in May, three out of four Americans said they were “dissatisfied with the way things are going” in the United States, compared to only one of two respondents who felt that way in May of last year.

The overall level of dissatisfaction in Gallup’s survey was higher than at any time since the 1982 recession.

“What is happening throughout much of America is a kind of sobering re-evaluation of self,” observed Dr. Claudewell S. Thomas, co-director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Martin Luther King Jr. / Drew Medical Center in Watts. “We’re no longer the home-run hitters. . . . We’re losing jobs to the rest of the world. That kicks the hell out of the American ego.”

The response to that, Thomas said, is often finger-pointing that tends to fracture society along racial and ethnic lines. In Los Angeles, an especially diverse metropolis of 8.8 million people, where dozens of languages are spoken and thousands of new immigrants arrive each year, the fissures have become glaringly visible.

For the past six consecutive years, statistics on hate crimes in Los Angeles County have risen steadily, according to the county’s Human Relations Commission. Though it is unclear whether the figures point to an actual increase in hate crimes or merely a rise in the number reported, there is clearly a sense of rising sensitivity--and therefore tension, said Bunny Nightwalker-Hatcher, a senior consultant for the commission.

Trade tensions with Japan last year spawned widespread incidents here of harassment directed at Japanese-Americans, including one incident in Claremont in which a home was spattered with eggs and human feces by a vandal who spray-painted “You rice ball” across an exterior wall.

More recently, escalating tensions between blacks and Koreans have further defined Los Angeles as a racist city.

“(We’re) no melting pot,” Night-walker-Hatcher said. “We’re a kaleidoscope . . . wildly spinning colored chips, which means we’re in a constant state of flux. And change is very scary.”

A society in flux--whites may soon constitute a racial minority in Los Angeles--has raised fundamental questions about what America really is, and where it is going.

Marcia Choo, 27, who emigrated from Korea at age 5, regards herself as American as anybody, saying she would not live anywhere else. Still, she said, she faces racial slurs and subtle insults every day.

“Sometimes, I don’t know what being an American really means,” Choo said. “America seems to be defined by white Americans.” But no longer is this a nation where everybody “is like Ozzie and Harriet,” she added. “I don’t know if it ever was, but it sure as hell isn’t now.”

The explosion of black rage during the riots changed impressions about America for a lot of Los Angeles residents, many of whom, in foreign tongues and broken English, were working 12- and 14-hour days in tiny storefronts, singing their own American tune.

Key shop owner Charles Yoon, 62, who watched Koreatown burn down around him, figures he will return to Seoul, sorely disillusioned. “It’s a shame,” he said. “Some people spend their whole lives (building businesses) . . . and it is lost in a few moments.”

David Joo, 28, the owner of a gun store, is staying. Business is booming.

Mayra Potter, 33, a Guatemalan whose Hollywood flower shop was looted and damaged to the extent of $20,000--virtually her life’s savings--wants to return to her homeland. But her husband, Rolando, wants to stay here, where her two young children attend Catholic school.

“We want to have our own house, want our children to have a better life,” Potter said. “We are so sad, believe me. Sometimes we hear in the news this (rioting) may happen again. Every day, when we close here, we are afraid because maybe we are going to find the next day it is destroyed again.”

Nightwalker-Hatcher, who is still analyzing and tabulating riot-related hate crimes for the county, is an American Indian of Yakima and Paiute blood. Born on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon and settled now in one of the world’s biggest cities, she has deep, complex feelings for a nation she looks at with cynicism and hope, pride and disappointment: a young nation still trying to find itself.

“Two hundred years, that’s the flash of a firefly in the night,” Nightwalker-Hatcher said, drawing a contrast between the short reign of Yankeeism and the rich history of a land that has stood here, proud and free, throughout the millennia. “For me, this is an old country,” she said. “This is my mother. And I love my mother.”