Think Good Thoughts

The trouble with L.A.’s bleak national image is that the people who live here are not thinking good thoughts and this creates a negative energy in the atmosphere.

We are going around grumbling all the time about smog, freeway tie-ups, random killings, inept legislators and sewage in the ocean, when we ought to be talking up the sweetness of life.

Don’t think sewage. Think sailboats on the sewage.

New York had the same problem until its I-Love campaign turned the Big Apple around. Now it’s the second-happiest kingdom on Earth.

Not that image tampering is new. Ancient Byzantium solved its reputation for being ugly, crowded and violent (sound familiar?) by the creative expediency of changing its name to Constantinople.

What brings this to mind is an offer by a Pittsburgh public relations man to design a campaign for L.A. that would add luster to its tarnished image. His name is Paul Alvarez and his company is Ketchum Communications.

The campaign, which he would design for free, would cost about $250,000. Its implementation, which he would not do for free, would cost millions.

In a speech last week to a downtown business club, Alvarez said America’s perception of L.A. hit rock bottom last April when Time magazine ran a cover story that asked, “Is the City of Angels Going to Hell?”

It seemed that everyone read the thing, including my sister Emily in Oakland who vowed she would never visit Los Angeles again because “there are too many bamboozles there.” I don’t think Time mentioned the bamboozles, but it should have.

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Normally, L.A. gets about 20 million tourists every summer, but we suspect the number may be decreasing due to articles like Time’s.

In his speech here and in a subsequent telephone interview (I caught him on the golf course), Alvarez suggested that we not ignore the negative aspects of the town, but simply accentuate the positive.

For instance, don’t say drug dealers are proliferating, say that their unemployment rate is steadily declining.

What this would do, Alvarez says, is cause all of us to think in more positive terms about ourselves and reinforce the reasons why we came to L.A. in the first place.

“You’re not alone in your problems,” he said in a tone meant to calm my fears. “Detroit, Washington and New York have been having problems for years, and they’re still standing.”

The next time your car breaks down at 2 a.m. somewhere off Atlantic Boulevard and a Chevy full of armed gangbangers pulls up, don’t panic. Think, “It could be worse. I could be in Detroit.”

Alvarez, manifesting his own brand of positive thinking, blames the local media for making our shortcomings seem worse than they are.

“L.A. is in a state of shock,” he said, referring to all of our sudden aggravations. “You are all thinking ‘How could this have happened to us?’ And the stories that appear tend to strengthen this perceived decline.”

True. For instance, the day we reported his image offer in our Metro section, the major local story on Page One dealt with a white supremacist plot to kill Rodney King and blow up the First AME Church.

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But, hey, I’m willing to accept some of the blame for enhancing our negative image. If thinking good thoughts will redress the problem, I say let’s get started.

A good place to begin would be to offer a bumper sticker slogan meant to enhance our feeling for L.A. on a level with the “I Love New York” campaign . . . which, by the way, also followed a Time magazine cover piece called “The Rotting of the Big Apple.”

It would be inappropriate, however, to adopt an “I Love L.A.” approach because love, while it embraces a theatrical quality in New York, is more basic in L.A., due to the influence of our movie industry. When we think of love we think of, well, doing it, and “I Love Doing It in L.A.” is not what Mr. Alvarez had in mind.

You can’t really adore a city either, and simply liking one (“I Like L.A.”?) is too noncommittal. Our passion for a geographic entity should not equal that of Tristan for Isolde exactly, but neither should we relegate it to the level of a cinematic buddy relationship.

“L.A. Is OK” is about as close as I’ve come to a decent logo, but even that seems damning with faint praise.

I guess it’s up to Paul Alvarez from Pittsburgh to show us the way, although he has already hit stumbling blocks. He can’t find our psychological or political center. “Lost in L.A.” could be his bumper sticker.

Maybe we should just forget the whole thing. Kick out the bamboozles, change our name to Constantinople and pray to God that Time magazine doesn’t notice.