A City Bound : For L.A., There Is No Destiny Without Unity

Behind the furor resulting from the verdicts in the Reginald O. Denny beating trial--the screaming headlines, the radio- and TV-talk shows, the opinion pieces and editorials--looms the shock, the silence, the question: Who are we? What have we allowed ourselves to become in the city that time and history created, this City of Angels?

Like the antiphonal choruses of Greek tragedy, a divided Los Angeles taunts itself. “So this is it!” chants the first chorus. “A brick can smash a skull, a thug can do a dance of joy over the bleeding, broken form of an innocent man; and a jury, intimidated and confused, can say that this is less, far less, than it seems.”

“Now you know how it feels!” answers the opposing chorus. “You have been doing this to us for centuries. Now we are repaying you in kind!”

Then comes the recognition that choruses of hate and rage--all these accusations, all these irreconcilable differences across barriers of income and race--can lead Los Angeles nowhere, save back to a repetition of a fear cycle.

Denny has already told us this, with a forbearance and a forgiveness--a silence, a refusal to demand vengeance--that displays a wisdom, a fundamental human goodness that should make this man one of the enduring heroes of this city. If there are sins in our history--the history of the United States, California or Los Angeles--that demand atonement, Denny is truly the sacrificial victim delivered up to the angry mob on behalf of all of us. He was lynched, with all that such a metaphor implies. He was crucified. (And yes, with all that this metaphor implies as well.) Astonishingly, he has forgiven those who took a brick to his head and kicked his prostrate body.

Can Los Angeles, on both sides of the issue, now do likewise? Can Los Angeles forgive itself? Can Los Angeles give itself yet one more chance to become the human community, the city in time, inclusive and hopeful, a destiny that history has always intended for the City of the Angels?

Two hundred and twelve years ago, 44 men and women of African, European, and Native American descent set down a city on a plain at the bend of a river. They named it Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula--the City of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula (Porciuncula being the place in Italy where St. Francis of Assisi began his public ministry in the 13th Century by rebuilding a chapel).

That early Los Angeles was a simple matter--a few adobe buildings, a small church, arranged around a square. But in the minds of its settlers and in the intentions of the Law of the Indies that guided its foundation, this pueblo, despite its simplicity, was an intersection of time and eternity. Here would be reconciled, once again, the City of God and the City of Man--this time on a semiarid plain in a remote province of the Spanish empire, with chaparral and mountains in the distance and the ripple music of a brave, if temperamental, river nearby.

Established by the Spanish Crown in 1573, the Law of the Indies decreed that every Spanish city in the New World, however humble its beginnings, had a grand destiny, including a moral and spiritual destiny, that the founders and the citizens who came after them must always keep in mind. Now is the time to recapture that conviction of destiny and build for the future.

Los Angeles has shown itself more than capable of establishing the physical fabric of a great city. Even as its social fabric started to unravel during the 1980s, Los Angeles pushed the Blue Line from downtown to the sea, completed the first phase of a multibillion-dollar subway, built a replica of the Spanish Steps on Bunker Hill, renovated its port and Central Library, reclaimed Pershing Square, brought to completion the long-overdue Century Freeway.

In and of itself, the renovation of Pershing Square, now nearing completion, offers a paradigm of how Los Angeles is everywhere recycling itself through public works. In social, cultural and psychological terms, Pershing Square has every claim to be considered, after Founders Plaza, as ground-zero of the Los Angeles experience. It embodies the idea that there is such a place as Los Angeles; that it is a public, hence communally shared, entity; and that in some special way the self-awareness and identity of the city is connected to this place.

Yet, public works, however grand and compelling, are not enough. Public works alone cannot redeem the city. What good is it to reclaim Pershing Square--to set up there a campanile and an aqueduct dropping water into a stone-lined tidal pool, to plant palm and cedar and orange trees--if the people of the city are afraid of each other and will not sit together in the park and, instead of coming together in the city, leave the streets and public places to gangs and assorted sociopaths?

In the silence that will come after the anger on both sides of the Denny verdicts has spent itself, let the question be asked: Where do we go from here? Who are we building this city for, if not each other?

In the lobby of the First Interstate World Center soars a great mural in bas-relief by the Russian emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. Entitled “Unity,” the mural depicts a heavenly choir composed of the grandest possible angels: bright cherubim and seraphim such as those that hovered over the Ark of the Covenant, or filled the visions of the prophet Mohammed, or were envisioned by St. Francis of Assisi, William Blake, Joseph Smith, or, in the days of slavery, consoled the tired bodies and anguished souls of the anonymous composers of the great African-American spirituals.

These angels are also the angels of Los Angeles. They are the angels in whose honor the Latino founders first named the city. According to Komar and Melamid, they are singing a song of a unity that today seems a long, long way off. Perhaps in the silence that now comes after the confusion and anger, Los Angeles may, once again, hear, if only faintly, the music of unity. There is--there must be--a better way of being in this city together. Angels can sing. So we are told by various traditions. Can they also weep?