Ominous Ticking in the Distance

It’s when they start carting away the trash cans that it’ll be time to worry.

On the beaches, in the parks and libraries and courthouses of Los Angeles County are thousands of trash barrels, an innocuous bit of social engineering, a mild reproach to the thoughtless and the untidy.

They are not, to date, a local instrument of terror, as they are in Paris’ train stations and its Metro subway, where every trash can I saw was soldered shut after terrorists planted bombs in them last year. The IRA did the same in London’s Underground, after which there were no trash cans to be seen there at all.

We may shoot each other and knife each other but there is one thing you can say for Angelenos, and that is that as a rule we do not, by God, blow each other up.

Still, the day doesn’t seem to pass without a “suspicious package,” in bombspeak, turning up somewhere in greater, edgier L.A. County.

News item: A “suspicious package” received through the mail today by the district attorney’s office at the Rio Hondo Municipal Courthouse in El Monte turned out to be a doll.

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That “suspicious package” in an employee’s desk that prompted the evacuation at the Northrop Corp. in Pico Rivera turned out to be a box of travel and safety brochures.

Until Oklahoma City upped the averages for a while last year, the county sheriff’s bomb squad--the Arson-Explosives Detail, headquartered in Whittier--was getting about 10 reports each week, from decrepit hand grenades to homemade pipe bombs to the objects of anxious imaginations:

That “suspicious device” found outside a church in Lancaster was just a battery.

Fully suited up, their gear weighs in at 75 protective pounds. If that isn’t enough, they can deploy a robot on a 238-foot tether with a 5 1/2-foot reach. If the “suspicious package” can’t be blown up where it sits, it can be hauled off to the explosives range on the grounds of the jail in Castaic.

This is no irrational prudence by the excessively cautious. Ten years ago, Arleigh McCree, the internationally celebrated head of the LAPD bomb squad, and colleague Ron Ball weren’t wearing any protective gear when they got blown up by a pipe bomb in the North Hollywood garage of a movie makeup artist.

They’re easy to make, a sheriff’s bomb squad investigator had said back then. You can get the books in the library.

Just as homes were about to be evacuated, a “suspicious” clicking device found beneath the chassis of a transit bus near Norwalk following an anonymous bomb threat turned out to be a newly installed valve.

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That “suspicious package” found at the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena turned out to be a package of paintings.

A bomb in London SW1 means the IRA. A bomb in Los Angeles 91608 means “Waterworld.”

For bombings in L.A. are memorable for their rarity: the McNamara Brothers and the Times building in 1910. The Human Bomb, Carl Warr, who walked into the police chief’s office in 1912 with 53 sticks of dynamite and threatened to blow up downtown if the Red Car railway president didn’t raise his workers’ wages. The acronym-obsessed “Alphabet Bomber,” who set a bomb at the airport as the first letter in a campaign to spell out “Aliens of America” one explosive locale at a time.

Sheriff’s explosive experts determined that the suspicious “ticking” coming from a piece of luggage in Agoura Hills was caused by a child’s toy that somehow got activated.

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Over the course of a year and a half, the nation has had to come to terms with Oklahoma City, the Unabomber, a Viper Militia that supposedly nicknamed its bomb-making ingredients the “guacamole mix,” and now the starburst end of TWA Flight 800.

Wartime aside, a bomb in our 20th century national mythology represents something cowardly and furtive--something un-American.

Villains in political cartoons of the Jazz Age were anarchists and Bolsheviks carrying fizzing bombs--an image created in part by a constellation of mail bombs that began showing up at the homes of the attorney general, a Supreme Court justice, plutocrats and other men of parts. It made for perhaps the biggest mass roundup until Japanese Americans were collected after Pearl Harbor: 4,000 people, many of them foreign-born, were arrested the night of Jan. 2, 1920, across 33 American cities.

John Wayne and Audie Murphy and Wyatt Earp--the myths and the movies made them out to be straightforward straight-shooters. A man should look another man in the eye when he is about to kill him. Even the cowboy pilot in “Dr. Strangelove” delivered his atomic bomb to its target personally. That’s the way to settle a score.

Six road flares tied together--a centerpiece taken from a premiere party for MGM’s movie “Blown Away”--triggered a bomb scare after an actress took it with her and someone spotted it in her car.