Leaderless and Loving It
You wake up one morning with a feeling of malaise. You’d say it was the merlot, but you don’t drink. See what this place does to people? If you obsessed on local government like the people in other cities, unhealthy cities, real cities do, you’d understand: You’re not sick. You just have no leadership.
You have no Rudy Giuliani to tell you not to cross the street unless there’s a light with a small white man on it and the letters W-A-L-K. You have no Richard Daley to boss your schoolteachers around from that cradle of enlightenment, City Hall. Why not? Because those mayors are in New York and Chicago, and you are in Greater Los Angeles, land of a thousand mayors, all chanting: We need leadership.
Perhaps you heard the official civic mantra last month, when this newspaper surveyed a group of thoughtful people from the City of L.A. The subject was charter reform (two words so fraught with confusion they’re almost their own kind of mantra) and the group opined pretty unanimously that the power balance of the City Charter really really needs to be reformed because the City of Los Angeles really really needs leadership.
There’s some truth to that, but you have to wonder if it’s the whole truth: Poor City of Los Angeles. Three million people. Milling around like tribes in the desert, Moses-less. Poor Mayor Richard Riordan, having to seem leaderly next to guys like Giuliani. As if Riordan couldn’t make Giuliani look like a piker if only he, too, had that many jaywalkers to hassle. Hey, it’s not easy to sound like Winston Churchill when your most promising line is, “All right, buddy, drop the leaf blower and put your hands behind your head.”
But the City of Los Angeles isn’t alone in the no-leadership fret-along. It’s hard to name an institution in Southern California lately where people aren’t complaining that nobody’s in charge: The MTA. The health care system. School districts from Simi Valley to Laguna Beach. Even the Dodgers got into the act this week, with the retired Brett Butler questioning Mike Piazza’s leadership quotient, and Piazza retorting that “you lead according to your personality. Guys can smell a fake.” (So duh.)
The brow-furrowing got so incessant that, out of sheer annoyance, your correspondent finally put down her Perrier and picked up the phone. Lacking leadership, she wasn’t sure what to do next, but then she followed a time-honored trick of the leader-impaired: She called a consultant--Warren Bennis, a distinguished professor of business at USC.
Bennis laughed and recalled a piece he had written. It had been entitled “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?” He’d like to say it was timely, but he’d written it in 1975. In fact, Bennis said, people worry constantly that there are no leaders, perhaps because strength and wholeness and good character have always been rarer than they ought to be.
But, he mused, “there does seem to be something elemental and muscular about the leaders you see in other cities that you don’t seem to see in Los Angeles.” He ticked off but one example: L.A. vs. New York. Riordan vs. Giuliani. O’Malley vs. Steinbrenner. Ex-mayor Bradley vs. ex-mayor Koch.
He was right, of course, but in a way that seemed more intrigued than outraged. George Steinbrenner? Who wants to live in a place where people are that easily led?
So I went to a smart friend on the Westside who has lived in Southern California for about 30 years: Didn’t he wish that this loose affiliation of suburbs could be less municipally flabby? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were more like those buff cities back East?
“You mean those cities where, when they say ‘You can’t fight City Hall,’ it actually means something?” he joked. I dropped the subject. Like most Angelenos, this guy loves having no leadership. No leadership was why he moved here. Like most Angelenos, he loves the way this metropolis refuses to fill in its blanks for you, the way its personality reflects the personality of its beholder, for better or worse.
This is why I love it, too, though to be sure, there are many ways in which its frontier mentality has stopped being cute. The schools need air conditioning and better-trained teachers and smaller classes in every grade; we need some consensus on where to put our airports; somebody needs to put somebody in charge of the MTA and let the folks who work there complete a plan, any plan. But by and large, these are problems for which we know most of the answers already; why should it take “elemental and muscular” leadership to make us ante up and cooperate?
Like Winston Church--I mean, Mike Piazza--says, “You lead according to your personality.” Well, the personality of this metropolis is the personality of . . . us. You want leadership, Southern California? Look in the mirror. Put down the Perrier. Step up to the plate.
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Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.