Love This Lethal, Stinkin’ Town

The following is an edited excerpt of a talk by author D.J. Waldie (“Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles”) Dec. 7 at the Los Angeles Public Library, as part of the Zocalo Public Square lecture series (www.zocalo la.org).

Because we’ve seen “True Confessions” and “L.A. Confidential,” “Lost Highway” and “Blade Runner,” we are certain we know what Los Angeles is. “Any reasonably intelligent American knows,” say the authors of the satiric guide “L.A. Bizarro,” “that Los Angeles is a rotten, stinking dump.”

You and I can recite the city’s defeated beliefs about itself like a catechism lesson for the regretful. What is Los Angeles? Los Angeles, for those lucky enough to get out, is a rite of passage and a fable of broken dreams.

The search for a usable story of Los Angeles -- an everyday history -- troubled this city 100 years ago. “How do we become ‘indigenous’ to this place?” the anxious new Anglo residents of Los Angeles asked at the turn of the [last] century. They were acutely aware that they lacked a story that would fit their American city into an unfamiliar landscape and one so recently appropriated from its Mexicano and Californio proprietors.

Now we buy so cheaply in Los Angeles and believe so easily, just take your pick of scriptures:

The story of Los Angeles is an elegy for a place of former perfection, a perfect place, once upon a time -- and the time was just before your new next-door neighbor arrived. That’s our history of regret.

Or the story of Los Angeles is a kind of pornography, in which every real-estate cliche is a menace: The city’s climate is actually lousy ... and the landscape is lethal (when it isn’t burning with wildfires or shaking with earthquakes, it’s crawling with fauna with a taste for suburban white meat). In its contempt for its subject -- in its belief that we’re just along for the ride -- that story is our pornography of despair.

Or the story of Los Angeles is merely a spectacle of this uniquely intoxicated place and its intoxicated people.

Or there is no story of Los Angeles. The city has simply disappeared from the narrative, a victim of the regime of speed and erased by forgetfulness.

Many of its citizens believe Los Angeles has one, last title: unnecessary city.

Pity them. And pity the city they think is unnecessary.

Cities are not mere conveyances of public services. They have a moral purpose. The moral purpose of a great city is to shelter a maximal diversity of public settings in which citizens might acquire the ability to sympathize with the condition of others and act on those conditions by communal and political means.

Remembering is an act of courage in Los Angeles. Memory is sabotage against the city’s regime of speed.

Environmentalist and writer Barry Lopez asks, “How can we become vulnerable to Los Angeles?”

Hunger for memory is one way. Take delight in the city’s stories. Find yourself in its history. Long for a sense of place. Fall in love. But what would inspire your allegiance to Los Angeles?

This city has failed to give its residents what they critically need: reasons to be faithful to each other that go beyond the politics of shared grievances. This city has not inspired faithfulness because it has not offered much that stands against the easy belief that no shared loyalties are possible at all.

Los Angeles is a ruined paradise, I agree, and in desperate need of us.

It was the fate of Los Angeles -- I almost said the grace of Los Angeles -- to be the paradise we’ve ruined and, as a consequence, now our home.