The Mini Me of National and State Political Concerns

It’s the hopping, happening center of the action, and you get three guesses: What city is it?

You said Sacramento? Oh, please. Not for nothing is economics called “the dismal science,” even in the hands of Herr Budget-Buster, Arnold Schwarzenegger. If the governor ever worried that public office would intrude on his privacy, surely he’s learned by now that pursuing the drab minutiae of government all but guarantees privacy. The television medium that helped to get him elected has turned its lenses back to the real newsmakers, like Scott Peterson and Robert Blake.

Washington, D.C.? Not when everyone is following the road-show fisticuffs of the Democratic presidential primary. And in the scavenger hunt for those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, President Bush has backed up practically to Crawford, Texas, to put modifiers between himself and WMD: “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.” By that definition, every high school chem lab, every farm with a bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer is arguably a potential WMD-related program activity.

Your last guess? Santa Maria, immortalized by Michael Jackson’s arraignment and dance solo on the roof of his GMC Yukon?

Sorry, that’s wrong. We do have some lovely parting gifts for you, though.

The correct answer is Inglewood -- Inglewood, California.

These days, Inglewood has everything -- not the way the travel agents mean it, but political “everything”: the nation’s concerns, the state’s concerns, in miniature.

* Organized labor. Over the weekend, some 14,000 union members and their cheering section rallied in Inglewood outside a shuttered Vons grocery store; it was the starting line for a national labor action on behalf of picketing grocery workers whose strike, if this were a pregnancy, would be well into its second trimester and is likewise thinking that its feet hurt.

* Disorganized labor and offshore manufacturing. Wal-Mart, having failed to persuade the Inglewood City Council to welcome the prospect of its mega-self, its baby-sitting-scale wages and local-merchant-killing pricing practices, has turned to the old California reliable, the initiative. Wal-Mart goes to Inglewood voters in April, asking to be able to come to town, eventually, no doubt, with one of its cradle-to-grave-supplies-manufactured-overseas superstores. It also wants to build without a public hearing or an environmental impact report or probably even blueprints. Before the election comes a court hearing this month on a lawsuit by the Coalition for a Better Inglewood, and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which say that the 85-page initiative is an unconstitutional end-run around city laws and codes.

* In sickness and in bankruptcy. Inglewood hospitals are on the verge of closing up tight as a kaffir lily at sunset. Tenet Healthcare Corp. bought Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital barely two years ago, and only on condition that it keep the place running until 2006, and the emergency room until 2008. But now Tenet has shriveled to junk-bond status by its own overreaching and medical misdeeds, and it’s put Centinela Hospital Medical Center on the auction block. Take two aspirin and call your legislator in the morning.

* Take a chance. Hollywood Park racetrack and its card club are linking up with Larry Flynt and L.A.’s card parlors for an initiative for November’s ballot. (I’m beginning to hate Hiram Johnson, the governor who brought us this initiative business in 1910.) This measure twists the arms of Indian casinos to give more gambling dough to the state or give up their monopoly on slot machines. If this passes, Inglewood could run more slot machines than any casino in Vegas -- 5,700 -- and the city would get 2% of the average daily take of $300 per machine. (Goodbye Wal-Mart, hello high rollers?)

* Police force, if you know what I mean. Once again, videotaped images of a white cop and a black citizen -- a teenager slung down onto the hood of a car by an Inglewood police officer who was fired once and tried twice, just like some of the officers in the Rodney King matter. In this case, two juries have hung. Round 3?

Inglewood -- just like everyplace else, only more so.

*

On the phone, the Rev. Altagracia Perez’s voice sounded like Lauren Bacall’s being played on a Victrola with a less-than-sharp needle. Sorry for calling when you’ve got a cold, I say, but no, she says, that’s the way I talk, OK, perhaps with a bit of fatigue from the Sunday sermon.

Her congregation at Holy Faith Episcopal Church is in the thick of all the vast national forces and concerns that have concentrated themselves over Inglewood. The church has adopted a supermarket, which means taking sandwiches and water to the striking grocery clerks, and taking up a picket sign now and then. Church members are working to keep their hospitals in town and in shape, and battling to stop Wal-Mart at the city line.

“It’s a small metropolitan area,” she says, “so urban issues that are happening all over the place are felt more deeply because it’s a smaller community -- like a microcosm of what’s going on everywhere else.”

To get biblical for a moment, the scale of their labors is David and Goliathan. They are undeterred, but too many people she meets just shrug and say, well, that’s the way things are: Wal-Mart will get its way, hospitals will close, Inglewood could become Vegas West.

And she wants to tell them all, “Wait a minute, they’re doing this to us! We should respond!”

In Inglewood Park Cemetery is the grave of Fred McMullin, dead these 50 years and more. He was one of the eight men expelled from baseball for throwing the 1919 World Series. It was a national scandal then; there are other national scandals now, of labor, of healthcare -- and some of them have come to Inglewood. If the Rev. Perez wants a battle cry, she might look no further than the memorable -- if memorably fabricated -- line put in the mouth of a little newsboy who spoke for the brokenhearted nation when, on the courthouse steps, he tugged at the sleeve of one of the eight ballplayers and cried: “Say it ain’t so!”

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@ latimes.com.