Few writers about Los Angeles have the knowledge, clarity of consciousness and eloquence as D.J. Waldie. In this article headlined “The Foster City” at Zocalo Public Square cuts through the fog around Frank McCourt, Sam Zell and much of the history of the city to reveal something true and important about our shared moment. Whet your appetite on these excerpts but read the whole article at Zocalo Public Square:
“Something narrow and coarse in the imaginations of the McCourts and
Zell and Selig and their business partners squeezed out any moral
dimension to their deals or any feeling for Los Angeles. But to question
how they acquired so much of our place so cheaply is uncomfortable for
Angeleños. Better to grumble about indifferent outsiders. Seen from
their perspective, Los Angeles has only market value, the sort of value
that sold Los Angeles to the world as one of the most successful
lifestyle products of the 20th century.
“Not any more. Too many deals have soured; too much of the city has
been taken into receivership. Even our citizenship – already problematic
- has been foreclosed. Deals under duress have taken too many of our
civic institutions from local control and put them in the hands of
monitors and special masters, raising another question we would prefer
to duck: Do we have the capacity to govern ourselves?”
————————————–
“Grudging compliance to special masters and appointed monitors may be
the best we have to give in a city fragmented by institutional barriers
and so distracted from civic concerns. Few of us want to see Los Angeles
as it is or what it should be; we’ve let others do it for us. This
city’s unaccountable political structure, its conception of power merely
as the means to another deal, and the city’s air of disconnected
neutrality have let thugs police its streets, unfeeling technocrats run
its services, and the McCourts loot its most-loved institution. And when
those faults became intolerable, others – not us – imposed their
solutions. We’ve come to expect this – and worse – from Los Angeles and
ourselves. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” might as well be the motto
on the city seal.
“Los Angeles succeeded once, less as a place and more as a succession
of slick real estate deals that have reached the limits of our
landscape. Truthfully, we never needed a shared moral imagination until
now, when so many desertions from the common good have shown us how
little loyalty the once powerful had for this place. And no deal, no
special master, no court-ordered monitor can supply what we lack.”
D. J. Waldie is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times and a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine. He is the author most recently of California Romantica with Diane Keaton. He blogs for KCET TV at http://www.kcet.org/user/profile/djwaldie.
