L.A.’s Own Brands of Parochialism

Some woman telephones me at least as often as my mother does, and she never gives me her name--only a piece of her mind, usually about some story we’ve screwed up or, once in a while, something we’ve done right.

She called last week to scold about our storm coverage: that with 150 miles of Southern California freeways closed and frozen winds blowing faster than the Montana speed limit, the top story on Page One in the Los Angeles Times was about the Dodgers being put up for sale.

Going strictly by the numbers, she’d be right. Dodger Stadium seats at most only 56,000 people; a quarter-million people were left in the cold and the dark by the storm. Millions more inconvenienced.

Yet storms and power blackouts come every year. The Dodgers have brought home nine pennants and five World Series trophies. The team’s arrival nearly 40 years ago made L.A. feel like a grown-up city. We wove the Dodgers into our threadbare regional identity; their departure could knock us off balance like a broken freeway support. And that is why it was bigger news than the storm.

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Los Angeles County’s reputation is that of a super-burbia, the Pirandello metropolis, all those suburbs in search of a city, 9 million people questing for some unifying concern apart from the internal combustion engine.

L.A. County is as big as Hawaii, bigger than Connecticut, than Delaware, than Rhode Island. One end of the county can be snowed in at the same time the other end is getting sunburned. All of Manhattan--all of it--could fit into our trifling 28 square miles of marshland and still leave some room for the shorebirds.

Established towns across the county--like Palos Verdes Estates, in 1939--incorporated themselves just to keep from being “geophaged,” eaten up by Los Angeles County government or by the ambitious burg next door. Now the San Fernando Valley talks of divorcing L.A., and Orange County--which broke away from L.A. in 1889--hears mutterings of secession in its own nether regions.

Official blue signs appear more often along L.A.’s streets, “district” signs that mean “This may look like an undifferentiated piece of L.A. to you, but it was, and it is, Carthay Circle,” or Rancho Park, or Eagle Rock. It is a neighborhood.

There is at one end a parochialism of the kind that Mayor Richard Riordan, in an excess of enthusiasm, showed when he praised city firefighters’ work in the 1993 Malibu fires, adding, “As a result of that, also, the fire has not reached the city limits of L.A. at this time.”

At the other end is a brand of supra-citizenship that knows Manhattan better than it knows downtown L.A., and that concerns itself more with the problems of Burma than in the county where they live.

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Michael Dear is director of the Southern California Studies Center at USC, a Welshman who has lived in other world cities and concluded that “pretty much anywhere I’ve lived, people are only interested in very close neighborhoods.” He once measured the falling-off point at two to six blocks from home. “As long as it’s not in their immediate bailiwick, they’re fairly indifferent. . . . L.A. is no better or worse off than anywhere else.”

So it isn’t us; it’s human nature.

You remember nature. It is, as Katharine Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen,” what we are put on this earth to overcome.

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On my way home, I had stopped for gas in a mostly Latino part of town on the Eastside, when a teenager walked up, soliciting for some laudable cause like keeping kids in school or out of gangs.

Good for you, I said, and--recalling some charity rip-off in the Valley--asked: Tell me about your group. And do you have one of those cards from the city, the one issued to authorized nonprofit groups trying to raise money?

The kid hadn’t the remotest idea what I meant. In the car at the next pump, a woman whose boyfriend was buying gas had been listening. She leaned over the steering wheel and shouted at me, “Hey bitch--maybe you gotta have some card in Encino, but we don’t.”

Encino! That hurt. I live a mile from that gas station. I tended to think of Encino in terms that that woman was projecting onto me: rich, white, by-the-book.

Our wide and uncrossed distances keep our stereotypes unchallenged, our questions unanswered: “Why do you have so many kids?” “Why do you have so many bathrooms?”

From the fastness of the San Fernando Valley, I heard that the Watts Riots were seen as no more troubling than a spiral of smoke from a backyard barbecue--and not their backyard.

A week after a 1987 earthquake made Whittier pitch and yaw, tearing up the venerable old town and killing a few people in the process, a Santa Monica woman asked me why the story was still Page One news. It’s over, it’s boring, and anyway, she hadn’t felt a thing. Because it could happen to you one of these days, I said.

And whaddya know--it did.