Escape from L.A.

Dispatches from a once-great city in decline

Imagine living in paradise… you are never more than thirty minutes from the most famous beaches in the world. A bracing hike high above the mountain snow line is never more than an hour away. The sun is almost always shining in a bright sapphire-sky and the temperature is never more than five degrees away from seventy-five. Everywhere you look free range celebrities roam and the world’s greatest chefs inevitably make their way to your town to prove that they are among the world’s best. Every weekend you can choose between a live game featuring one of the city’s half dozen professional sports teams, a strip of music venues which have birthed most of the greatest rock acts that ever were, or dozens of comedy clubs from which the funniest men and women in the world have been discovered.

What on earth could make you leave a place like that?

Such is the great mystery of Los Angeles here in the early 2020’s… because people are leaving. A lot of them. In droves.

In my very first Substack essay, published here a little over a year ago, I argued that Decline is a Choice. That many of the public and private sector Oligarchs running Big Blue cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, along with the braindead government fucntionaries who do their bidding and the Press who covers for them, assume that the days of TAXI DRIVER and DEATH WISH have been forever buried in our past, never to return. But they haven’t yet learned that history isn’t always an arc… sometimes it’s a circle. And the policy choices being made in America’s bluest cities are indeed bringing the DEATH WISH era back, like a zombie from a very different kind of movie.

Worse, the choices that these Oligarchs and their Government lackeys make are done without much input from the public… a public which nevertheless must suffer the consequences of those choices when they inevitably fail.

Enter, Los Angeles… A once great city, something like a paradise on earth, really… now in the grips of a terrifying and, I suspect, irreversible decline.

The thing about this decline is that it’s not even the crime and homelessness that are the real problems. Yes, those are the issues that get all the national media attention, but the truth is that even though violent crime is WAY up in L.A., an individual Angeleno is still very unlikely to be directly impacted by it. And yes, the homeless population has exploded and tent cities have become an inescapable part of the city landscape, but again, this is a problem we mostly drive by on our way to other places. It turns out that very few Angelenos spend much time hanging out underneath freeway overpasses.

It’s likely that Angelenos would be much more forgiving on these issues, and much less likely to consider leaving the city, if our leaders seemed like they were switched on and working hard to fix the problem… but they are not. Gavin Newsom is already running for President and spends most of his time tweeting and appearing in ads to yell at Ron DeSantis. Our City Council spends as much time threatening us with vaccine and mask mandates or banning city employees from traveling to States whose politics offend them, as they do on actual city business. And our last Mayor happily slashed the LAPD budget after BLM spent a whole fourteen minutes angrily camping out on his lawn, right before skipping town to become the Ambassador to India.

But when it comes to actual governing, there is still one thing that gets Los Angeles politicians and their activist class allies as excited as a wolf at a chicken farm with a busted gate, and that is Tax Revenue. As Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, before he became a Progressive squish and told us that we should all “fuck our freedoms”…

“I am in principle against taxing, because I feel that the people of California have been punished enough from the time they get up in the morning and flush the toilet, they are taxed. Then they go and get a coffee, they are taxed. They get into their car, they are taxed. They go to the gas station, they are taxed. They go for lunch and they are taxed and it goes on all day long, tax, tax, tax, tax, tax. So even when they go to bed, you can really go into the bed and fear that you may be getting taxed while you are sleeping. There’s a sleeping tax. This is crazy.”

He was right (once) and it turns out that there is very little tangible benefit associated with being a responsible and productive Angeleno these days. Rather, if you are visibly productive, it seems to make you much more likely to be targeted by Los Angeles City government and punished for it.

It’s Government-sponsored psychological abuse, really. And I think it’s that insult added to the injury of living here day-to-day that winds up driving most of the population outflow. I mean, come one, at least buy me a drink before you screw me.

“But alcohol is bad for you…” whined the churlish city official… “try some pot instead… the sin tax rate is higher.”

OK, let’s first stipulate that there is nothing worse than physical abuse. But psychological abuse is awful in its own way. It’s insidious for one thing. The accomplished psychological abuser can gaslight their victim into believing that the abuse is their fault, and not the fault of the abuser. Which aptly describes the average Angeleno’s relationship with our city government, these days. We are being punished for our own good, you see, because we’ve been naughty.

What is it the memes say? “The humilation is the point”?

Nowhere is that kink indulged in with more relish than in the world of Los Angeles parking enforcement.

Almost every major Los Angeles street is lined side-to-side and end-to-end with derelict RVs. They never move, many are on blocks or have rotten tires and couldn’t move even if someone wanted them to. And yet they are never ticketed, and they are never towed. But woe be to the hard-working middle class Angeleno who returns to their parking meter even one minute late.

And it’s no better in the residential zones where meters are fewer and farther-between and where a confusing litany of sometimes contradictory street signs keep the rules about where and when you can park vague at best.

For a couple of years, I drove my youngest to a pre-school in a residential neighborhood along Venice Blvd every morning. The three parking meters closest to the school were blocked, every single day for two years, by one of those derelict RVs. One morning, while walking my kid to school, I saw one of L.A.’s most valuable revenue sources, a meter maid, giving some poor sap a ticket because they had parked on the wrong side of the street on street cleaning day (another of the City’s many pocket-picking scams). I lost my temper a little bit and said “hey man, why are you writing this guy a ticket when that goddamned RV has been sitting there taking up three metered spots for a year?” This meter maid (no I won’t call them Parking Enforcement Officers because they are odious creatures who thrive on human misery and do not deserve our respect) shrugged and said “Just doin’ my job.”

Got that? No one is responsble. No one is to blame. Everyone’s just doing their job… “following orders”, you might say.

Reminds me of my favorite scene from ABSENCE OF MALICE. Paul Newman plays a businessman whose life has been destroyed by a combination of what could only be called the Miami Deep State and the local Press who does their bidding. After he turns the tables and embarrasses them publicly, he finds himself in a hearing where he asks the mediator (played by Wilford Brimley) whom he should see about getting some justice. Brimley’s response, “Ain’t nobody to see… I wish there was,” is illuminating… and also depressing.

But there is more than one way to abuse a citizenry beyond simply squeezing them for every loose cent and then using that revenue to fund the city’s many Departments of Making You Sad. And when it comes to Governmental harrassment, the one thing we know for sure is that things can always get worse.

If you doubt that, then allow me to introduce you to “The Road Diet”, an idea so awful it could only have come from Calfornia.

Los Angeles officials describe The Road Diet as a way to “shift drivers to other transportation options by adding hundreds of miles of bicycle and bus-only lanes.” Which, on the surface, sounds entirely uncontroversial. But the real purpose of The Road Diet, one which they never ever admit out loud, is to make driving on L.A.’s roads so awful, so dispirting, and so soul-crushing that Angelenos voluntarily abandon their cars altogether in favor of Public Transportation.

What city officials have done is take major cross-city thoroughfares like Venice Blvd, which were once six lane roads, and remove one lane in each direction. That third lane is now reserved for cyclists and permanent parking spaces, and it’s separated from the other two lanes by rows of thick plastic barricades. You can only imagine what these changes have done to what was already an awful rush hour experience even before “The Road Diet” came along.

Hint: it ain’t good.

And since, when it comes to harrassing the citizenry, Governments are really into function stacking, here’s where The Road Diet combines with L.A.’s lax enforement of the metastasizing homeless situation to create another one of those Ur-problems that makes you believe humiliation really is the point. Now those derelict RVs have begun to park themselves in such a way that they block those brand new combo bike/parking lanes. Got that? Not only did they remove a lane that used to accomodate 33% of rush hour traffic, but now that new lane cannot be used for the purpose for which it was intended, because it’s blocked by a rotting RV with an overflowing five-gallon bucket under the on-board toilet.

In L.A., we call this “progress.”

And yet there are still many more layers of misery in this harrassment onion that we must peel back before we can fully understand the outflow of frustrated Angelenos.

For instance… why are they trying to get people out of their cars in the first place? For the “environment” of course. “Climate Change”… that great Governmental catch-all. “The cause of and solution to all of Life’s problems”, as Homer Simpson once said.

But as with everything else in Los Angeles, when it comes to our responsibility to protect the environment, some animals are more equal than others. If you are a productive hard-working Angeleno, the City already has its Eye of Sauron trained on all the things that add the most value to your quality of life. They have already targeted our cars with the Road Diet “nudge”, but if that doesn’t work, the nudge will become a “demand”, and if the demand doesn’t work, they will eventually resort to “force.” But it’s not just your car they want to take away… it’s also your gas stove, your appliances, your single family home, plastic straws, grocery bags, your lawn, your vegetable garden and a million other things that make city life easier and more convenient.

Even as the city is trying to force you into the extreme austerity of constant environmental vigilance, the homeless crisis is creating an environmental disaster that no number of cars removed from the city’s freeways can ever hope to keep up with. Several times a week I walk out my front door only to be greeted by the acrid chemical stench of L.A.’s newest mascot, the “homeless encampment fire.” Walk to the top of any parking facility or tall office building and look out across the cityscape and you’ll see tall columns of toxic black smoke rising up from multiple sites across the city. Oftentimes, L.A. looks a bit like the overhead shot of a collapsing Philladelphia as Brad Pitt escapes the city in the opening sequence of World War Z.

Worse… during the pandemic, the City spent god knows how much money on an army of hard plastic trash cans which they placed at intersections up and down major streets like Venice Blvd. The idea was that these heavy cans would be harder to tip over, more difficult to damage, and easier for the city to unload.

They’re all gone now, most of them reduced to puddles of black plastic slag. Turns out they’re pretty fun to light on fire if you’re homeless and cold or just a bored sociopath. One wonders how many internal combustion engines must be removed from the city to make up for the toxic smoke created by a single melting plastic garbage can.

But no matter. It’s the virtue signal that counts. Your lung health only matters to the extent that improving it can help Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass or London Breed or George Gascon or Barbara Ferrer get one step closer to their dream of National Office.

Its been a rainy winter here in L.A., which means once a week we’ve seen a river of sludge… a combination of human feces, garbage, and discarded masks from our Pandemic Cosplay adventure washed off the city streets and into the L.A. river, bound directly for the ocean that everyone pretends to care so much about… but of course, this is one kind of environmental crisis we shouldn’t worry about, because it’s not the kind of crisis L.A. is interested in solving.

Fear not though, it will soon be Summer. And as the rains end, we will soon begin to hear radio ads announcing “Los Angeles Flex Alerts”, in which we will be told not to use our appliances during “peak hours”, otherwise known as “the only housework hours available to those of us who actually work for a living”, because doing so could irrevocably shatter our already crumbling electrical grid. This will happen even as the city spends enormous time and resources to add even more electric cars and appliances to our over-taxed grid. Each year the blackouts grow longer and more frequent.

Property crime will continue to grind down the grim resolve of even the most committed residents. Almost everyone I know has had their catalytic converter stolen at least once. A repair that’s becoming difficult to afford since the demand for new parts is so high. They’re being stolen faster than replacements can be shipped in. The fact is that if you have your catalytic converter replaced with a cheaper used part, that part was probably stolen from another city resident. Many Angelenos no longer lock their cars at night because they’d rather the criminals be able to open their car door easily than be forced to break a window first.

And don’t bother calling the police for any of this… my wife called the cops once because a man was banging on our door and trying to get into the house. The cops never showed up, but at least they had the decency to call her the next day to ask how everything turned out.

Will things ever get better? I have my doubts.

What I can tell you for certain is that a year from now, another couple hundred thousand or so residents will have thrown up their hands in frustration and fled this city and state, and Gavin Newsom will have to find some new way to hide his absymal record (of which Los Angeles is a big part) in order to improve his chances of making it to Washington. We can only hope that much like our shattered dreams of living in paradise, Gavin’s dream too will end in frustration and humiliation.