Category Archives: Americanism

Smart people demean Los Angeles in conversation more than any other big city in America. The pollution, the traffic, the anti-intellectual culture, the sprawl. And that's just the start. Most of the myths about L.A. circulate because locals don't feel a need to mount a vigorous defense. Talk bad about L.A. to an Angeleno and be ready for a shrug that says, "Don't like it? Great. Stay out. More room for us."

When I'm in these conversations, even as the San Francisco outsider that I am, I stress just one point: Los Angeles is the most complicated city in America. It's extremely hard to spend a week there and "get it." It's inaccessible. It's not friendly to just-stopping-in visitors. You don't have to love L.A. (though I do). Just withhold judgment until you've spent meaningful time there.

Here are a few reasons why I think Los Angeles deserves the honor of "most complicated":

* Decentralization. Los Angeles is a sprawling monstrosity of freeways. It's decentralized in every way. There is no one Los Angeles; there are many L.A.'s. There is not a "downtown" from which everything emanates. Other big cities are physically compact. Consider New York. It's easy to get around in New York. You can take the subway around Manhattan with no problem, the streets are straight and sequential, the tourist sights are concentrated, all the important companies are in one place, the five boroughs are well-defined, etc. San Francisco is the same way. NY and SF are dense in both geography and identity. Does the "metaphysical" mirror the physical?

* The scope and scale of the region's economic activity. The 22-million-strong Southern California basin means moviemaking and entertainment are just a piece of the economic activity. There are more manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles county, for example, than in the entire state of Michigan. The L.A./Long Beach ports comprise the fifth busiest in the world and the most important in the western hemisphere. Imports from China arrive first in Los Angeles. Understanding the economics of Hollywood does not mean you understand the economics of L.A.

* Los Angeles is the most ethnically diverse place in the world. It is "the most diverse human habitation in human history," says Robert Putnam. Many people forget this, since L.A.'s diversity is not as integrated as New York's or London's. You cannot walk around a Times Square equivalent and feel like you're in a melting pot. You have to work at it. But this doesn't mean immigrants are non-existent; quite the contrary. All these different people, all the different ways of thinking, the hundreds of different languages spoken: it complicates things, as the movie Crash depicts. (This is why, by the way, many foodies call Los Angeles the best ethnic food city in the world. Cultural omnivore Tyler Cowen calls L.A. his favorite American city.)

* The rich/poor contrasts; economic diversity. The Economist once called West Los Angeles the glitziest concentration of wealth on the planet. Then there's Southeast L.A., right around the corner. There's Skid Row. Then there's Beverly Hills. Even the Bronx/Manhattan or Hunter's Point/Pacific Heights contrasts don't rival what exists in Los Angeles.

* There is not one unifying civic identity. Los Angeles doesn't impose a civic identity on its people like New York or San Francisco. L.A. writers don't identify as an "L.A. writer" like New York writers do. You're more alone in L.A. You're more anonymous. (The positive spin: you can most easily be yourself in Los Angeles.) Los Angeles has some of the lowest levels of trust among its people — ie, neighbors trust each other less. I would guess that civic pride is lower there than in most other places.

In sum, to spend time in Los Angeles is to experience non-stop contrasts and contradictions. In a matter of minutes you can go from an idyllic view of palm trees, shifting effortlessly in the wind like in the movies, to observing a wrapped assortment of Botox-enhanced, intellectually vacuous women coughing on dirty air. You drive on a 10-lane freeway with a Caltech egghead to your left and Britney Spears to your right. It's bizarre, it's insane, it's confusing, it's complicated, it defies attempts to capture its essence. Perhaps it is essence-free.

A quick visit to Los Angeles clarifies nothing other than that the 405 freeway is to be avoided at all hours of the day.

Related Posts:

• Here's my post on L.A.'s diversity.
• A paragraph on L.A.
• One of the most eloquent and compelling overviews of the place: It's L.A. You Don't Matter. You're Free.

By the way, here is Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart on Bloggingheads.tv talking about why Washington D.C. has overtaken New York as the intellectual capital of the U.S.

From Salman Rushdie in his novel Shalimar the Clown (review forthcoming). In poetic fashion it captures some essence of LA, and near the end of the graf speaks to why I think it’s a city better to live in than visit.

He praised the city, commended it precisely for the qualities that were commonly held to be its greatest faults. That the city had no focal point, he professed hugely to admire. The idea of the center was in his view outdated, oligarchic, an arrogant anachronism. To believe in such a thing was to consign most of life to the periphery, to marginalize and in doing so to devalue. The de-centered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blog, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it the true democratic city of the future. As India [name of daughter] navigated the hollow freeways her father lauded the city’s bizarre anatomy, which was fed and nourished by many such congealed and flowing arteries but needed no heart to drive its mighty flux. That it was a desert in disguise caused him to celebrate the genius of human beings, their ability to populate the earth with their imagings, to bring water to the wilderness and bustle to the void; that the desert had its revenge on the complexions of its conquerors, drying them, ingraining lines and furrows, provided these triumphant mortals with the salutary lesson that no victory was absolute, that the struggle between earthlings and the earth could never be decided in favor of either combatant, but swung back and forth through all eternity. That it was a hidden city, a city of strangers, appealed to him most of all. In the Forbidden City of the Chinese emperors, only royalty had the privilege of remaining occult. In this brilliant burg, however, secrecy was freely available to all comers. The modern obsession with intimacy, with the revelation of the self to the other, was not to Max’s taste. An open city was a naked whore, lying invitingly back and turning every trick; whereas this veiled and difficult place, this erotic capital of the obscure stratagem, knew precisely how to arouse and heighten our metropolitan desires.

Related Posts:

• In LA, You Don’t Matter. You’re Free.
• LA Diversity May Decrease Trust, But Optimism Reigns.
• LA and NY On Each Other via James Frey
• Disaster Mythology and Californian Identity

Hilarious map of the world. Click the image to blow it up.

Andrew Sullivan’s cover piece "The Case for Barack Obama" in the latest Atlantic contained these interesting sentences:

To be black and white, to have belonged to a nonreligious home and a Christian church, to have attended a majority-Muslim school in Indonesia and a black church in urban Chicago, to be more than one thing and sometimes not fully anything—this is an increasingly common experience for Americans, including many racial minorities. Obama expresses such a conflicted but resilient identity before he even utters a word. And this complexity, with its internal tensions, contradictions, and moods, may increasingly be the main thing all Americans have in common.

Could be. A "mongrel" sense of self as the predominant form of identity is a case G. Pascal Zachary makes forcefully in The Global Me: New Cosmopolitans and the Competitive Edge. I finished it yesterday and recommend the book to anyone interested in globalization, cosmopolitanism, and hybrid identities.

Fred Kaplan of Slate solicited over a hundred suggestions from readers (mostly Americans living abroad) on how to improve America’s image in the world. The ideas are good and interesting but not terribly surprising. I second the thought American personnel in U.S. customs or embassies need to be much friendlier. Excerpt:

And so the most prominent suggestion on how to improve America’s face in the world—a suggestion made by well over half of those who wrote me—is to send the world more American faces and to bring more of the world’s faces into America.

In other words, these readers say, there should be a vast expansion in the Peace Corps, in Fulbright fellowships, and, above all, in student-exchange programs.