74
PARTISAN REVIEW
Fitzgerald had tried to teach us, it is rarely necessary for the rich to
prove the depths of their virtue. The rich are
reI/tiers,
and the rest of us
merely beg for a place at their table. "You have to take what the land–
lord gives," my mother used to tell her two sons. Post-war California
knew that it alone was America's rich landlord.
Its decline is statewide, but California's problems are most clearly vis–
ible in L.A. For a New Yorker who is always surprised at how much
genuine affection he feels for the city, there is a grimness to L.A. now, a
tawdriness that wraps the city in familiarity. L.A. is enough like New
York so that even poor Woody might feel secure there. Angelenos are
now as
angst-ridden
as the people who line up in Zabar's on Sunday
mornings. In their petulant whine of discontent, one detects the rising
note of urban breakdown , too close to a New Yorker's bone to be ig–
nored.
From the moment I first flew there in 1977 to take my ten-year-old
son to Disneyland, L.A. was "real" enough for me. As it struggles with
its future, the city seems not only on the verge of becoming the nation's
polyglot urban center but also a prelude of twenty-first century America .
One can despair of knowing it, yet still like and admire it. L.A. is so bent
out of shape that its agony seems surreal. Even when it was prosperous
and confident, it was never like other cities.
"A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving alone,"
writes Joan Didion , our most trenchant California observer, "through
streets devoid of meaning to the driver." Driving is
the
essential L.A. ac–
tivity. It dominates focus, defines one's sense of the city, measures exis–
tence itself. One drives the freeways as if in a Laurel and Hardy movie,
plunging downhill at breakneck speed, foot pumping useless brakes. The
laughter loud and hysterical, one nervously awaits rescue. In Hollywood,
deliverance is bound to come in the form of a haystack or a shallow
lake. There are no other acceptable endings.
Only what movie
deus ex lIlachill(/
can save California? Do we lay
odds on the sizable political debt Bill Clinton owes the state? Do we
ask the Wobbly ghost of Big Bill Haywood to return the promise of
plenty to our Pacific paradise? "Workers of California, Unite! You Have
Nothing to Lose but the Defense Industry!" Will a new Disneyland,
planned on so vast a scale that fake earthquakes will not only shake like
the real thing but merge into the real thing, return prosperity to our
most singular state?
Its decline not yet a free fall, California seems more defined since its
slide. When it was our American claimant, tourists came for scenery and
