The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
February 23, 2008 Saturday
First Edition
Only in California
by Don Watson
Hoping to make sense of a country of contradictions and extremes, Don
Watson set out on a series of journeys across the United States. In
this extract from his new book, he pays a visit to America Lite, the
atypical enclave of Santa Monica.
YOU DROP DOWN THROUGH THE HAZE ABOVE LOS ANGELES – the "marine
layer", scientists call it – and see the cars beginning to fill the
streets in the early morning sun. Two decades ago the city had smog
alerts a hundred times a year. Thanks mainly to the catalytic
converter they have become very rare, but an expert at UCLA says new
concentrations of ultrafine particles are killing or debilitating
thousands of people. In some places, a piece of the air not much
bigger than a pea contains a million or more of these things. You
land anyway. Half an hour in a taxi will have you in Santa Monica –
or "the People’s Republic of Santa Monica", as Republicans sometimes
call it.
The signs in the back of LA cabs say passengers are entitled to a
"driver that speaks and understands English … and is knowledgeable
of major destinations". But you don’t get in for entitlements. If you
worried about your entitlements, you’d worry that competence in
driving and mental stability are not mentioned. You get in because in
LA often there’s no other way to get where you want to go. You might
also get in because you could learn something about places which,
though startlingly absent from the collective consciousness of
America, remain home and alive for tens of millions of Americans.
"You know about Turkish massacre of Armenian people?" the driver
asked.
"Yes," I said.
"You think is true?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Only Turkish say not true," he said.
"True," I said.
"How many Armenian people die? One million, or one million and half?"
"I thought it was about a million," I said.
"Okay," he said, "about a million."
He told me there were 400,000 Armenians living in Glendale, which is
twice as many as there are citizens in that suburb. Lost, he phoned
one of them and asked for directions, but he sent us the wrong way.
IT IS EARLY MORNING AND, UNDER THE PALM TREES ON OCEAN AVENUE, PAST
the fun park on the pier where the old Route 66 ended and began, the
homeless rise with the sun and pick up their beds. They put their
belongings in plastic bags and drag them down the streets or push
them in supermarket trolleys. Wrapped in garbage bags, on breezy days
you hear the susurrations in the plastic before you see them emerging
>From the side streets: grinding along the pavements with heads bowed,
rustling and whistling like sailing ships.
If it happens to be a Wednesday or the weekend, the streets between
the ocean and the mall will be filling with the biodynamic abundance
of the farmers’ market. There is agribusiness with its phenomenal
volumes of perfect – and perfectly tasteless – produce, and there are
the farmers’ markets, where chemical fertilisers, pesticides,
preservatives, genetic modifications and cheap Mexican labour are
fiends that have been banished from their gardens. If agribusiness
satisfies the American desire to be big, to overcome all rivals, to
achieve "full-spectrum dominance", the farmers’ markets and the
burgeoning organic food movement go to the desire to be good. They
might even go to the Puritan founders. People who eat the products of
agribusiness get big; people who eat organic treat their bodies as
the little temples that nature intended and get a feeling of virtue.
You can spend a lot of time thinking about your body in America. In a
country where it is easy to grow fat, it is also easy to be obsessive
about staying relatively thin. Food is one of the great national
divides, and Santa Monica falls emphatically on the thin side.
There’s less corn syrup in Santa Monica. The horrors of the American
fast-food diet – fat, fructose and free radicals – have not been
vanquished, but they don’t have it all their own way. At an organic
supermarket back from the beach, young people glowing with health
patrol the shelves to help customers who can’t decide which
antioxidant is right for them. The sign says: "Life isn’t about
finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself." Perhaps Americans
only seem to create themselves more than the people of other
countries, but I don’t think so. To me, they are the only people who
are visibly evolving: always, like organisms watched through a
microscope.
In the 1980s, against the grain of Ronald Reagan’s America, the City
of Santa Monica came under the control of a coalition of liberals,
greens, Democrats and left-leaning Christians with a comprehensive
plan for the city. Ceilings were put on development and controls on
rent; footpaths, bike paths and other amenities were built on the
foreshore. The Wall Street Journal declared the whole enterprise a
calamity and President Reagan kind of agreed. That’s when someone
called it the People’s Republic. But the People’s Republic Âbecame
an international model of urban development, and far from fulfilling
the Journal’s prediction that the liberals would kill the place, it
boomed. Property values streaked upward, the middle classes flocked
and the good life blossomed in the soft southern Californian air.
THEY DIDN’T ESTABLISH ANYTHING EVEN VAGUELY socialist, of course.
Free enterprise drives the place, albeit with some supervision. Santa
Monica’s saviours were middle-class American liberals who, in
rescuing the city from the familiar beasts of development – the
dehumanising malls, the ugly and unaffordable high-rise – were
obeying communitarian instincts of long and honourable provÂenance.
Think of the town squares of New EngÂland, think of Central Park.
For that matter, think of the New Deal or the Great Society; but be
careful who you tell, because there have always been Americans who
believed the New Deal was a tumour on the vital organs of American
freedom, and they are as zealous now as they were in Roosevelt’s day.
Douglas built its DC-3s in Santa Monica during the war and a lot of
the workers’ houses are still there, most of them renovated and worth
about a million each. In the same back-reaches of the city are the
headquarters of HBO, the media company that brought you The Sopranos,
Six Feet Under, Sex and the City and Deadwood. The Simpsons was
invented in a hotel not far away. The place lays claim to an
unusually large role in the invention of modern consciousness.
The commercial hub of Santa Monica is a model of modern enterprise.
It is lined with all the usual brands and stores: all of them living
by their business plans, their strategic goals aligned with their
values and their mission statements; all of them evolved to the
highest stage of modern management. It’s strange that business so
often resists the idea of planning, because nothing in the history of
the world has been as thoroughly planned as modern businesses. In
Santa Monica’s main shopping strip, where half a dozen of them
compete all day, it seems possible that even the street performers
have business plans. It is orderly competition, but also intense –
and intensely good, most of the time: so good that sometimes there
will be more people around a pair of virtuoso guitarists than there
are in any of the shops, and they will be selling as many of their
CDs as the Apple store is selling iPods.
On the fringes of all this activity there are the beggars, whose own
mission statements are scrawled on cardboard signs: "Please help me –
I have arthritis in both hands and elbows"; "I am homeless"; "I am
trying to save"; "I am trying to go back to school". The social
anomalies remain, but they are well-managed anomalies. They don’t
have speaking roles or any influence on the plot, but the indigent
seem to have been recognised and given a part in the show.
AT THE OLD SHANGRI-LA HOTEL – WHERE the breezes blow straight off the
Pacific and into the rooms, and where Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton
liked to spend time when he came to visit friends (and meet Hollywood
stars) in the People’s Republic – a man said on TV that when John
Wayne died his body contained 44 pounds of faecal matter. "That’s
what doctors found!" he said. "Look, we consume a hundred times the
toxins our grandparents did." His dual-action colon cleanser restored
the "natural undulating action of the colon" and removed these
toxins.
On another channel, a man who made seaweed capsules said the Food and
Drug Administration was trying to turn cancer into a "chronic
manageÂable disease". The FDA was "keeping the manhole on the sewer"
of degenerative diseases "running rampant" in America. Kelp, he said,
had 60 times the nutrition of land plants. The Japanese eat kelp;
that’s why on average they live seven years longer than Americans.
"Our blood plasma," he said, "is essentially the same as sea water.
The sea lives in us. God made us with the sea in our system." God
gave us the same pH value – if only we would see it.
On another channel, Stephany Schwarz, aged 28, talked about her life
so far. She bought her first house at 23, and what she wants most in
life is her own successful business. Born in Colorado, as millions
did before her she took herself to California to chase her fortune.
Like all good parents, Mom and Dad are urging her on. Her mother is
head of sales for her company. Her stepfather, a Methodist and
conservative Republican twice elected to the Colorado legislature, is
a self-styled "fiscal conservative" who will "never abandon his
Republican ideals of self-reliance, lower taxes and individual
freedom". He’s backing Stephany too.
Stephany looks just a bit like Monica Lewinsky. She’s a follower of
the Wiccan "neo-pagan earth-centred" religion – it sounds like fun:
"And it hurt not, do as thou wilt," they say. This is not such a long
way from her stepfather’s belief that he is closer to God when he is
hunting and fishing than he is in a church. As the Wiccan website
says: "Wicca is full of metaphors which can coexist with your current
religious or scientific outlook."
Stephany’s professional name is Jewel De’Nyle. She is one of the big
names in American pornography. Howard Stern was talking to her in the
TV studio. Howard Stern is the biggest barracuda in the millpond of
respectable American life. He had Jewel’s parents on the line from
Colorado. "We’re backing her all the way," they said.
There is pretty well nothing that Jewel won’t do on screen to repay
their devotion. Stern played an audio tape from one of her porn
flicks and asked her parents if they could recognise their daughter’s
voice screaming in real or feigned sexual ecstasy. Her parents
listened, smiling: "Well, that could be her," they supposed.
In May 2005, when the Southwest Chief delivered us into the art deco
majesty of LA’s Union Station, Fox News was hammering away at the
breaking story of the real Deep Throat. It was emblazoned on all the
billboards. For three days earnest men and women debated the
questions: Was there only one Deep Throat? Was Deep Throat right or
wrong? How important was Deep Throat in American history? Someone
should ask how important fellatio is. How important is pornography?
Deep Throat, as everyone over 50 knows, was the name of an early porn
flick.
Today the US pornography industry is worth $12 billion: of this, $2.5
billion operates on the net, where 40 million American adults
regularly visit porn websites, and where porn websites make up 12Â
per cent of all websites. In California, the porn industry employs
12,000 people and pays $36 million in taxes. The demand is so great
that several Fortune 500 companies, like many conservative preachers
and politicians, have been unable to resist temptation and now
(within the bounds of their commitment to corporate social
responsibility) help in modest ways to meet it. The great hotel
chains, for instance, just cannot afford to pass up porn: 50Â per
cent of all their guests watch their pay-as-you-go "adult" films,
which deliver 70Â per cent of in-room profits.
YOU COULD LIVE IN SANTA MONICA AND, like everyone else in the world,
know Los Angeles only through TV and the movies that are made just a
taxi ride away. A bus runs all the way downtown, but few residents of
Santa Monica have ever taken it. There are plenty of films in the
video store if they want to see the real LA. Or they can just watch
TV. I went to see A History of Violence. I had not fully recovered
when I took myself to see Crash. When Crash was over and I drifted
out with the 20 other patrons, it was dark and the last and least
able of the street performers were trying to extract a few more
dollars from the day. Four white men were singing Jesus songs. A
hugely fat man, who had been playing jazz at midday in the mall, was
now making hard work of something classical and looked close to
death. The place seemed to have turned itself inside out: the raw
flesh was exposed. A man in an open-topped SUV shouted at two women
in another car: "Asians! F…in’ Asians! Wouldn’t you f…in’ know
it?"
Before leaving elementary school, the average American child has seen
8000 murders on TV. More than a quarter of citizens convicted of
crimes of violence say they imitated something they saw on TV. In the
last decade, 50,000 American children were killed with firearms. A
child is murdered every two hours. Eleven times more murders are
committed in the US than in Japan, nine times more than in the UK.
Every day four women die from domestic violence. Each year the number
of rapes and attempted rapes is in the order of 132,000, and it is
estimated six times that number are not reported. There are 676 hate
groups in the US. Every state has at least one: Florida has 38,
California 36, Texas 31 and Pennsylvania 27. Of the 676 groups, 403
have internet sites.
THE STATISTICS ALMOST DEFY BELIEF, BUT not when you scan the local
papers for a while. Everywhere, every day, violence is reported. In
Jackson, Mississippi, five residents had been murdered in the five
days previous to my visit; a local court was holding a hearing into
the rape, torture and strangulation of a 12-year-old girl by her
parents. In Salt Lake City, a veteran of the Iraq War gunned down
several people in a mall. An obituary in New Orleans reported:
"November 15 was Joyce Frieler Rader’s last day on earth. She was
murdered and then she went into God’s arms."
So long as the Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, a fair
percentage of people will take that to mean the right to use them.
And some of these will take it to mean that a man is not a man
without them; and some others that true liberty depends on them; and
others still that the rights of revenge and pre-emption are enshrined
in the Constitution along with the guns.
Every day on American TV an episode of Law & Order pits good against
evil, order against chaos, the reasoned and objective law against
subjective impulse and delusion. Evil is endemic and
self-perpetuating in Law & Order: the battered child becomes the
batterer, the abused the abuser. Just as the west made tough but
honest citizens who civilised the frontier, the streets make cops and
lawyers with the mettle to hold off the evil, deranged and weak who
would otherwise scythe through everything.
But this is not the mythic violence of westerns or film noir. It’s
not the horror that myths transfigure and make bearable. It is
everyday violence, as recorded in the newspapers from which the show
draws all its stories. It is crime with specific causes, which can be
identified by reasoned inquiry and dealt with by the law with
specific, practised remedies. Though justice is not perfect every
time, Law & Order unfailingly affirms the principle on which all hope
for the republic rests: that the law is sufficiently good and sound
and there are enough good, sound people to carry the day for
free-enterprise democracy. It’s the "law" in Law & Order that
requires a leap of faith: you have to believe in the probity of city
hall, integrity of the police force, proper functioning of the
bureaucracy, disÂinterested and unstoppable operation of the legal
system. In fact, every episode of Law & Order demands we not believe
in chronic social failure, corruption and dysfunction in the US. And,
somehow, that is what we want to do. "In my opinion, human societies,
like individuals, amount to something only in liberty," Tocqueville
wrote 150 years ago, and summed up the drama of American life.
Watching Law & Order almost every day for a month, I began to think I
knew why so many Americans you meet are very sane, civil and kind. In
the midst of every variety of weirdness, ignorance and brutality, it
easily goes unnoticed that, in the day to day, America is the most
civilised of places: how often you see in Americans and the way they
deal with each other the graces you should like to see in yourself
and your compatriots. They are more civilised, I thought, for the
very reason that barbarism lurks on every corner, if not in every
individual, and they must be above it, ready for it. Calm
self-possession is all.
OSCAR WOULD SAY IT IS ALL RELATIVE. HE has been driving cabs in LA
since the day he came up from Honduras 46 years ago. He has four
grown-up daughters and many grandchildren in various parts of the US,
and all of them are doing well. His wife died a few years back. Now
he has another four children under seven living with their mother,
his second wife, in Honduras.
"Not bad for 66 years old," he says. "How old are you? You could do
it too."
He said he’d take me down to Honduras. He sends his family money from
what he earns in his decrepit taxi, and every year he catches the bus
for the five-day ride and spends a couple of months with them. He
says LA is sometimes bad, but Honduras is bad all the time. "You take
a walk in the wrong place in Honduras, and if they want your shorts
you better take them off or they’ll shoot you. They’ll shoot you for
your shorts." He gave me his card, and the next time I saw him Oscar
showed me photos of his new baby and all the other children standing
in front of the security fence that surrounds their house and keeps
out the gangs.
Seven million people in LA, more than 70Â per cent of the population,
are from "minorities". Many are taxidrivers. A taxidriver said to me:
"A Jew is always a Jew and a Palestinian is always a Palestinian. As
the Jews thrive wherever they go, so do the Palestinians. We are the
cousins of the Jews." He seemed perfectly free of prejudice, but he
believed there would never be an end to the war because Israel would
never leave the Palestinians’ land.
He thought the invasion of Iraq had been a disaster for the US. He
held the US administration in contempt, both for its policies and for
what he believed was its stupidity. That he and his fellow
Palestinians were under permanent surveillance he neither resented
nor feared. His compatriots’ long experience made them very hard to
infiltrate. He was curiously equable about it. Had the people who
followed LA’s Palestinians and tapped their phones been able to
understand what they were hearing, they might have been less
surprised when Hamas won the Palestinian elections, he said.
He had lived in LA for 16 years, and for 17 years before that in
Kuwait. LA was better than anywhere in the Middle East. He would
always be Palestinian, but nowhere in the Middle East could he be as
free as he was in LA. In LA, he said, he could "be himself".
A friend left me at a bookshop where Ryan O’Neal was reputed to take
his coffee. While browsing I heard a woman ask the bookseller about
the rash on his face. What had caused it? Was he taking anything? Had
he seen a dermatologist? The questions, which might have put some
people in a very bad mood, seemed to put him in a good one. Yes, he
had been to a dermatologist. So what did he say? Did he give him some
cream? Did he say what had caused it? No, he didn’t, the bookseller
said.
"You mean he didn’t know? What sort of dermatologist doesn’t know
what caused it?" Was he a proper dermatologist? Was the bookseller
"eating something bad"? Then another customer asked if Viggo
Mortensen was coming to give a reading on Saturday and they both
forgot his rash; a pity, because I wanted to know more.
I FIRST WENT TO VENICE BEACH NEARLY 30 years ago. Rollerblades were
the new essential item and people went gliding up and down watching
the freak show of hulking men working out in cages like the ones that
housed gorillas in unreformed zoos. The bodybuilders are still
working out, but in an open-air gym, and the effect is less
startling. On the bat-tennis courts beside the gym, men and women
applied themselves with McEnroe-like verve and fanaticism. Their
rallies were long and gripping, the more because death seemed likely.
No one laughed. No one gave an inch. No one seemed willing to by any
sign concede that this was not Wimbledon and not real tennis.
Those Santa Monica socialists have built a path along the beach from
Venice. I walked back past people talking truth and eloquence to
seagulls. A man who looked as normal as Garrison Keillor went past on
a unicycle, which he rode on the inch-wide edge of the concrete
kerbing. People were leaving the pier. Beneath the palm trees on the
grassy strip between the beach and Ocean Avenue, the homeless were
bedding down for the night. Those with homes were gathered by the
railings, their jerseys swung over their polo shirts, watching the
blood-orange sun sink into the Pacific.
Edited extract from American Journeys, by Don Watson. Published by
Knopf Australia on March 1; rrp $49.95.