When I was a boy and my brother was a boy (I always began the stories I told my youngest goddaughter and her sister when they were little this way) . . . so, when I was a boy and my brother was a boy, I attended a crowded Catholic grammar school, as they were called then, in Bellflower.
Early photographs of Los Angeles surprise for many reasons, but often what's most striking is how empty the city looks. Open countryside surrounds familiar landmarks. Busy intersections appear as dusty crossroads.
This being Valentine's Day, I was figuring on writing something about love. But local events in the last week have intervened big time. So in the aftermath of the manic Christopher Dorner manhunt (an aftermath that isn't yet official, as of this writing) it feels appropriate to talk about not love, but something related: idealism.
I'm sure many more details will emerge in the coming days and months about Dorner, about what exactly prompted his ill-fated mission of revenge against the LAPD, about the veracity of his exhaustive manifesto. But the information we do have is more than enough to have fueled lots of empathy, especially from black Angelenos, for Dorner's personal battle against a police department that he experienced firsthand as racist and corrupt. When Dorner concludes in his manifesto that the department has culturally changed little since the nadir days of Rodney King and Rampart, it's not hard to get
"amens" from people of color who've been disproportionately targeted and profiled by the LAPD since its inception. Department reforms notwithstanding, nobody African-American that I know has the warm and fuzzies for police officers today. To say things have gotten better is only to say that black civilians and motorists are unfairly treated, say, fifty percent of the time as opposed to all the time. An improvement, but not cause for celebration or letting up on suspicion. Far from it.
What makes Dorner's grievances so compelling, of course, was that he was a cop. He was an insider. And an insider with a mission; an idealist, he saw himself bettering the LAPD by being conscientious, by making himself a model for the kind of compassionate attitudes and behavior the department said it wanted to adopt. In a bigger sense, he wanted to uproot the institutional racism that in many black people's minds is synonymous with the LAPD and with law enforcement in general. He saw himself as heroic that way.
But when the institution prevailed and Dorner got fired -- unfairly, the evidence so far suggests -- he spiraled into a sense of defeatedness, anger, and helplessness that ultimately led to another, more destructive and clearly un-humanistic mission that has so far eclipsed any discussion about root causes or unsexy things like institutional oppression.
But what's most interesting to me and to folks I've talked to is that Dorner, like so many of us who've been obstructed by racism and racist attitudes in our lives, was angry; unlike most of us, he snapped. In other words, Dorner's personal reaction to what he saw as a systemic problem was highly unusual. Most black people file away their disappointment over not getting a job, over being called names or being told, subtly or otherwise, that they are not equal. It's a survival thing honed over hundreds of years, an act of self-repression and resilience that's practically become part of black culture. Dorner refused to be quiet or file away his feelings, not just because he was young and fed up but because as a police officer with the duty of protecting and serving, it seemed like he felt he had some responsibility to speak up. He had to let us know. That feels heroic.
But it's too bad he felt he had to speak up in such a terrible way -- the manifesto alone would have sufficed. Being a black martyr and going up against the system and then down in a blaze of gunfire, or in just a blaze, turns out to be so much "Django Unchained" spaghetti-western hooey. Idealism can be dangerous, depressing, the source of your undoing, especially if you're black. I suspect that we'll be learning the lessons of Dorner for many Valentine's Days to come.
Journalist and op-ed columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan's first-person accounts of politics and identity in Los Angeles, with an eye towards the city's African American community, appear every Thursday on KCET's SoCal Focus blog. Read all her posts here.
It was officially a centennial ceremony, but to call it a celebration would have been taking it too far.
When Annette and I were first dating five years ago we parked a rental car one summer night on a hilltop in Nevada in a forest of Joshua trees. The day had been scorching, well into the triple digits, and huge thunderheads boiled up out of the desert across three states. That night they cast floods down onto the plateaus of Arizona. A massive wall of cloud a hundred miles east, dark-lit by the moon, flashed bright in county-sized patches a few times a second: silent lightning from the heart of the storm. We relished the cool night air, the temperature back down in the high 90s. Holding her, watching the remote storm carve new canyons in the Arizona desert, I felt my heart had cracked wide open.
Dorella and Marshall Anderson met in the 5th grade at Irving School, in Riverside, but she had to think about it before she married him. "Oh, I looked at a lot of boys," Dorella said with a grin, setting up tables for a reception at Park Avenue Baptist Church after Marshall had brought all the tablecloths inside and then waited for his next assignment.
"She had those green eyes," Marshall said. Dorella laughed hard and added, "Yeah, I had to think about him. I wasn't gonna marry someone I couldn't whup." But then a look passed between them -- you know the kind, the one that says we have known each other all these years and we know what love and work mean. "And he didn't start out at Irving," she added, waving her hand in dismissal over the folding chairs.
Marshall said, "I started school at Longfellow. Then they told me I had to go to Irving. And look what I got!" They have been married since 1954, when Dorella's grandfather, Reverend Goodwin, a pioneer member of Riverside's black community, conducted the service at Dorella's mother's home. Dorella Anderson was the heart and soul of the Community Settlement Association, shepherding families through school and social events and life, for more than forty years. Two years ago, when Marshall became seriously ill, Dorella nursed him continuously, and now here they are, finishing up this banquet room with centerpieces for a party, then heading off to the movies, as they do every single week. (Romantic movies -- for the Andersons? Who talk about love and whupping on people, who still love football? They have just seen "Lincoln," "Django Unchained," but today will be "Gangster Squad," their favorite kind of action film.)
As I write this, I have salt on my lips and my mind. The salt on my lips is ocean salt. I just got back from surfing. Yes, it's one o'clock on a Thursday afternoon as I write this. If I had a boss they would fire me.
Driving home, the radio played Valentine's ads. Lots of Valentine's ads. Advertisers sold flowers, jewelry, romantic getaways, and items I cannot mention because sometimes my Mom reads this column. I barely listened to the ads. Mostly I thought of salt. For me, salt is the memory of things that matter. Love, yes, but not love alone, because love rests atop a foundation built, stone by stone, on friendship, laughter, respect, patience (if you were married to me, this one might be more to the front), loyalty, selflessness, surprise,
and plain good fun.
And, for me, moments that taste of salt.
There are two sisters downtown on the rise that was once called Pound Cake Hill for its compact elevation. The Los Angeles City Hall is the younger, dedicated in April 1928. The older Hall of Justice replaced the county's 19th century courthouse in 1926.
Both City Hall and the Hall of Justice were built from white Sierra granite from the same quarry. And both were severely damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake; the Hall of Justice so badly that it was red tagged and emptied.
The priapic City Hall tower and the rectangular Hall of Justice share another likeness. Although called "beaux arts" in style, the Hall of Justice reflects the muscular classicism that the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition once popularized. The inspiration for the hall's tall base and upper stories of columned walls seems to have been the tomb of King Mausoleus at Halicarnassus. City Hall, although more properly Art Deco in style, is topped by a stepped pyramid just like the one that rose over the king's tomb.
In Los Angeles at least, west and east do meet. If you're paying attention, you experience the meeting point as you turn an obtuse angle at Hoover Avenue and pass from the orthogonal American grid to the bent grid of Spanish colonial law. (Jeremy Rosenberg on these pages summarized the clash of empires embedded in asphalt. I've offered an explanation, too.)
Do you ever wonder why there are so many ballot initiatives designed to decrease the political clout of unions? Well, simply put, because they have a lot of it.
In our country, thanks to decades of United States Supreme Court rulings, political money is seen as the equivalent to political speech, and therefore money really is power. Unions have a lot of this particular type of power, which is why their opponents have consistently waged efforts to make it more difficult for them to spend money in political campaigns.
I Am Los Angeles: On His Way Back
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