33. Seal of forgetfulness

The Board of Supervisors may have to refight the battle of the county seal. They had decided in 2007, probably for the best, to erase the cross that former Supervisor Kenneth Hahn put on the county seal fifty years ago.A divided board voted then to edit out the disturbing imagery, and now they may have to face another debate about the symbols we place on our public perception of ourselves.

I didn't think the decision in 2007 went far enough. In our Los Angeles, a place notable for its edited memories, an official seal that tried to represent the kind of people we are would have to picture the unimaginable "? how can you draw a universal symbol for forgetfulness?

Corporate America learned long ago that product names and logos can be active sites of memory and, therefore, can be contentious. Your misinterpretation of their symbols isn't good for business, as Proctor and Gamble discovered when some Christian zealots imagined satanic references in that company's corporate seal.

For the makers of advertising nonsense, a product name should be reduced to meaningless sounds, and the company symbol should be a context-free conundrum. Did the name Enron identify a power company or an erectile dysfunction preparation? The company's cockeyed E logo refused to own up.

For the people in marketing, Enron had whatever meaning the company said it did, and if their product ultimately failed to satisfy, it could easily be rebranded with a different string of optimistic consonants and vowels.

Our experience of places and our own past ought to be less fungible.

So, if we must have a name and a seal in this era of endless rebranding, they shouldn't contain appeals to a past we don't want "? not to a Roman goddess or Pearlette the award winning heifer or an unidentified tuna fish. All of them were on the old seal.

And the seal can't identify aspirations we're become ashamed of "? empire or the music of dead European males which are still on the new, edited version.Better to scrap the name "Los Angeles" for its religious and colonial overtones and junk the iconography of the seal's carefully drawn but incomplete list of reasons why we live here.

The rebranded county's official designation should be El? "? two meaningless syllables, pronounceable in most of the 100 languages spoken in the county "? short and sort of uplifting, without promising anything the Federal Trade Commission would question.

The seal ought to be pointlessly assertive, celebrating action and not purpose. Too bad the "swoosh" symbol is already taken.

But if the county can't be boiled down to a harmless trademark, perhaps the seal could be represented by all of us instead.

Draw something like an odometer on the seal, the numbers in the total rolling up from 10,130,000 as the county population increases. Then new numbers could be stenciled on county buildings every year, memorializing nothing except the bare fact of our existence.

Or the surface of the seal could be replaced by a mirror so that whenever you looked you'd see just your own image, the only thing that apparently matters. Nothing else can endure the withering fury of our grievances against the past except our own self-regard.

Everything else should come off, too, because collectively we have neither the courage nor the humility needed to deal with the history that the seal represents so poorly. We demand that our public symbols be neutral surfaces, untroubled by what we've been as a people and uncomprehending of what we might become, because we resist the idea of having a past or becoming anything together. We're so impatient with other people's memories and so careless with our own.

The cross should come off because, among other things, it represents faith. Leaving it there now would be a lie. A public reminder of the need to be faithful is the last thing we want.

Ramona Ripston, the executive director of the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Times in 2007 that the ACLU was pleased with the county's new seal and the supervisors' editing of public memories. "The county seal will reflect all the people who live here," she said.

That's saying too much. To pass Ripston's impossible test of maximal inclusiveness, the county seal ought to be a disk of solid, matte gray carefully painted to reflect nothing at all.

The county shouldn't have a seal, if the seal won't console every real and imagined hurt. If it doesn't respect every shade of our differences or burnish the esteem of each one of us, then it doesn't truly represent our resentments.

A large brush stroke in the form of a Zen master's calligraphic O might be a fitting substitute, a cipher for the ambiguity of identity.

Or paint out a blank space on the seal and hold it for an artist of the distant future for whom our passionate anxiety about who we are will be a historical footnote. By then, braver Angeleños might be able to be drawn together.