(3089/898) The City of Angels 1

61) To begin with, [very old jokes about Los Angeles] only made sense if there continued to be some kind of dialectical relationship between New York and Los Angeles. After all, there is nothing particularly funny about making fun of the antithesis, that is, of L.A., unless the thesis, New York, still burns brightly as an ideal of city life. But New York, as all of us who live there know - however quiet we keep the news - is a specter of what it once was, and grows dirtier, more desperate, and more expensive with every passing year. It hardly exemplifies anything these days, except perhaps the bleaker assertions of Thomas Hobbes.

David Rieff
Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (1991)

62) This city runs on brown wheels. [i.e. Mexican laborers]

A Los Angeles resident
quoted by David Rieff in
Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (1991)

63) To be an American has always meant being able, precisely, to exercise one's right to opt out of the continuum of history, choosing isolation over community, and one's desires over one's obligations. In the grand rhetoric of Emerson, it is to be "a seeker with no past at his back." More prosaically, the notion is embodied in the great American expression "Don't fence me in." Inevitably, this model of utopia depends on solitude and space to spare and is as contemptuous of any particular place as it is of the past. Perhaps that is why Americans have been so oddly complacent about the decay of their older cities. If New York or Philadelphia doesn't "work" anymore, it must be time to move on.

David Rieff
Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (1991)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 880 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.