I Don't Care

There are riots in Los Angeles, and I live in Los Angeles, but I don’t care. I’m several states away, accumulating bug guts on my windshield.

Back home, we’re developing a new tradition of riot season. It’s just another version of the dying thing displaying its pending death. A long time ago I lived in Santa Monica, just off the end of the Third Street Promenade, near the beach and the pier. It was lively and fun and frequently beautiful. But Santa Monica has been on a hard downward spiral for a while, and the Third Street Promenade is ugly and dull — because of riots, during the last riot season, after which the place never really recovered:

So we’re going to have riots again, for justice and to make things better. Great. What’s happening now is that, first, an untenably unpleasant place is becoming even more untenably unpleasant, quickly, while the people who run the increasingly ugly and shitty place are actively encouraging its ruin (click this link to play the video below).

Eunisses Hernandez is an adult woman in her 30s who has spent her life in politics and community organizing jobs. There is no evidence that she has any form of wisdom, to any degree, or any form of basic knowledge or productive experience, so we’ve chosen her for leadership.

I could give you more examples of exactly this, California politicians with this background and this level of experience at making things, but who cares. I’m reading from the road that the Trump administration federalized some National Guard units and sent in soldiers to try to keep the peace, and then some marines, which caused the leaders of Los Angeles and of California to complain about the interruption of the destruction. I have nothing more to say about this, or about them. The trajectory is the trajectory. I’m not seeing any mysteries to parse.

Second, what’s happening now is that we’re seeing the illusion of conflict over the illusion of choice. There are no choices. The Blue Model is dead on its feet. The City of Los Angeles is in financial crisis, Los Angeles County is in financial crisis, California is in financial crisis, and the federal government is now just short of $37 trillion in debt. State and local government spending has grown like wildfire in California over the last decade¹, with the miserable tax burden growing to fund it, and the result is that the state and its major cities are much uglier, much dirtier, and obviously in decline, while the state has a crisis of taxpayer outmigration.

There are 9.7 million people in Los Angeles County, and the period of austerity that must inevitably arrive in the foreseeable future will cause considerable local pain:

All of this is going to end, in varying forms and on an accelerating timeline. That’s not a side in a debate — it’s just what’s going to happen. There’s going to be a bunch of noise and cultivated ruin as it does, avoidable misery and inevitable misery blending together in a long structural decline.

Los Angeles is being torn apart as Los Angeles falls apart. To the fact of structural, generational crisis, add Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. Our destruction is becoming redundant.

And this is the week I stopped caring. I remember this place when it had people who cared about it, but anyway.

I’ll be on the road for a couple weeks, but I’ll check in again soon.

1. “During Gavin Newsom’s governorship, California’s state budget grew over 63 percent, rising from around $200 billion in 2019 to about $327 billion in the current fiscal year ending June 30. After adjusting for inflation and California’s population losses since 2019, this represents a 38 percent per person increase in real (inflation-adjusted) state government spending.”