Jonestown: Virtuous Feelings Edition

The profoundly stupid people who govern Los Angeles have just boldly put up signs in a bunch of parks warning that city property is declaratively off-limits to mean federal immigration officers, which is very warm and virtuous, because only LITERAL NAZIS believe in ever having any kind of immigration law.

So I drove over to MacArthur Park today and walked around to find the signs. The park was…normal.

This dude was conversing with his fentanyl:

Fentanyl is lone users and small quiet groups, meth is big loud groups. A quite large meth group was gathered on the southeast side, near this park entrance (with no anti-ICE sign) across from Langer’s. The sign on the door at Langer’s says that gentlemen are not permitted to enter in sleeveless shirts, thank you very much.

The energy of the meth-focused gathering suggested that I not be seen taking pictures of it. Also not hard to figure out who’s selling it, but it’s also unwise to openly photograph that.

Anyway, after a couple of laps I finally found the wonderfully virtuous new sign. It’s hidden away at a back end of the park, on the northwestern edge, across the street from the Mexican consulate:

Try to guess what the people sitting at the base of the obelisk were doing.

You get the wording? The park is owned by the City of Los Angeles, and “it may only be used for its intended city purpose.” Its intended city purpose is fatal drug overdoses and smelling like a toilet, so. (“Last year 83 fatal overdoses occurred in the zip code encompassing MacArthur Park, more than any other zip code in the county, according to data from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner.”) Question for Karen Bass: What if some ICE agents want to smoke meth and shit on the ground? Could they be wedged in under the normal rules?

You may be noticing the sky and the grass, by the way, and the lake at MacArthur Park looked like this today:

Death, misery, broken lives, pretty park.

The comedic descent into ideological psychosis: driving past the bodies and the drugs and the obvious drug dealers and the people who are locked on unmistakable paths to near-term death, but then proudly hammering a signpost into the ground to announce, but not at a main entrance, that the one thing you won’t tolerate is the presence of people who enforce immigration laws. Stick to respectable behavior like dying in a pool of your piss and vomit.

You could throw a rock from the city’s ICE sign and hit the Park Plaza hotel (more recently called the MacArthur), a 1926 art deco building with walled gardens and elegant ballrooms. The entrance used to look like this:

It currently looks like this:

Los Angeles will tolerate death and ruin, but it won’t tolerate law. It shows.