The Blue Zones Are 38% Ruined

but next week it'll be 39%

I had a visitor from the East Coast, a few weeks ago, and I drove her around the San Fernando Valley to show her what a dismal shithole it is. But I kept missing all the encampment sites and pirate RV villages, which move around, so we ended up driving around the Encino hills, where my plan to show a visitor how disgusting Los Angeles has become led to the visitor saying that oh my goodness, this is such a pretty neighborhood. I apologized for the absence of squalor.

There’s a lot of that going around. A bunch of recent online discussion centers around the hard decline of Santa Monica, as close to an inevitable paradise as you’re ever going to get.

There’s been a disturbing amount of gang violence around the pier and the mall, a cop got shot, the Third Street Promenade is trending toward “ghost town,” and that big outdoor mall, Santa Monica Place, is more vacant than not. But I drove out there, recently, to take a look at the impending ruin, and the city was more okay than not. Third Street is depressing, and the beautiful Tongva Park had its share of hollow-eyed homeless drug addicts, but Second Street and Fourth Street are mostly just fine. Montana Avenue is…Montana Avenue, rich people street, and apparently always will be. Affluence is greatly in evidence all over the blocks near the ocean. There’s a hollow core, but it’s surrounded by more or less permanently upscale places. It’s at the beach, it’s 70 degrees and sunny in the dead of winter, and there are a bunch of very expensive houses. The place just kind of keeps going. Lots of things inside the place die unnecessary deaths…

…but the place doesn’t.

There’s a lot ruin in a blue zone. People in neighborhoods work at the preservation of order while they vote for disorder. Ordinary lives keep the squalor sort of more or less at bay, even when government stops bothering. Blue Model governance is a metastasizing disaster, caring for nothing and going broke while doing it. If you gave Gavin Newsom a dozen bright red roses, I suspect the bouquet would die in his hands before he could put it down. The man is the angel of death. But California isn’t dying; California is sort of okay, because many people sort of still try. The implication is that the decaying places could be turned around pretty easily, even after years of appalling government failure.

Side note: The decline of clean and safe public space leads to the creation of parallel public space, privately public. The City of Santa Monica runs several dog parks, but you can also buy a membership at a privately owned dog park in town that has a cafe and a guarded entrance. If you click on that link, you’ll see a video that resembles the scene in Children of Men in which the Clive Owen character goes to visit his brother in the gated elite district. Screenshot of the private dog park video:

See what they’re selling? See why they’re selling it there? Dogs in Santa Monica parks have overdosed on drugs:

And so: private, gated, members-only dog park. I always thought Mike Davis was a dumb communist, but I’m grudgingly coming around to his perception of Los Angeles. I’m sorry that he died before I could tell him. “I kind of don’t mind you, dumb communist.” We could have grabbed some beers. “First round’s on you, cool Nazi friend.”

I just spent the morning in Lincoln Park (the city park in the neighborhood of the same name), doing laps while Miss Teenager attended a teen art thing, watching Mexican dudes in flannel jackets pull big trout out of the well-stocked lake. Lincoln Park is city, distinctly urban, sitting not quite in the shadow of the giant county hospital for the indigent and the coroner’s office, and it has a decades-deep natural beauty. Previous generations created something remarkable for us. So here’s a flock of geese gathered around the big Moreton Bay fig tree near the lake:

Picking through the garbage for breakfast.

Beautiful-disgusting, an elegant dump.

Next to the park, a median strip of monumental sculpture honors people whose names have fallen off. Unknown man on horseback.

Hero, anonymous, in garbage.

The jacket belongs to the person who lives in this plaza. The base of the sculpture is his closet. He asked to have someone come by and clean the place up, by the way.

Here’s the youth art center:

At X, go read this long post from “Willa, aka Liberty Belle, the 355.” Core observation, referring to the classical liberalism of the founding era rather than to the Kamala Harris kind:

A liberal society can only survive if its laws & moral scaffolding are enforced & protected. If a liberal society becomes tolerant of cultures who do not value those same principles (for example, private property is a BIG deal—our founding is predicated on this concept, & it doesn’t apply only to physical belongings but personal autonomy) then it will become overtaken by the less tolerant, more illiberal society steamrolling it.

It drives me mad when people cannot seem to grasp this concept. This is common sense, it is logical. Upholding liberal values, which include the rule of law, is not bigoted. How can we have a liberal society that values all people (which those who claim to be liberals, & who are democrat voters think they are championing) if we are permitting the *exact* behavior that will destroy such a society? I wanted to say “My god woman, do you think that man holds the same values as you? He obviously doesn’t!” The only thing that will stop this behavior is to force it to stop. I cannot imagine permitting it to go on.

A great deal of ruin is flooding in where a great deal of conscious beauty and social peace built a strong foundation. We’re letting it happen, and it’s not too late to stop making that choice. There’s still something to save.