The Great Relearning

and some notes from other places

This is about Los Angeles, but it’s not at all about Los Angeles. This will make sense in a minute.

So see if this sounds familiar: MacArthur Park was controlled by gangs and drug dealers, full of open drug use and prostitution, filthy and unsafe for families. The disorder in the park bled into the surrounding neighborhood.

MS-13 controlled the park, but other gangs fought for space to sell drugs in the area, which led to violence: "One year, we had almost 106 homicides in eight square miles," an LAPD captain said.

Through the 1990s, the gangs fought bitterly over control of the drug trade. Longtime residents Sandra Romero and Alex Alonso remember how violent MacArthur Park was in those days.

"It was considered one of the most drug-plagued communities in the United States," Alonso says.

"It was the haven for all the gang members and drug dealers," Romero recalls. "They were involved in drug dealing, murder, people smoking crack, prostitution in little rolling brothel vans."

Alonso adds: "It looked like Beirut, Lebanon, in that area."

The City of Los Angeles decided to stop tolerating the conditions in the park, and they found help to fix it.

But Rampart division Capt. Egan says things changed after William Bratton took over as LAPD chief…and began a partnership with agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I’m quoting from an NPR story, and don’t miss the date:

What really worked to clean up the park and the neighborhood was, uh:

And federal immigration agents regularly deport undocumented gang members with felonies. FBI and Los Angeles police officials admit the city's gang violence has been exported. In fact, prisons in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are filled with deported gang members from Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the current mayor of Los Angeles says that what are you talking about, MacArthur Park is clean and safe and wonderful, and children love to play there, but the one thing we absolutely can’t allow is an ICE presence, which destroys the peace and harmony of the neighborhood. They’ll deport all the MS-13 members, which is very mean.

We just keep doing the same dumb shit over and over again, and relearning the same lessons. If only there were some way to clean up MacArthur Park. Taking bets on the likelihood that Los Angeles is led by people who remember any of this through the ancient mists of the old, old, old days in 2008. I think people might have worn togas back then.

Tom Wolfe famously described the “great relearning” that followed in the wake of the New Left of the 1960s, “a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero.” He was mistaken only about the “unprecedented” part. We’ve always done this. Fix, forget, ruin, rediscover the same solutions. The human condition is an endless return to “oh no how can this have happened?” when in fact it’s just the carousel coming back around again.

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Now, a few notes from other places to start the week.

First, six months after the fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, we’re still learning new things about those fires. The documentary filmmaker Gabriel Mann, who made a movie about hotshots by embedding with them while they fought fires…

…dug deep into the emerging evidence in a two-hour livestream last week, and it’s well worth the time. (When you click on that link, fast forward to the seven-minute mark to get past the opening wait for the recorded stream to begin.)

Mann argues, with considerable evidence, that the Palisades fire was actually the Palisades fires, as the LADWP failed to de-energize powerlines and started new fires around the area that was already burning. And he presents what sure looks like smoking gun evidence that a DWP employee tried to change city records to hide the failure to turn off the electricity in the fire zone, as poles burned and lines fell into dry brush or sent out showers of sparks:

And so:

There’s much more on the recorded livestream, from a longtime observer of wildfires and firefighting. Here’s the link again. Worth the time.

And finally, don’t miss Keely Covello’s sharply written story about the Nevada rancher Hank Vogler, who has “spent much of his 76 years in sheep camp.” It’s a fascinating window into a way of life that’s under attack and becoming harder to sustain. Vogler, the story says, has been forced to hire a “baseball team of lawyers” to keep his ranch alive. He’s not the first.

The Great Relearning is everywhere.