After another of my biannual 6-week stints in the City of Angels I am, as ever, happy to be back in Asia. I always enjoy our first couple of weeks in LA but consigned by circumstance as we are to Beverly Hills, by the third week I feel like I’m living in a grey haze of cotton wool and am raring to get out of the place. I yearn for the dynamism of Hong Kong and the green and clean air of Bali. I think I’d tolerate it a lot better if we at least had the dimension of the sea, in Santa Monica say. You have to go to quite a bit of effort and travel a long way to get out of LA.
I reckon most Angelenos don’t really realize what foul air they are breathing. In fact, on a fine day if you look directly upward as often as not you will see clear blue skies. If you ate healthy and exercised well, as so many Angelenos do, you could easily overlook the fact your environment undid all the good work. But lower your gaze to a more horizontal perspective and you soon perceive the brown murk of reality. Better still, just look down on the pall that hangs over the place as you descend toward LAX and just know that you will be living under all that murk. Whatever they’ve done about controlling car emissions, and it’s a lot in California, it just cannot be a healthy living environment. Any sunny Sunday morning will show you that. For on that one day of the week you can actually see the skyscrapers downtown, even the mountains beyond. That can only mean the pollution in the air must be big and heavy if it settles so quickly on the only day when traffic is relatively light. Just imagine what all those big particles are doing to your lungs….
A Death in LA
Walking across the bridge at Piazza-level in Cedars Sinai one day I saw an awful thing. A young man stood strangely rooted to the spot with a look of amazed horror on his face, his eyes fixed on the parapet nearby. I asked him if he was OK. He looked at me blankly for a moment and said incredulously
“
She just dove off. A second ago it was. She was a kid. I thought she was just being naughty standing up there, I was going to say something but she just dived off. I could have stopped her.”
I went to the parapet and looked over. About 40 feet below on a wide ledge above the delivery lorries at the goods entrance to the hospital lay the body of a young girl dressed only in a hospital smock. It seemed an age before the security men showed up or anyone approached the body. I offered what comfort I could to the young man as an awed and hushed crowd gathered before moving on to my appointment. On my way back an hour later she was still there where she fell, covered with a blanket and some uniformed men standing about. “She must have been dead when they got to her or they would have done something”, I heard someone in the lingering crowd explain. The sense of shock and unreality was palpable. Numinous. Everyone felt it. What unbearable circumstance could have so terribly possessed a young 12-year old girl that she would dive to her death without a moment’s hesitation? What made the tragic event stranger yet was that in this place of all places, where death is an everyday event, this death was so shocking. For a moment this young girl had shattered the polite convention that surrounds death in a hospital. She had done the one thing that the medical system goes to enormous lengths to hide from us. She had taken command of her own fate and put death squarely back on the agenda. I pass that same way often and I am still haunted by the same sense of wonder and the unreality of it.
Torture? Moi….?
I sense a shift in the public’s attitude to Bush and his administration. I wish it had happened before he got re-elected but it seems the scales are falling from the eyes of more and more Americans. The one thing that seems to have really gotten through to Americans of all stripes is the torture thing. Some are outraged and shamed, Bush-haters in the main, but for most people it simply comes as a nasty shock to think that legally any American government could actually condone torturing people in their name, even if they are suspected of being terrorists. Everyone knows bad things happen at times, but to actually put it in writing does not square with how Americans like to see themselves. The long awaited return to reality and seeing things for what they are is only in part due to the war in Iraq, mainly it’s domestic. People are coming to grips with what government by the rich for the rich actually means for them. It means a lot more people don’t know how they can meet their medical bills and face ruin, or have to sell their house if they or their family get sick, whether or not they have cover. The absurdities, inequities and sheer complexity of the medical billing system are now being revealed for all to see, right along with the disgraceful price gouging visited on Americans by the drug companies. Millions more are coming to the uncomfortable realisation that the pensions they confidently expected on retirement to see them through old age will not be honoured and that the government will leave them to the tender mercies of their corporate masters, who are denying or whittling away their entitlements.
The Great Society….
Voices, and middle of the road ones at that, have been heard in the Republic calling for a national or federal health system similar to the ones in Europe, whereby all citizens are assured of good medical care, not just the rich. Many Americans are recalling LBJ’s plans for the Great Society, so fatally derailed by another dishonestly entered war. Many of them are asking why a country as wealthy as America, currently pouring trillions of dollars into Iraq with no end in sight, cannot afford the most basic social contract giving all citizens an acceptable level of medical care and security in old age, without the feather-bedding of say Germany? Bah! Communism! Blasphemy! exclaim today’s dyed-in-the-wool capitalists and evangelicals, dreaming of a mythical pre-FDR golden era, if not the pre-trust busting 1890’s, when capitalism was untrammeled by government, when any hard-working American could grow rich and the poor, through moral failing if not ungodliness, deserved their poverty. If deserving poor there be, private charity and crumbs from the rich man’s table was more than adequate for them.
…
.And the American Dream
The American Dream is not dead. It can only be accessed through education and the gate is narrow, and getting narrower. There is an entrenched upper strata where privilege and wealth is maintained. For the aspiring, hard work is still required but in itself is not enough. A ticket to indentured labour merely, with no guaranteed access to the middle class comfort and security that blue-collar workers came to expect in the 1950’s and 60’s. And yet millions of people still want to come to America and try their luck. What is more, whatever cultural background they come from and maintain, they seem to become patriotic Americans, even the Moslems among them. Contrast that with Europe where large Moslem populations want nothing to do with their host countries. It is passing strange and I really don’t know what accounts for it.
I can’t see a return to decency and McCainite Republicans effecting much social change or Clintonian Democrats either, for that matter. Perhaps Americans need a financial meltdown or eight more years of the Bush dynasty abetted by nice folks like Dick Cheney before taking even modest steps toward a fair society, let alone a great one? I hope not, I wouldn’t wish either fate on a dog.
