We yearn to rebel. It’s in our blood and we usually
make a mess of it.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
– W.B. Yeats
I never would have read Yeats if it wasn’t for Joan
Didion.
She used him for the opening of the best essay I’ve ever read,
“Slouching Towards
Bethlehem” where she exposed the ugly side of
Haight Ashbury in the Summer of Love circa 1967 in a way that was
as hard and bare and truthful as the iPhone videos of the light
slowly going out in George Floyd’s eyes.
Ms Didion’s still around. I wonder what she thinks about what
happened in Santa Monica over the weekend.
Has anyone asked her?
Does it feel like deja vu?
A never ending circle of shit?
I think she’d get a whiff of the red tide that’s lingered in the
bay for weeks and say, “There is something uneasy in the Los
Angeles air this afternoon, some stillness, some tension.”
I had a feeling what would happen in Santa Monica and stayed
away.
I saw it firsthand in Oakland and Berkeley in 1992.
I felt it coming in
Huntington Beach a month ago.
Americans just aren’t built for this.
You take kids of out school, you keep us locked down, you don’t
let us make a living, you try to force control and something
snaps.
We yearn to rebel. It’s in our blood and we usually make a mess
of it.
Whether it’s Trump supporters refusing to wear masks in Costco
or suburban kids in designer
clothes casually walking down the street with stolen surfboards
under their arms, the Eric Cartman level of arrogant
ignorance is the same: “It’s my body, and I’ll do what I want.”
In Joan’s 1967, the world still had Martin Luther King, Bobby
Kennedy and Jimi Hendrix. The protests had leaders, demands. They
fought and bled for the end of Jim Crow and the war in Vietnam.
They thought they were making progress.
Now we’ve got moneyed teens hopping in Ubers to go and loot
shopping malls and a reality show insane clown president tear
gassing protesters so he get can his picture taken holding a Bible
in front of a church.
And it’s all a distraction from this:
Less than 200,000 people in America were in jail in 1970. Now
there’s 2.1 million behind bars. Forty-six percent of them are in
for drug offenses. Five times more blacks are locked up than whites
and they’re more than twice as likely to be killed by police.
We’ve traded an overt form of bondage and segregation to one
that’s quieter and more ruthless.
I saw three white people in Malibu today holding signs and
asking people to honk their horns in support of Black Lives
Matter.
I’m sure they meant well but their town is 1.2% African
American.
I live in Inglewood (yes, I got priced out of Venice) and my
neighbors would have laughed if they’d seen them.
Unlike 1992, it’s quiet here now. Really hope it stays that
way.
