A Guy in LA

COMES NOW the first entertaining must-read on your May syllabus, the first from this time of troubles that scarcely seem to trouble the City at all. It's by one Scott Olin Schmidt, and it speaks fire and truth.

The premise. "There's a Spanish-speaking Los Angeles and an English-speaking Los Angeles and, as recent events here demonstrated, the two rarely speak to each other."

The evidence, please. Here's Scott on the May Day disturbance: "While the media went apoplectic over the attacks on members of their own, most of Los Angeles seemed to shrug and move on. The incident in MacArthur Park barely registered a blip in coffeshop or cocktail conversation on the English-speaking Westside."

Here's Scott on the Griffith Park Fire-slash-photo-op: "Bringing Bratton to the press conferences at the Griffith Park fire was a stroke of brilliant political theater on Villaraigosa's part. While most of non-Spanish speaking Los Angeles had a vague idea that he was embattled, there was no city-wide resentment towards him as there was for former police chief Darryl Gates. The Griffith Park inferno was the May Melee for Gringo L.A. impacting the livelihood of its residents who had to flee the fire, Sierra Club environmentalists, equestrians and those who can afford to live in Los Feliz."

He forgot all those key grip hikers, and he falls a little flat in imagining that Antonio would even be interested to bother "bridging the gap between these two Los Angeleses." The premise would have been better if it were divided along its true axis, not Latino/Anglo but poor/privileged. The race chasms needn't be bridged at all---that's something every Mayor since, well, Sam, knows and loves about his position of power in the City; and until the working poor are sufficiently mobilized, there's no need to toss them even the barest of political bones.

In LA, your only task as Mayor is not bridge, nor to solve, no, not even to lead; it's merely to counterbalance. That's what the obsequiously-obliging Bratton was incongruously doing at the privileged people's fire, and that's what his police force was doing, while Antonio was in Latin America, through the poor people's May Day melee that accidentally roughed up some working class media types, but has been very soon forgotten in privileged LA.