Why LA is Great

As promised, I shall endeavour to explain the greatness of Los Angeles, California.
It's not because of the beaches, the palm trees, the movie stars, or any of the other reasons the Clampet family packed up their bags and moved to Beverly--Hills that is. But in a strange way the Clampets themselves may be part of the greatness. Los Angeles is where we make those parts of the culture that are explicitly manufactured. The motion picture remakes of television shows, the pop music by committee, and the bad television that it all produces are made there and they are the Frankenstein force that animates our national corpse. The capitalism and the democracy tempered not with philosophy and education, but with desire and venality have become the basis of a national greatness that it mildly perverted. We might enjoy a light operetta, or a Winslow Homer exhibition, but the great masses of men watch CBS. And when the piper comes to collect in exchange for driving out the rats he's a takin' the chilluns; or more aptly, he already has. We went out and demanded cheap and eye-catching entertainment and we have sold our very ability to reason to raise the capital. When the cancer that will eventually consume us all metastasizes we will wonder at it's first invasion point, that place is Los Angeles.

My contention is that we should all move to LA so we can get a front row seat to the slow show: the deterioration of of the national soul.
We owe it to ourselves to see the sinking of the ship from the lido deck. Wallow in the filth and the destruction, the blow jobs and the happy endings (of all kinds). I for one propose to enjoy it as our very own Gommorah by the sea leads us all into evil.

And let's clear this up once and for all. I'm not getting all Pat Robertson about this...indeed he's part of the infotainment apocolypse, necessarily feeding the media monster he pretends to defend us against. He is a St. George who sleeps with the dragon. On the contrary, I'm enjoying the slow slide. I myself merely plan of being in Bethelehem when the rough beast slouches there to be born. And if you doubt Hollywood's power remeber only this...William Faulkner went to write screenplays and was deemed competent. Tremble not at the Grand Guignol, but the sublime mediocratic power of the only true hell, development hell.

So LA's greatness is not the greatness that was Greece or the glory that was Rome. LA's greatness is the sticky sweet greatness of cotton candy...eat too much and you'll be sick, but you'll always eat too much. It's sunny and seasonless and warm with salty breezes and it's seduction is perilous. I propose to give myslef then and be in love for a while, it's a sort of divine drunkeness we can all enjoy. I think Faulkner worked on the script for that one too, didn't get made.