IN ALL KNOWN TRAVELOGUES about historic U.S. Route 66, the traveler is always driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. Never the other direction.
In books such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in the old “Manifest Destiny” ideology, in the legacies of Reagan Republicans and Beverly Hills Democrats, and in the history of the entertainment biz, the movement American economic, political, and cultural activity, of the nation’s overall zeitgeist, inevitably moved in one direction–from Northeast to Southwest.
Everybody who was anybody moved to L.A. or wanted to, as proclaimed in the Go-Gos’ song “Our Town” and the last verse of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
L.A. was the dominant pop-cultural force of the whole world, and the model of commercial and residential development for the nation, for better or for worse.
Whenever certain folks saw something developing in Seattle they didn’t like, from sprawling subdivisions to traffic jams to cookie-cutter chain stores, they publicly bemoned that Seattle was “becoming another L.A.”
But while nobody up here was noticing, L.A. ceased to be the unchallenged icon of American inevitability.
The region’s aerospace and defense industries have been shrinking, and much of what’s left is now controlled by Boeing.
With the single exception of Disney, all the major Hollywood entertainment giants are now under the thumb of conglomerates based in other cities or other countries. Those highly hyped “new media” outfits are more likely to be situated in northern California, the Northeast, or the Northwest.
Educated young adults across the continent are clamoring to move into “real” neighborhoods and communities, not SoCal-style sprawlsvilles.
The image of a “Southern California Lifestyle” once romanticized in movies like L.A. Story and TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 has devolved into the more dystopian depictions of Tinseltown seen in Showtime’s Beggers and Choosers (filmed in Canada!).
And we won’t even get into southern California’s increasingly lousy reputations for race relations, education funding, and police corruption.
Among all this bad news, word recently came that Times Mirror, parent company of the L.A. Times, would be merged into the Chicago-based Tribune Company.
The L.A. Times, just like the Chicago Tribune, used to be known as a financially prosprous but editorially weak paper, a mouthpiece for its owners’ right-wing opinions. But both papers learned to get more respectable in recent decades, while their respective parent companies expanded into other media ventures. (The Tribune Co. owns Seattle’s KCPQ-TV and operates KTWB-TV under a management contract.)
Now, Times Mirror (the “Mirror” in the corporate name refers to an L.A. evening paper that died in the ’50s) will fold its papers, TV stations, book companies, and assorted other endeavors under Tribune’s control.
Some commentators have bemoaned the loss of local newspaper ownership as a sign of L.A. “losing its civic identity” (sound familiar?).
Los Angeles used to collectively think of itself as The End of the Line; the inevitable receiving place of all America’s energies and dissemination point for all America’s entertainment. All roads led, like Route 66, to L.A. All eyes and ears were attuned to Hollywood product, as signified by the RKO logo’s radio tower beaming one signal to the world.
It’s not just that L.A.’s not the End of the Line anymore, but that there’s no more “Line.”
TOMORROW: Some short stuff.
ELSEWHERE:
