Judging from this poll of 60,000 Americans conducted by Travel & Leisure of visitors' and residents' attitudes toward 25 American cities to find "America's Favorite City," Los Angeles has to be America's Least Favorite City.
Consider the subsets of the "People" category. Seattle came in first in "Most Intelligent People," while Los Angeles came in dead last, worse than Las Vegas, Miami, or San Antonio (perhaps 100-year-old Jacques Barzun raises San Antonio single-handedly?)
Charleston was first in "Most Friendly," while LA was last again.
LA -- surly and stupid, like the cast of "Idiocracy."
LA scored near the top only in "Luxury boutiques," "Shoe-shopping," and "Jewelry-shopping." LA is so hated it only came in sixth in "Weather," behind (besides San Diego and Honolulu) Miami and Charleston (ever hear of this thing called "Summer"?) and 7,000 foot Santa Fe (ever hear of this thing called "not Summer"?).
The only consolation Angelenos can take is that year by year, the rest of the country becomes more like LA (but with lousier weather):
We're the future, your future.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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21 comments:
That pretty much sums up the American experience: from Charleston to Los Angeles; from Alpha to Omega; from First to Last; from Beginning to End.
Thank you, George W Bush. Thank you, Bill Clinton. Thank you, Ted Kennedy. Thank you, Emanuel Celler.
NYC was for a long time the most hated. It not LA was the celebrity/wealth capital of America. Now LA is and thus the hatred.
For Hollywood idiots like say, Lindsay Lohan and D-list reality stars like Heidi Montag.
LA is an overgrown Midwestern city and the traffic/nasty people make the weather moot. Who wants to sit in nice summer weather stuck in traffic on 405? To get to an overcrowded filthy beach filled with Mexicans?
LA has very little going for it in comparison with almost every other American city. It has all the worst aspects of suburban overcrowding and very few of the advantages that could offset them -- for those you go to New York. The only thing you can say about LA is the weather is good, but it's good in Texas as well.
A police officer friend of mine, back in 97', had to go to LA to do something related to his job. I forget if it was to testify or detain someone. It doesn't matter now. All I remember is Steve (his name) coming back and what he said about Los Angeles when I asked him about the city. He said "thats not effing America man, we need to take the flag back and cede that place". He went on to say that he never felt so outnumbered in all his life. He was really pissed off. You see not all whites or blacks dreamed of the diverse America our betters have planned for us, and didn't see anything wrong with the America of 1985.
The dislike and mistrust will only intensify. John Bolton of the blog, Open City and its Natural Enemies, has pointed out repeatedly that mucho diversity will in effect bring a repressive state with it in the future to keep the peace, but the power-greedy know this and welcome it. Thats why they want so much diversity, they are very aware of the side effects and welcome them because this will give them the impetus they are looking for to implement what they want in the first place- a restrictive state.
As Kevin Phillips noted recently, the US now has economic inequality closer Russia, Mexico and Brazil than to Canada or Western Europe.
Ultimately, its like Disraeli said, the castle is not safe when the cottage is unhappy. To see how that plays out in Brazil, go rent Send A Bullet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LAFtUcCf0I
I can't believe that Gary, Indiana or some other city like that is not below Los Angeles. Gary is the place where they did a test drive for the paradigm that Los Angeles now follows.
I went to college in LA in the 50's and it was paradise. Those were the days.
I've just Googled Mr Celler and find, in Wikipedia, "In the 1940s, ... relax immigration laws on an emergency basis to rescue those fleeing the Holocaust." The common belief in the existence of these "refugees" implies that they had the choice of flight - they didn't. The poor buggers were prisoners of a regime that wanted to murder them.
William: Thank you, Emanuel Celler.
Okay, I had to google that one.
A police officer friend of mine, back in 97', had to go to LA to do something related to his job. I forget if it was to testify or detain someone. It doesn't matter now. All I remember is Steve (his name) coming back and what he said about Los Angeles when I asked him about the city. He said "thats not effing America man, we need to take the flag back and cede that place".
I lived on the outskirts of LA in 1994 [in what they call the San Gabriel Valley], and told my girlfriend at the time that the place was a "cesspool".
Anonymous: nasty people
I don't know this for certain - I can only try to imagine what California might have once been - trying to reconstruct it from anecdote and story and guesswork - but my best guess is that it was a pretty wonderful place to experience.
Steve Sailer [who was born in late 1958] is probably just about old enough to have the faintest childhood memories of what I consider to have been the golden age of the Golden State - that period from the late 1950's through the mid-1960's - when everything in California really did seem to be golden.
From Hitchcock filming Vertigo, in San Francisco, in 1957/1958, to the Ventures releasing Walk Don't Run in 1960, to the Surfaris cutting Wipe Out in 1962 [not to mention John Wayne & Jimmy Stewart teaming up to shoot Liberty Valance that same year], to the rise of Fairchild Semiconductor and those crazy UFOs flying in and out of the Skunk Works every night, all the way through to The Gipper's victory in 1966, everything in California must have seemed [perhaps correctly ?] to have been perfect.
Have you ever seen Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer? It paints a picture of a life which appears to be about as close to heaven as a man can expect to experience in this world. Just look at any old picture from that era - or even the picture in The Gipper's Wikipedia entry, called, simply, Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan aboard a boat in California in 1964, and then try to tell me that we weren't a better people then.
And poor Steve Sailer is probably just about old enough to be able reach back through the fog, into his earliest childhood memories, and see California as it once was, in his mind's eye.
And now he's saddled with the absolute certainty of knowing how its demographic death will unfold over the course of the remainder of his life.
Anyway, pity the guy - it was not always thus.
PS: Great 1960's/1970's era California trivia question: Who sang backup vocals on Wishing You Were Here?
People see LA as a microcosm of the 3rd world in America. Ethnic fiefdoms, smog like Mexico City, traffic like Beijing, brown outs like in India, crumbling infrastructure. Contrasts of extreme wealth and poverty.
LA is everything that the rest of the country fears will happen to them
If LA is so bad why do you live there, Steve (a question that could be asked to all Anglo-Angelenos or all Angelonos for that matter).
Lucius Vorenus:
The Ventures are from Seattle. Otherwise you post is pretty good; I lived in SoCal for a year in 1976 and things were still pretty good, but there was sense of a lost mountain-and-beach golden age of the 50s and 60s.
Well, Anony-mouse, as one who lives "behind the Orange Curtain," but still reasonably close to LA, I'll try to explain:
I was born here in '57, so I am old enough to remember the "good old days." Things really didn't seem to start seriously going downhill until the early 80s. I don't know if that's because of Tom Bradley having been mayor for long enough to have finally undone all the positive things his predeccesors did, or if it's more because that was when the first large wave of illegals poured over the border in reaction to the '82 peso crisis, or some of both.
I would be the first to agree with you that LA has become a 3rd world garbage dump, but for all the things that are wrong with this area, this is where my family and closest friends still are, and that counts for a lot. And my part of OC is still pretty nice, so it's not like I live within the LA city limits as I once did.
Sometimes my wife and I talk about where we might go in 10 years or so when we retire, but the unfortunate reality is that there's probably no place you can escape to anymore. There are very few, if any parts of the country where poor, uneducated Hispanic immigrants have not yet gotten a toehold, so unless you want to live in rural isolation somewhere on the US-Canada border, it's a given that any place one might live is going to, over time, resemble the USA less and less, and Mexico more and more. So, we'll probably stay put and deal with it the best we can since at least the weather is nice, and violent, destructive earthquakes happen only every 20 years or so.
Even the 80s in California were still pretty good. It's all gone now.
I seem to recall the old National Observer did an annual listing of the best states to live in back in the mid '70s. They included all the usual factors: weather, per capita income, crime, employment, etc.
Every year I remember the "C" states were always #1-#3: Colorado, Connecticut and, of course, California, before its demographics really started to change into what they are now.
I'm a couple of years younger than Steve, but I can still recall thinking that California was what all states aspired to be. Seems like a distant dream now.
Ethnic fiefdoms, smog like Mexico City, traffic like Beijing, brown outs like in India, crumbling infrastructure...
...government kelptocracy like Zimbabwe.
[Celler wanted to] relax immigration laws on an emergency basis to rescue those fleeing the Holocaust.
Of course, if they were Polish Catholic, Celler and all his friends would've had an equally deep and abiding interest in their disposition, just like our good friends of La Raza would be out there arguing for amnesty everyday even if all the illegal immigrants were Britons, and just like the ACLU would still be fighting border security tooth and nail if the wetbacks all turned into Pat Buchanan voters on arrival.
Even the 80s in California were still pretty good. It's all gone now.
Talk to the Western states about it. The flood of white refugees began in the late 80s/early 90s and hasn't let up since.
When I ask people why they left, the first thing every single one of them says is "it's so expensive there."
A lot of them, obviously, are unwilling to sound racist by pointing out the obvious. But to me it also demonstrates how many people are simply unable to connect cause to effect.
To Santa Fe's credit, there's not much humidity or rain, it's not as god-awful hot during the summer as Phoenix, and it's close to skiing.
If only Johnny Carson was still living! How he would rip that town! :0
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