Where I Was From by Joan Didion

Author:Joan Didion [Didion, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307763297
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-25T23:00:00+00:00

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LAKEWOOD exists because at a given time in a different economy it had seemed an efficient idea to provide population density for the mall and a labor pool for the Douglas plant. There are a lot of towns like Lakewood in California. They were California’s mill towns, breeder towns for the boom. When times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong, that managed to increase the proletariat and simultaneously, by calling it middle class, to co-opt it. Such towns were organized around the sedative idealization of team sports, which were believed to develop “good citizens,” and therefore tended to the idealization of adolescent males. During the good years, the years for which places like Lakewood or Canoga Park or El Segundo or Pico Rivera existed, the preferred resident was in fact an adolescent or post-adolescent male, ideally one already married and mortgaged, in harness to the plant, a good worker, a steady consumer, a team player, someone who played ball, a good citizen.

When towns like these came on hard times, it was the same adolescent males, only recently the community’s most valued asset, who were most visibly left with nowhere to go. Among the Spur Posse members who appeared on the talk shows that spring, a striking number had been out of high school a year, or even two years, but did not seem actively engaged in a next step. “It was some of the older kids who were so obnoxious, so arrogant,” one Spur father, Donald Belman, told me. “They’re the ones who were setting up talk-show appearances just for the money. I had to kick them out of my house, they were answering my phone, monitoring my mail. They were just in it for the money, quick cash.” Jane Gross of The New York Times asked one of these postgraduate Spurs what he had been doing since high school. “Partying,” he said. “Playing ball.”

Good citizens were encouraged, when partying failed, when playing ball failed, when they finally noticed that the jobs had gone to Salt Lake or St. Louis, to see their problem as one caused by “the media,” or by “condoms in the schools,” or by less-good citizens, or non-citizens. “Orange County is using illegal aliens now as a smokescreen, as a scapegoat, because that’s the way we get the white lower-income people to jump on board and say the immigrants are the problem,” the wife of an aerospace engineer in Costa Mesa told Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times. “But we had our class differences before the immigrants. One of our sons was on the football team in the high school in Costa Mesa about twelve years ago. They had a great team and they were beating the pants off one of the schools in Newport Beach and the Newport stands started to cheer. ‘Hey, hey, that’s OK, you’re gonna work for us one day.’”

This is what it costs to create and maintain an artificial ownership class.

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