Pamela just posted a great little piece on frogblog about the Playground of the Baby Giants, where we are staying for another two weeks.
Interestingly, I came up with the Baby Giants metaphor because I was struck by how L.A. looks so fake and architecturally simplistic, as if kids had made a town out of shoe boxes in a sandbox, to push their toy cars around in. (Think of the backdrops in the Thunderbirds TV show. That’s what L.A. looks like to me).
But the infant metaphor was more apt than I intended.
Because the general level of competency, of discourse, in everything and everywhere, is falling at an alarming rate. So much so that it sometimes seems like the whole society is being run by children. They can handle simple and mundane tasks, as long as they’ve been precisely scripted and rehearsed. Throw a wrench in the works (like showing a foreign I.D. in a bike rental shop) and you can see the anguish and the fear overwhelm the poor children.
(And of course, when they are off work, all the baby giants do is play: beach-volley, surfing, flying kites, which is obviously fine, but completely incongruous to my eyes).
Even hallmarks of american grown-up culture and sophistication, like the New York Times and National Public Radio are succumbing to this disheartening fate.
I like to read the NYT’s Arts section when I’m here. I was struck by the latest, “Arts, briefly” column which mentioned a TV talk-show host’s breast cancer, Britney, Nicole, and of course Paris (the bimbo heiress (ooh, my blog stats should go up now!)).
I like to listen to NPR when I’m driving here. Yesterday, on the venerable All Things Considered news program, an interview with a structural engineer, following the collapse of that bridge in Minnesota, went like this:
– Why do things like this happen? Because things get old?
– Yes
– Could it be avoided and if so, how?
– By maintaining and fixing things.
– Would it cost money?
– Yes
I’m not making this up, but it’ll cost you $3.95 to read the transcript.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media is all over Oscar, the psychic cat and Hillary’s hint of a cleavage.
The bell-curve that usually applies to everything (incompetent to mediocre to not bad to great) doesn’t seem to apply to anything here anymore. It’s more like a straight line stuck at the incompetency level with the far right extremity dipping slightly towards the mediocre.
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting my 13 year old drive a car alone (even an automatic, even on streets as wide as runways). Now imagine letting him fly an airplane, run a corporation, a city (bridges collapsing, steam pipes exploding), the military (half of the military expenditures in the world / the mess in Iraq) and you’ll get an idea of just how I feel when I’m here:
Fucking terrified.