The City That Nobody Loves to Love

LOS ANGELES —  There’s a pile of news clippings on my desk, maybe two inches high, all about the loathing of Los Angeles. This is a curious theme because it exists side-by-side with the notion of L.A. as paradise. Call it a sub-theme if you want, but people have always loved to hate L.A.

Not so long ago, Los Angeles was the object of national scorn because it was seen as goofy. Remember that? People in L.A. dressed in citrus colors and spent long, nonverbal weekends under a lanai . Life was regarded as too easy here, and that ease inspired ridicule in places where winters still happened.

These days, you don’t hear much about the goofy theory. Probably it faded because no one would even pretend that life is very easy in L.A. anymore. And there’s also the sheer success of Los Angeles. When it takes half a million dollars to finance a comfortable house in a decent neighborhood, the word stupid no longer seems a good match.

But in its place has come something else, a new form of L.A. hate. Maybe some cities are born to accept the animus of outsiders and, if so, L.A. is the champ. In any case, this new version is darker, less playful. It seems to grow out of some kind of fear.

Consider this story from San Diego, which is true except that the names have been excised for reasons that will be obvious.

A company with headquarters in Los Angeles decides it wants to establish a branch office in San Diego. There’s good demographics there, etc., etc. So the newly appointed manager of the branch office sets out to find suitable quarters and chooses a building in San Diego’s downtown. Everything looks good.

Now, the L.A. company is an enterprise of considerable size, and the branch office will fill a big chunk of the building. So the manager approaches the building owner and inquires about the possibility of putting the logo of his company at the top of the building. A little signage to announce the L.A. company’s arrival in town.

This sort of arrangement is made every day in a big city, but this time the building owner hesitates. The branch manager is confused and decides to press further. Finally, the owner comes clean.

Nothing personal, the owner says. It’s just that the company’s name happens to contain the name of the home city. Los Angeles.

This is San Diego, see, says the manager. There’s strong feelings about Los Angeles down here. If I put the name of Los Angeles on the top of my building, there might be some resentment around town. I might, in fact, find it difficult to sign up other tenants to my building.

No sign.

You see this kind of thing everywhere these days. Seattle had a bad case of L.A. hate about a year ago, led by a local newspaper columnist who once suggested that visitors from Los Angeles be fixed with electronic tracking devices to make sure they didn’t outstay their welcome.

Then there is San Luis Obispo, where ranches are being churned into ranchettes and the whole process blamed on L.A. expatriates. Not long ago, there was a state Assembly race in Modesto where one candidate distributed pamphlets showing a squadron of bulldozers carving up the land. The message of the pamphlet was “Don’t Los-Angelize Modesto.”

I repeat: Modesto.

As an exercise, it’s interesting to ask what exactly these people hate. First, of course, you hit on the obvious. There’s the cars and the smog and the sheer ugliness. But let’s get past that. Chicago is plenty ugly and it hasn’t been turned into a verb. You think Muncie worries about being “Chicagoized?”

No, there’s something else about L.A., a perceived evil that transcends all the cars and the smog. People from outside L.A. sense a deep malignancy to this city that is not associated with Chicago or Houston or New York. The feeling seems to be that L.A. is not only cancerous but capable of metastasizing. It can plant its urban oncogenes in other cities and so must be regarded with fear.

Here’s the most curious thing of all. When New York or Chicago is slurred, a host of defenders will rise up. They concede the sins and love their city anyway, like they love a member of their family.

But L.A. seems to have no defenders. I have a friend who says that after years of living here, he feels no closer to L.A. than when he used to watch it on TV. In fact, he says, the two experiences seem to be much the same.

Perhaps that explains some of the outside scorn. San Diegans and Seattlites sense the love gap here. If its own people will not defend a city so rich and successful, what then is wrong with Los Angeles?