The Blimp’s View : Hearts of the City / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news

A New Year in Los Angeles. And quiet, very quiet. If it wasn’t for the gunfire, you’d think this was Canada. No brush fires, no earthquakes, nothing to make the joint jump. According to the newspapers, even the gunfire has died down. The annual weapons-shooting and lead-spraying on New Year’s Eve reportedly mowed down a mere two of our fellow citizens this year, a record low.

And then, on Monday, USC won the Rose Bowl. I mean, all of a sudden it’s like the ‘50s here. All day long the Blimp flew over Pasadena, sending out pictures that made L.A. look like paradise, just like the old days. From a thousand feet up, the scenes resembled orange-crate labels from 40 years ago. The pretty pictures seemed to be saying, “Here lives a lucky band of frolickers and citrus-eaters with nothing to worry about.”

And maybe the message is right. With only four years to go before the century ends, L.A. has sunk deep into normalcy. Look at what the newspapers say we are going to worry about in ‘96:

* House prices. Will they go up again so we can all run down to the bank and refinance one more time?

* Football. Will the NFL let L.A. build its own team for the future or will we be forced to buy out Phoenix?

* Subways. Will the Valley get a subway or be jilted with just a Podunk trolley-car line? More important, where will the next sinkhole appear?

* Business. The recession being over, will we grow faster than the rest of the country, or merely as fast?

You see what I mean. We are looking squarely into the maw of a yawner year. Understand that normalcy never seems like normalcy when it’s happening because we love to elevate small worries into big ones. But normalcy is what we’ve got. Nothing like your crisis years of 1969 or even 1973. I remember picking up a newspaper one morning in 1973 and a Page One headline said something like this: “World Running Out of Raw Materials.”

For a long time, people really believed in the raw material crisis. Not just gasoline, but everything. I recall one story mentioning zinc. After the zinc went, the story said, everyone would be forced to live without toys or flashlights because there wouldn’t be any batteries.

Anyway, those years were nothing like our present time. Now we are looking at a year more like, say, 1957. A comfortable, nonthreatening, satisfied, slow-track, garden-variety year.

And does it make us happy? Not a bit. Garden-variety years tend to make us restive, nervous and suspicious. In the ‘50s we had so many garden-variety years that we had to invent the Commies as a receptacle for our anxieties. The ‘60s, with all their crises, came almost as a relief.

The other day my 4-year-old son was pawing through a picture book and came across one of the familiar scenes from the ‘60s. The picture shows a college student, in the midst of a campus confrontation, hurling a smoking can of tear gas back toward a line of advancing policemen.

Casey studied the picture. What were these people doing, he asked.

I explained.

Casey loved it. He wanted to do it.

“Let’s go to college and throw bombs,” he said.

I told him we couldn’t, that the picture was taken a long time ago and people don’t throw bombs at colleges anymore.

The gleam left his eyes. In some way, life had tricked him. He looked at the book and kicked it. He was trapped in a world where no one had any fun.

And us too. Surely most of us do not wish for a return of the ‘60s nor, for that matter, of the time when we worried about the extinction of zinc. But neither do we really welcome the endless petty trials of normalcy. And that’s what we’re facing.

After kicking the book, Casey retreated to his room and returned with a plastic version of his favorite dinosaur. It’s an Oviraptor, a vicious beast that liked to climb on his victims’ backs and rip out their throats. Casey loves it dearly.

He waved the Oviraptor toward my midsection. “I’m going to eat you,” he said.

I understood. The Oviraptor wasn’t a bomb, but it was something.

All of a sudden it’s like the ‘50s here. All day long the Blimp flew over Pasadena, sending out pictures that made L.A. look like paradise, just like the old days. . . . The pretty pictures seemed to be saying, ‘Here lives a lucky band of frolickers and citrus-eaters with nothing to worry about.’