Name a beacon, bail out a city

Oh, well -- what’s one more “for sale” sign on a piece of property in Southern California? It’s better than a foreclosure sign.

But what if the sign is in front of Los Angeles City Hall?

That tireless optimist, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, is prepping us for something big and nasty when he warns that he doesn’t want to “sugarcoat” the city’s money problems and that “crisis” is not too strong a word when we might be staring at a half-billion-dollar municipal pothole called the budget deficit.

How’s he planning to fill that hole? Here’s one of his ideas: naming rights. This has been on his mind since at least 2006, when he said it “just boggles the mind” that the MTA had banned most advertising. Now, our buses are rolling billboards; if you get knocked flat by a bus, you just have to look up for the phone number of a personal injury lawyer.

No doubt Villaraigosa is thinking bigger now. Get ready for “your name here,” there and everywhere.

It’s not an original idea. Sports stadiums no longer bear heroes’ names but sponsors’. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (named in honor of war veterans) hopes for at least $5 million a year for naming rights, and I hope that a certain condom manufacturer writes the check just so I can hear sportscasters welcome everyone to the USC Trojans’ Trojan Coliseum.

All that dough puts a covetous gleam in civic eyes. L.A. County welcomed sponsor ads on benches and trash bins at the beaches 10 years ago. New York City, if you believe the New York Post, may offer up naming rights to its parks. Some opportunities go cheap: Naming rights to Baltimore’s “Martin Luther King Jr. Parade Presented by Forman Mills” went for a staggering $7,500. At least King still gets top billing -- for now.

But Los Angeles won’t come cheap, baby. What would L.A. put on the naming-rights auction block? Probably anything -- if the price is right. It already tried putting libraries on the block, although not without resistance. A dozen years ago, locals demanded that the new Watts library branch be named for a woman who acted like a citizen, not a CEO; she bought thrift-store books for kids and campaigned door to door for the library bond measure. They won.

Outraged by the thought of the Xbox Public Library? I was too, once. Better an Xbox Public Library than a closed public library. When I can’t step into an elevator without being turned into a captive audience for commercials on a video monitor, that battle is over; America Inc. has won. Our leaders like us to be consumers, not citizens. Citizens have rights; consumers just have needs. With the Bush administration jonesing for privatizing, we’re lucky to have dodged the Pfizer FDR Memorial (“We have nothing to fear but chronic pain itself.”)

So let’s pull out the stops and splatter corporate names on every public place. Get used to them coming trippingly off the tongue, just as they do on “Project Runway” with its L’Oreal Paris Makeup Room. Reconcile yourself to odd matchmaking. Goodbye Tom Bradley International Terminal, hello Hello Kitty International Terminal.

Let Purina and Royal Canin duke it out over naming rights to dog parks. If the price is right, rename the Lindbergh Beacon atop City Hall the Sempra Energy Beacon; what has Charles Lindbergh done for us lately?

With the state now $16 billion in the hole, it can’t be long before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announces a naming-rights initiative from his official Nike lectern, the swoosh poised just above the Great Seal of the State of California. He’ll extol the pleasures of California’s Bain de Soleil state beaches, the beauties of Procter & Gamble’s Big Basin Redwoods, the delights of the Manolo Blahnik California Museum for History, Women and the Arts, all of which are easily reached via the fine Wal-Mart highway system. Afterward, he and the legislative leaders can retire to the smoking tent and select cigars from the R.J. Reynolds state humidor.

I know just where to start this ball rolling -- with naming rights to politicians. Democratic Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez could be the Pechanga Resort & Casino speaker. And, for sticking up for yacht buyers who dodge California sales taxes while the state is about to put the screws to blind people on Medi-Cal, Republican Assembly leader Mike Villines could very well become the Assembly Boating and Sportsmen leader. His defense, as he said on the Assembly floor: “I am not working for Thurston Howell III.”

Sure he is. And we’re being led by a bunch of Gilligans, brought to you by their sponsors.