Are you reassured?
There are twenty types of 911 calls LAPD no longer intends to answer. Catalytic converter theft is among them.
Fear not, in the cosplay world of political mailers we still enforce civic order in L.A. and our local candidate is a super heroine bringing the hurt to swarthy criminals lifted from the pages of Nancy Drew.
So says Valley Families for Valley Values, a/k/a LIUNA Local 300, and a quarter million dollar donation.
No candidate has been asked to describe what enforcement measure they would deploy to return law and order to the status quo of 2019. Rick Caruso and Karen Bass weren’t during the Mayoral race and the council candidates aren’t now. That’s just icky and annoying and disrespectful of the Journey We Are All On.
Well, I asked. But who answers? Isaac Kim and Douglas Sierra did. You don’t get $200K money bombs for answering sensible questions. You get the money bomb in exchange for promises to send city business to groups who cut checks.
There’s no bigger business right now in L.A. than Shantytown, Inc. Here in the slushy, swampy pleasure pits of civic contracting and million dollar hand jobs, a quiet point of contention has emerged in the CD 6 Special Election to which few are paying attention: ‘By right’ development, wonk-speak for allowing large projects that pass building code to go forward without community input. Meaning homeless housing near you, like it or not.
Marisa Alcaraz is in favor. As is the Carpenters Union, the IBEW, L.A. Federation of Labor, all of which stand to book lots of business in this way. They’re buying mailers in which Marisa poses with a katana.
She’s foxy fighting! Who’s she fighting? The special interests! Who are they? Bad people! Standing in the way of homeless housing progress. Not Good Valley people like you, whose love for the Homeless Industrial Complex is so abundant you wouldn’t dare turn the mailer over to confirm who or what is paying for it.
To her credit Imelda murmured an encouraging observation at a recent debate. ‘By right’ hasn’t been fleshed out. No kidding. There’s an issue with teeth. She might have run on that point, really leaned into it, but she or her people went with cosplay.
There are four versions of the Super Imelda mailer and she has grown progressively sexier in each one. There’s some compensating going on.
We embrace fantasy as a cope when the answers to grubby real world problems involve close work and commitment to hard decisions and require the courage to be yelled at by obnoxious people with a vested interest in the status quo.
We love shortcuts. We are a city of enablers with too much money and a supine media. Los Angeles is a self-licking ice cream cone.
I’m thinking of a mailer from homeowners to other homeowners. It would be two words long: Had enough? The graphic would be, well pretty much any random footage from the street scape, but with a strategically placed guillotine in the background.
If only I could get someone to pay for that. Are you there, Elon? It’s me, Van Nuys.
Photo Credit: Mel Melcon, LA Times
