The Money Archipelago
After the presentation of attestations and tests, after the strange silence of security, there are rows of closed shops and cafes, the departure area dim and empty. Getting out for the first time in two years is an eerie experience. Only three planes are leaving.
All through the night, as we bounce and lurch through the turbulence, I imagine our plane as a tiny, lonely dot, no fellow travellers ahead to warn of bad weather. There’s a renewed sense of distance, of how extremely remote we are.
The Los Angeles immigration queue is a miracle. We are through in an unprecedented half an hour. And then we’re on the freeway, and here is America with its crumbling infrastructure, its potholes and wildness, its opulence and cruelty.
On the side of the freeway a shirtless man is struggling to his feet. There is no pedestrian access. He has either fallen down a high concrete wall or been pushed out of a car. He is unsteady and staggering. As I spot him our driver is negotiating a furious, weaving, high-speed lane change; we veer away and when I look behind, the man’s arm is raised. We who are about to die salute America, the land of the freeway.
Los Angeles is effectively an archipelago, a city divided against itself by two things: money and the freeway system. The way from island of safety to island of money is by car. Walking can be done with caution within islands, but not between.
On the first morning, as we google map our way on foot, the phone directs us beneath an overpass. We hurry through a street lined on both sides by the tents of the homeless. It’s a long and unnerving walk. Coming out the other side we pass an enormous, gated palace, the sinister headquarters of the super-rich and opaque Church of Scientology. Homelessness and distress come right up against extraordinary wealth. The trick while navigating is to avoid the borders.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon recently referred to some types of people as “bottom feeding.” Perhaps some of the “wealth narrative” of American evangelism has rubbed off on him: affluence as a sign of virtue. On TV, American evangelists tell their flock, “If you enrich me, folks, God will be pleased.” (It sounds like a fantastic ethos to me, and not a scam at all.)
Here in Los Angeles there is no safety net, no easily affordable health care for anyone, and nothing for the outdoor bottom feeders except their tents and shopping trolleys, their crazy singing, and the mad fire in their eyes. You can’t actually get rid of them, so you have to steer around them. Los Angeles will remind you, there is a good reason why societies with proper taxation and the least inequality are the most cohesive and the happiest.
If you’ve made it here, you might live up in the hills, in a mansion with private security, even a private fire service. And when you need to you drive, between islands of prosperity.
It's a beautiful city. Up on Mount Hollywood it’s dry and hot, the buildings spread out below, the sea in the distance, hawks flying overhead. There are banks of yellow flowers, rattlesnake holes in the dusty slope. If you’re lucky you might see a mountain lion.
At the Ahmanson Theatre, vaccine passes are mandatory and masking is strictly enforced. We’ve driven downtown to see a show and the subject is beautifully apt. The Lehman Trilogy is a brilliant play and its central theme is, you guessed it, the corruption of the American dream, the insanity caused by money.
