The Ocean Between D.C. and L.A.
This is a tale of two cities. Each is the seat of an empire, one built around political power, the other around entertainment. The 'tologist can tell you all about it because he's just back from L.A., which gives him the opportunity to say, repeatedly, "I just flew in from the Coast." (Of course no one on the Coast actually calls it the Coast. You have to not be on the Coast, or have any real knowledge of the Coast, to call it the Coast. Same with Frisco and the Big Apple.)</br></br>If cities have an organic quality then Washington is a flower, the District a monumental pistil, heavily dusted with the pollen of modern city life, the Potomac a stem from which everything rises, the suburbs arrayed like petals, simple and lovely if somewhat repetitive.</br></br>This is not to insult Los Angeles. In fact it can be a beautiful, mesmerizing place, which is one reason why upward of 10 million people live there. Los Angeles has big mountains, palm trees, good-looking people, beaches. One day I drove up to Point Dume and walked along the bluffs, the Santa Monica Mountains tumbling into the sea, seals swimming in the clear blue water, sea birds soaring on the updrafts. Someone was surfcasting, barefoot on the beach. Hardly anyone else was around. It was a Saturday morning; if you were in Washington and had gone to Sugarloaf Mountain on a sunny day like this you'd have found hundreds of people, acres of children scrambling around - mall meets mountain. But in Los Angeles there are mountain ranges in every direction, there's even a range right in town, the Hollywood Hills, and so people are spoiled. Their attitude toward nature is like that of a Washingtonian who sees the Lincoln Memorial every day but never goes there.</br></br>So, yes, Los Angeles and its surroundings can be lovely, but they can also feel post-apocalyptic. Washington is still basically pre-apocalyptic, except for Democratic Hill staffers. Washington never has serious recessions, because government is incapable of doing anything but grow, and we don't have natural disasters, which happen in Los Angeles continually to the point where everyone walks around in this Death Is My Companion daze. Insanely they have built a city atop a piece of the Earth's crust that is fractured like a broken windshield. It's hard for anyone to be deeply serious about anything in Los Angeles, since they know that in a couple of hours they'll fall into a jagged crevice in the Earth's surface, never to be seen again. The typical Washington disaster? It snows some. That and term limits.</br></br>Washington has history, a deep sense of its place in the creation of a nation. It's been here at least since the late 1800s, if memory serves. But in Los Angeles everything is new, disposable, with the texture of things not meant to age. Half a century ago Raymond Chandler wrote great stories about a private eye tooling around town finding bodies and getting beat up. If Chandler were still alive he'd have to have entire chapters about Philip Marlowe getting stuck in traffic. You can imagine the prose: "I was headed for Bay City to eyeball a stiff. I turned off Melrose and took the 101 to the Harbor Freeway. It was a parking lot. The world had stopped. I put my feet up on the dash and read the funny pages. Something caught the corner of my eye, a flash of white in the HOV lane. Teeth. A blonde in a purring red Porsche. Her lipstick was the color of aortic blood. She smiled hugely. Her mouth was more than flesh and bone, it was a geological formation. She gave me a look I could feel in my hip beeper. I put the car in neutral and pressed down on the gas. She got the message."