photo: California Digital Library

One of the myths about Los Angeles is that in the late 1940’s a consortium of General Motors, Standard Oil and other large corporations bought up our “Red Cars” and put them out of business so that everyone would be forced to drive cars. The story is largely untrue and an excellent explantion for why it is not true can be found by clicking on “Mythology as Fact”.

There is another myth circulating around this town that is taken as fact.

Illegal immigration is responsible for every ill in the city: Traffic caused by broken down cars driven by Mexicans. Overcrowded hospitals and the health care crisis. The poor quality of our school system. Crime, drugs, and violence–all are caused by illegals.

Rarely do I hear white or non-Hispanic Californians acknowledge the responsibility that their own anti-tax fervor and reactionary politics might have caused some of our ills. Spending billions to house prisoners, keeping taxes so low that schools starve, and the obscene mess of private health care insurance and the lack of logic in not having a National Health Care system…….these are problems that we voters have brought on ourselves.

We spend hundreds of billions of dollars to establish a phony democracy in Iraq, which is surrounded by other unreformed dictatorships, and then we say we cannot cut government spending on the military. We live in an constantly impoverished domestic situation, while we endow government contractors with lucrative deals to continue waging unecessary wars around the globe.

We watch Honest Tim Russert question Honest John McCain who never answers a question honestly and then we wonder why our bi-partisan system of government is in shambles. McCain is a liar who is neither a Republican or Democrat. Yet he is treated as some sort of sage by the media. What makes him so special? His time in detention in North Vietnam? The same dishonesty and double-talk is true for Hillary Clinton. Yet we behave as if we are little children listening to our elders who tell us to keep on fighting to win a war that isn’t a war, but a never ending series of retaliations. We vote in a Botoxed movie actor action hero who is a liar and neither a Repulican or Democrat yet we think he will “reform” Collie-fornia. He hasn’t. We keep shooting ourselves in the foot and wonder why we are bleeding.

There is another myth: all soldiers are patriots and anybody who isn’t a soldier or didn’t fight in a war somehow hasn’t earned the credentials to be a true patriot. There are plenty of non-soldiers who are patriots. Some of them are called teachers, nurses, fireman, police officers and government workers. Some of these good people who vote for politicians who say they are protecting family values while they cut education and health care spending and vote more dollars for war materials and spy agencies. Some of these workers are finding that they have no money for retirement, that their pensions are non-existant, and they cannot pay for their health care. But they eventually have an answer for their ills…….

They will come back and blame our whole mess on Pedro and Maria.