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PHOTO: http://www.lesjones.com

Natural disasters are so instantly amplified by the media that seconds after they hit, images and commentary are beamed by satellites around the world. Almost everyone on Earth has seen such recent events as the south Asian tsunami, the hurricanes in the American Gulf Coast, and the earthquake in Pakistan and India. Are these tragic events part of a divine plan? Is the end of the World coming as punishment for the evil doings of certain men?

Bob Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary doesn’t think so. In his most recent “Skeptic’s Dictionary Newsletter #60” he writes:

“The Pat Robertsons of the world are trying to fit these natural disasters into their worldview, which says that everything is part of God’s plan. These disasters point to the end of the world and the second coming. These self-anointed prophets are deluded about everything else so why should we trust them about their grasp of reality when it come to what’s going on with our planet?

Others blame capitalism.* If communism were still much of a force, I’m sure some would blame it.

Still others think that governments are controlling the weather. They can’t keep secrets, control their own tongues, or predict yesterday’s football scores, but they can control the weather. Right.

The smart money says that nothing special is going on. You are on the planet Earth. It’s cooling down from its formation several billion years ago. Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, volcanoes, mudslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning fires, and the like are common fare on this planet. If these things weren’t happening, it’s likely the planet would not be habitable. When none of these things occurs any more, the planet will be dead. It will become a nice place to visit, though, like Mars.”

He also has some coherent and understandable arguments against the mystical concept known as “Intelligent Design” which fundametalists have been trying to slip into the science curriculum as an undetectable poison.

Why is nobody in the press asking why Judith Miller has impersonated and perhaps stolen Anna Wintour’s identity?

In 1993, when I was still living in New York, I visited some friends in Woodland Hills, CA. They lived in a beautiful home south of Ventura, and the head of the house had been a successful TV producer in the 1970’s. He was a big eater, rarely walked, and had definite opinions about the world and his city.

“In LA, you don’t have to drive through any bad neighborhoods to get to the airport when you come from the Valley,” he told me.

A simple statement, yet it stayed with me all these years. He represented to me one type of person you find in the Valley: satisfied, successful and completely isolated from the city. He preferred living in Woodland Hills because he was removed from those lower elements.

In it’s more extreme form, the “Calabasas mentality” is an escape from urban life. Behind gated entrances, inside the Hummer, on the mobile phone, driving at 80 miles per hour down Malibu Canyon–the ones who have “made it” think that they are morally superior to those who have not.

As the Busway opens, Los Angeles, and the Valley in particular is experiencing a culture shock of sorts. For not often do we construct beautiful public works which are both environmentally and culturally beneficial. As an added insult to the Calabasas cretins, the Busway services people who do not or cannot afford auto transport. Liberals who criticize and demonize Bush for the Iraq war and the billions poured into democraticizing that country, cannnot bear to see the hundreds of millions spent on local public transportation!

There is another strange stereotype that the Valley provinicials engage in. They like to say that they know who will use the bus. “It’s the lady cleaning houses in Chandler Estates” or “It’s Mexicans going to East LA”. As if the riders could all be dissected and the entire mode of transport dismissed because one imagined that it serviced the wrong type of people!

It is really the freeway that is a waste. Criticize the driver in his solo vehicle. He is belching out emissions, burning fossil fuels as the icebergs melt, on his way to get a coffee at Starbucks.

By contrast, the bus rider is mostly using the bus because he HAS TO, not because HE WANTS TO. Do we dare make large scale assumptions about people who are driving on the freeway? Do we say, “I resent that new off ramp in Brentwood because it is used by spoiled bitches who are on their way to Yoga class?” Of course not. We presume that the widening of the 405 into the Valley is useful because the users are people like us.

We Angelenos know on many levels that the old ways of thinking about how to live here are undergoing reformation. The collapse of our health care, the failure of many schools, the resistance to public transportation, the environmental spoiling of wild lands and the destruction of historic landmarks such as the Ambassador Hotel, all are symptoms of a sick society. We are not sick in the sense of being evil, we are ill in that we are not healthy.

Ilustration courtesy of the California Digital Library.

One of the tragedies of California has been the loss of millions of acres of citrus. Vast areas of the state stretching from the San Fernando Valley eastward to Palm Springs were devoted to the cultivation of oranges, lemons and limes. Trains shipped these fruits to cold cities back east. The perishables were packed in beautiful color boxes decorated with illustrations of sno-capped mountains and verdant fields of yellow and orange. This was an industry that defined the Golden State. It also was a religious message, preaching the gospel of California, that brought so many millions of pilgrims to this state and helped to destroy the very beauty that they sought out.

Imagine what it was before Pearl Harbor…….What was it like to descend, for example, the Sepulveda Pass on a Sunday morning in 1940 and enter the San Fernando Valley when thousands of acres of orange trees were in full bloom? A time before smog, freeways, acid rock and acid rain? You rode in your convertible through a beautiful mountain roadway, and entered a green leafed kingdom that tantalized your five senses of taste, touch, smell, sight and sound. How fleeting that moment in time was……

After World War Two, thousands of acres of orange groves were bulldozed to make way for ranch houses, shopping centers and industrial parks. People started to eat “mandarin” orange slices packed in tin cans.The entire county of Orange was similiarly destroyed and replaced with clone like housing fit for a totalitarian state. A new Disneyland [also called the “Magic Kingdom”] murdered a much more magical kingdom of nature.

Is it possible to regain some of the citrus lands we have lost? Perhaps those acres of now rusting factories in the northeast San Fernando Valley and east of downtwon Los Angeles can be transformed into citrus farms. Mayor Villaraigosa should hire some of the many Israelis in town and establish kibbutzim around the city. All of those homeless men and women sleeping on the streets might work and live on these farms and earn free health care and housing in return.

Productive agriculture is part of what keeps a society healthy. The Swiss government lavishly subsidizes its farms up to 80%. Why can’t Los Angeles, one of the most imaginative and flexible places on the planet, create new pockets of citrus to replace those hellish miles of gangland, grafitti, freeways, urban squalor and ugliness which we now call our city?

Shawn Pyfrom, who plays Andrew Van Der Kamp, on ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” is an actor of outstanding intelligence, honesty and range. As the put upon son of the Stepford Mom “Bree” (played by Marcia Cross), the 19-year-old actor is sardonic, natural and entirely believable.

On his website, it says that he is a straight A student and may study business and marketing. But will any other profession be as lucrative as the one he is now embarking upon? Granted the course of an actor’s life is hardly guaranteed, but this thespian stands apart from his peers, and even the other adults on his show, in the boyish intelligence he exudes. He has a brilliant career ahead of him.

“Desperate Housewives” is wildly uneven as a show. Its writing veers from witty and dramatic, to flat and insipid. There are scenes that introduce actors who are not seen again, and excursions and diversions into plot points that are never expanded upon. The stars of the show are both appealing and revolting, and their chemically and surgically altered faces and bodies are plastic and often robotic. The program is a true Hollywood fantasyland, where 40 year old women are never fat or frumpy. Airbrushing and digital special effects are to be applauded.

In this land of make believe, where roses and picket fences wall off hunky plumbers from ditzy matrons, the young Mr. Pyfrom injects a steel will that is both charming, sexually appealing and gently tough. Let’s hope the producers of the show keep him on.