California Dreamin’

LALA Land is Coming to a Town Near You...

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Hella, Iceland…

Something special for you today, dear reader…

A few years ago, we had the pleasure of interviewing MN Gordon, founder and author of the excellent Economic Prism website. Mr. Gordon had not long moved out of his native and beloved California, joining the hundreds of thousands of folks fleeing high taxes, onerous regulation and rising crime (among other non-trivial unpleasantries).

The discussion was a fascinating one, especially as we shared a love for many of the things that make California great… the pristine beaches, many surf spots and ‘90s music scene (note the NOFX reference in today’s column, below.)

A few years later, we caught up with Gordon in his adopted home state of Tennessee, where he and his family are enjoying the great outdoors and relatively relaxed lifestyle. We asked if he minded if we shared some of his writings with our own readers from time to time and, kindly, he agreed.

We have no financial arrangement with Gordon and do not profit from publishing his work… we simply enjoy what he has to say and reckon you might, too. Check out his latest musing, on the current state of LALA Land, in today’s guest column, below. And if you like it, be sure to comment and share. Cheers ~ JB

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LALA Land is Coming to a Town Near You

by MN Gordon, founder of Economic Prism

“I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.” – Brian Wilson, R.I.P.

California Dreamin’ in LALA Land

Southern California has wonderful weather. Within the coastal zone it’s especially wonderful. The sun shines brightly every day, there’s low humidity, and a cool breeze wafts off the Pacific Ocean making things perfectly pleasant. You just can’t beat it.

But for every sweet smelling rose there’s a stem full of jagged thorns. In Southern California, the traffic, cost of living, state and local government taxes, and the large swaths of urban blight and homeless encampments fall far short of perfection.

The remnant luster of Hollywood’s golden age was irreversibly corroded with the slaying of Sharon Tate and her unborn baby by the Manson Family in the early morning hours of August 9, 1969. By then, the cultural decline of Los Angeles was already well underway.

Brian Wilson lost his mind in 1964. The Watts Riots burned hot in 1965. And by 1967, Pacific Ocean Park – a rival to Disneyland – had fallen to terminal disrepair.

The inflation of the 1970s blighted the expansive boulevards and urban sprawl. By the 1980s kids like Jordan Hiller were overdosing on doors and fours. Others found joy in bashing their heads in. Filmmaker Penelope Spheeris captured the aesthetic in the documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization.

The delusion of California Dreamin’ over the years has most faithfully emanated from Los Angeles – LALA Land. During the pre-World War II days, before the mania to splatter every square foot of its surface with concrete took hold of the local spirits, the place was already a magnet for eccentrics, pyromaniacs, and hucksters galore.

Howard Hughes, a total madman, would dream up his latest flying machine and then crash it into Beverly Hills. There was also Griffith J. Griffith, who amassed a fortune in the mining industry.

Later Griffith shot his wife in the face in a Santa Monica Hotel and then commuted his time in San Quentin to just two years by donating the land for Griffith Park to Los Angeles. He also funded the city’s observatory. Without Griffith’s private act of preservation, the city wouldn’t have any open space left to get lost in.

Rigorous Flexibility

When it comes to immigration status, many Southern California cities have had a modus operandi of rigorous flexibility. Not having proper documentation has been a pesky detail to be readily ignored. Over many decades, things have gotten completely out of hand.

Your lowly editor was a middling student at Encanto Elementary school on 65th Street and Broadway in San Diego in the late-1980s. This is about 14 miles from the international border with Tijuana, Mexico. Some of his classmates crossed the border with their parents each morning on commuter green cards to attend school.

He later moved to the big bad LA Basin in the mid-1990s. There he met his fetching bride who’d immigrated from Mexico City to LA as a child, gaining citizenship under Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program.

When the Mayflower disembarked at Plymouth Rock in 1620, John Smith and his fellow Pilgrims didn’t care if they were citizens of the New World. We doubt the thought even crossed the mind. Their focus was on carving out a new life in a new land that was free from the religious persecution they fled in England.

The Ten Commandments given to Moses make no mention of citizenship. That’s not to say present day immigration laws are vetoed by the Old Testament. We’re merely recognizing that the road to citizenship does not always follow a path -- or a morality – that’s straight and narrow.

Rules, by definition, are made to be broken. For many decades, America has had porous borders. At the same time, immigration laws were never reformed to address this reality.

People were allowed to enter the country illegally. Yet nothing was done to account for or incorporate them. Ultimately, this disconnect led to what is now an absolute cluster.

No Papers

President Trump was voted into office to clean house on illegal immigration. Tightening up border security after the failure of the Biden administration was essential. But the ship for wholesale deportation sailed long ago. Things have been so out of control for so long that it’s entirely unworkable.

The City of LA is broad and expansive. There are many affluent areas with trophy homes and estate properties on the west side, cloistered in the hills. Brentwood, Westwood, Pacific Palisades, Holmby Hills, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Beverly Glen, Hancock Park, and others. These areas are in stark contrast with the areas of the city in the east and south, which are so hideous they lacerate the eye.

What’s more, there are countless unsightly cities that span east through the San Gabriel Valley and south to Long Beach. These are cities you’ve never heard of and would never go to, which are jumbled together like shipping containers on Terminal Island.

East LA, Temple City, El Monte, South El Monte, La Puente, Pomona, Vernon, Maywood, Commerce, Huntington Park, Bell, Cudahy, Bell Gardens, South Gate, Lynwood, Paramount, Compton, Gardena, Lawndale, Hawthorne, and many, many more. These cities are massively populated with illegal immigrants.

We don’t know what the demographic breakdown of Huntington Park was when our grandparents lived there during the dark depression days of the 1930s. But we suppose it was far different than the 97 percent Hispanic population recorded in 2024 census data. Of this, about half were born outside of the USA.

It’s not a stretch to say that the majority of this foreign-born population doesn’t have papers showing them to be of legal standing. In fact, a decade ago, Huntington Park swore in city commissioners without legal immigration status.

The city’s population density is estimated to be 18,000 people per square mile. At this density you’d expect an abundance of high-rise apartments. Instead, the city’s housing is characterized by single story dwellings and two-story infill developments. What this means is several families are regularly crowded into 800 square-foot housing units.

The surrounding cities noted above have similar demographic and density characteristics.

LALA Land is Coming to a Town Near You

The Trump administrations recent ICE raids and the subsequent counter protests have shined a light on a madness that has long been ignored.

The protestors, for their part, seem to be unclear about what they are after. Many are seen waving flags from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere, as symbols of defiance. But at the same time, they’re protesting deportation to the countries of which flags they wave. Shouldn’t they be waving American flags if they want to stay in America?

Sometimes in life mistakes are made that can never be reversed. When left to run wild over many decades they are impossible to go back and correct.

Targeting Home Depot parking lots and restaurant kitchens with the goal of wholesale deportation may be perceived as a solution in the eyes of MAGA. But so is cutting off your head as a solution to a headache. Moreover, is ICE really prepared to deport close to one million people from just LA County alone and upwards of 15 million people from the U.S.?

The current circumstances are a total mess. Politicians, however, refuse to appreciate them or work to address them in a positive and constructive way.

Former California Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once had a secret love child with the Guatemalan housekeeper of his Brentwood estate, recently pointed his finger at the failures of political hacks:

“This is the result of Democrats and Republicans not being able to come together in this immigration reform. And so that’s what needs to be done so that you don’t have to go and start arresting people in the first place, so we know who is in this country and who is working here, who has the temporary working permit, who has the permanent working permit.

“We don’t even know who is in here. For decades now, they have been avoiding the subject because it’s an advantage to both parties to not do it. So they’re all political hacks, party hacks, rather than public servants.”

We don’t expect the political hacks will get their act together anytime soon. What this means is, LALA Land is coming to a town near you.

Regards,

MN Gordon, founder of Economic Prism