The Great Relearning - and some notes from other places

Tell Me How This Ends ^ | 14 Jul, 2025 | Chris Bray

[MtnClimber]

This is about Los Angeles, but it’s not at all about Los Angeles. This will make sense in a minute.

So see if this sounds familiar: MacArthur Park was controlled by gangs and drug dealers, full of open drug use and prostitution, filthy and unsafe for families. The disorder in the park bled into the surrounding neighborhood.

[McArthur Park Cam-1 Video at link]

MS-13 controlled the park, but other gangs fought for space to sell drugs in the area, which led to violence: "One year, we had almost 106 homicides in eight square miles," an LAPD captain said.

Through the 1990s, the gangs fought bitterly over control of the drug trade. Longtime residents Sandra Romero and Alex Alonso remember how violent MacArthur Park was in those days.

"It was considered one of the most drug-plagued communities in the United States," Alonso says.

"It was the haven for all the gang members and drug dealers," Romero recalls. "They were involved in drug dealing, murder, people smoking crack, prostitution in little rolling brothel vans."

Alonso adds: "It looked like Beirut, Lebanon, in that area."

The City of Los Angeles decided to stop tolerating the conditions in the park, and they found help to fix it.

But Rampart division Capt. Egan says things changed after William Bratton took over as LAPD chief…and began a partnership with agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I’m quoting from an NPR story, and don’t miss the date:

What really worked to clean up the park and the neighborhood was, uh:

And federal immigration agents regularly deport undocumented gang members with felonies. FBI and Los Angeles police officials admit the city's gang violence has been exported. In fact, prisons in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are filled with deported gang members from Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the current mayor of Los Angeles says that what are you talking about, MacArthur Park is clean and safe and wonderful, and children love to play there, but the one thing we absolutely can’t allow is an ICE presence, which destroys the peace and harmony of the neighborhood. They’ll deport all the MS-13 members, which is very mean.

We just keep doing the same dumb shit over and over again, and relearning the same lessons. If only there were some way to clean up MacArthur Park. Taking bets on the likelihood that Los Angeles is led by people who remember any of this through the ancient mists of the old, old, old days in 2008. I think people might have worn togas back then.

Tom Wolfe famously described the “great relearning” that followed in the wake of the New Left of the 1960s, “a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero.” He was mistaken only about the “unprecedented” part. We’ve always done this. Fix, forget, ruin, rediscover the same solutions. The human condition is an endless return to “oh no how can this have happened?” when in fact it’s just the carousel coming back around again.

[MtnClimber]

How to fix it, vote out the communists.

[montag813]

And I’ll never get that recipe again!

[Ronald77]

If you didn’t want this it wouldn’t be there,