Posted on 03/30/2008 7:18:08 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Los Angeles - Deep inside the bunker. Your erstwhile war correspondent clacks out another column on life as lived in America's second-largest city. That popping sound you hear in the background isn't the Orville Redenbacher or my stiff joints snapping as I stretch for one more M&M. That's the sound of sporadic small-arms fire, incoming rounds pinging off the new armor plating I have recently installed around my writing compound. It's called "defensive architecture," but I won't object if you find it offensive.
Big Bill Bratton, the politician's favorite cop, tells us crime is down; race has nothing to do with gang murders, and we can't "arrest our way out of the problem." So L.A. keeps stacking bodies like cordwood and sullying its name internationally with horrific headlines that sound more Karbala than Compton, Fallujah than Alhambra, Baghdad than Baldwin Park.
In desperation, urban planers have begun to incorporate ammo-resistant designs into new housing and public buildings. It's both pragmatic and pathetic.
If you're around my age, you may remember aluminum siding.
Instead of painting the house, you'd just hose it off once or twice a year. It looked great until one too many tennis balls thwapped into it, or dents from the extension ladder the old man used to clean the gutters left their dimples. After a while, your house looked like it had a bad case of cellulite.
Aluminum siding is a relic of the pre-Glock,
Mac 9, AK-47 San Fernando Valley of orange groves, sock hops, slingshots and BB guns. Today's L.A. is more interactive. Your home needs something tougher, Kevlar siding, something that can stand the onslaught of an army of domestic terrorists: Crips, Bloods, Avenues 43, MS-13, Latin Kings, Vineland Boys, 18th Street, whatever. Drive-by shootings have actually spawned a new school of urban planning, "defensive architecture." So move over Post-Modern, make room for Post-Moral. L.A. went from Bauhaus to crack house. From Art Deco to Art Ducko, as in hit the deck before a stray bullet hits you.
City Councilman Ed Reyes represents one of the most densely populated districts in the city, with as many as 66,000 residents per tract. He correctly asks, "What do we have to do so every time there's a backfire from a bad muffler they don't have to hit the floor...? How do we bring the parks back for families and kids?"
Part of the solution is Reyes' "defensive" designs for housing, pubic buildings and parks.
It's hard not to see the pragmatism. It's also hard not to puke. How pathetic that we've allowed gunfire to become so commonplace, we have to make buildings drive-by proof.
The Rio de Los Angeles State Park is a 40-acre oasis surrounded by the concrete and power-line sprawl of a city that's been guided by Darwinian planning. Reyes points to a 5-foot dirt hill lined with fencing, shrubs and trees for the explicit purpose of absorbing incoming rounds from San Fernando Road. While Los Angeles talks a big game about being the 21st century city, we're essentially reverting to moats and castles with a dot-com face-lift.
How does the clich go? "If you build a better mousetrap, someone builds a smarter mouse?" We're playing a game of cat and mouse with amoral killers.
The latest atrocity was the slaughter of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw Jr., a star footballer who caught the eye of top college recruiters. Tragically, he also caught the eye of an illegal-alien gangbanger who gunned him down while Jamiel's mother served in Iraq.
You can't make this up. The irony of fighting a war against terrorism half a world away while a generation of Angelenos is shot to pieces by local terrorists, while your own son is cut down at home.... Wow.
Smart people and good people may argue over the way out of this mess, but we'll continue to bury kids and wring our hands impotently until we agree on the basics: We have to salvage the next generation of gangbangers while crushing the current generation.
In the six months past, libraries have been shot up, Garfield High School torched, the copper wire stripped from hundreds of streetlights and a landmark Mid City statue was cut in two with a blowtorch and sold for scrap by scavengers. The barbarians are literally pillaging Los Angeles around the edges while we cheer on Eli Broad and the Grand Avenue boys. We've come so far we've circled back on ourselves. Back to the Middle Ages.
Meanwhile, child after child, young adult after young adult is quietly buried with an all-too-familiar chorus of tears.
Doug McIntyre hosts the "McIntyre in the Morning" program on Talk Radio 790 KABC, weekdays from 5 to 9 a.m.
Good afternoon.
“...a multiple fence system is better, because the enemy invaders can’t hide their movements behind a wire fence.”
You are right. If our government were motivated, they could still get the Wall built, and properly, before the next President cancels it after being sworn in.
I’ll not hold my breath waiting.
Michael Frazier
We built the Empire State Building in 400 days, back in the 30s. It’s amazing to see our border still wide open, because “it’s to expensive and difficult.”
Nice wall, but I prefer the Korean model with triple strand concertina and things that go "boom".
I’d be satisfied with just a modern double fence backed by border guards, even without the boom boom.
I've never heard of this guy before, but his POV here is spot-on.
When you let the bloody third world move in, it brings the bloody third world with it, it seems. Someone else here on FR wrote "multiculturism is national suicide, and PC is the cyanide capsule". Yes, indeed.
I'd be willing to forego the mines as long as the Rio was stocked with 'gators and piranha.
No way, ese! Chu messin' wit our right to free assembly, homes!
Under Bush, that flow became a TORRENT!
He CLEARLY doesn’t care WHAT we think!
DO TRY TO GET THAT MEMORY OVER THE TRADITIONAL 20 NANOSECOND LEVEL AND HOLD THE THOUGHT THROUGH NOVEMBER ’08!
In ABSTRACT terms, this is the conspiratorial view of what’s going on vis-à-vis the INVASION of the illegals here:
The current alien invasion from the south serves BOTH the elites who run Mexico – and many of the OTHER states of Central and South America -- and the political ruling class who increasingly run the United States:
· It takes pressure off the 60 or so families who control approximately 80% of the wealth in Mexico. Without the northern “safety valve” (the United States) for their poor, those poor MIGHT be inclined to do what America’s early colonists found it necessary to do: Revolt! Parenthetically, that would be MY suggestion for them: Instead of fleeing here – and converting “here” to a larger, more poverty infested version of “there,” they ought to stay there and make “there” into their version of “here,” whatever that would be. Revolutions ARE messy and there are no guarantees that they will produce the desired result. But – according to one T. Jefferson – they are often necessary. Never forget that THIS country was born in revolution!
· For the NAFTA/CAFTA coveting US national ruling class – especially those who, in varying degrees, quest after some sort of One-World utopia run by guess who? – it provides yet another level of insecurity and tension among the indigenous populace which can be used to justify new and more draconian limits to freedom here. Instead of securing the borders, allow millions of illegals to come in and when the natives become alarmed, require a national ID card. “Your papers, please!” will soon become a phrase familiar to all. It’s Mr. Franklin’s trade of freedom for (false) security. It’s also the time-tested Hegelian Dialectic the One-Worlders have successfully worked like a rented mule.
While they occasionally squabble among themselves, the elites of history have ALL had one thing in common: They will do ANYTHING to remain in charge. And throughout that history, except for the 230 year-old experiment in freedom called “America,” most of the men who have walked the earth have lived as slaves to these elites whether they call themselves kings, emperors, potentates, sultans, czars – or presidents.
Get ready, folks. Unless some SERIOUS changes are made and the handful of Americans who CARE about liberty get involved, that history will almost certainly repeat here.
Now for the SPECIFICS of the matter:
My take on Bush's role in all of this is:
1. His long and apparently positive experience with the large hispanic population in Texas is largely responsible for his inaction on this alien invasion. And why wouldn't HIS experience with them be positive as he traveled in the highest, best-educated circles among them, not the Hispanic gangbangers and pine-straw spreaders...
2. Boy Jorge Bush was cared for by a Hispanic nanny for many years while his daddy was running Zapata Oil (into the ground).
3. His brother Jeb is married to a native of Mexico and his nieces and nephews are mixed blood. And before you scream "ethnocentric bigot" at me, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But that fact -- and items 1 and 2 – DO predispose him to a warm and fuzzy feeling for folks from south of the Rio Grande.
And if -- in some strange and metastasizing American desire for a new royal family dynasty -- Jeb or his son should win the White House in some future presidential beauty contest designed to divert the American electorate every four years, I'd bet that HIS activities toward this alien invasion will make W's behavior look like a warm-up exercise.
Any vestige of Western European culture will be a distant memory.
This author says we need to save the next generation of gang bangers while crushing this generation of gang bangers. I agree. How to do it is the thing.
But it won’t matter what we do with the barbarians inside, if we don’t plug the hole in the sinking boat.
Agreed. First plug the hole, then start bailing.
But none of the three candidates for president will do either. Instead, we’ll have open borders, amnesty, and a new flood.
As for the current crop of political leaders, I'll leave you with a "sea shanty" lament.
Them was the days, sonnies,
Them was the men,
Them was the leaders
as we'll never see again.
Police have identified 720 street gangs in Los Angeles, with 39,315 members, 50% of whom are illegals according to a recent article in the LA Times. (Sorry I can't provide a link, but I archived the information)
diversity is great so say the hacks.
Los Angeles County routinely denies applicants for concealed carry permits. If a gang member sees you on the street, you are either one of his gang, one of somebody else’s gang, or a law-abiding person who is disarmed. There is no reason for any gang member to respect law-abiding citizens in L.A.
Thanks. Fewer than I thought, but enough to cause worry.
Michael Frazier
One charismatic leader, and in the face of strong opposition, that would become an army. Sure, there'd be infighting, bickering, slacking so former competitors got torn up, but still, they are organized (on a smaller unit basis), have a command structure, and are armed.
They already do not care about legalities (wide open ROE), and they only care about their own.
They would have to be taken down in such a way that the minor players decided it would be wiser to fade into the woodwork rather than unite in opposition, which means take out the big boys first.
Round em’ up and send em’ to G’itmo...permanently.
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