LA Pomophobic

This summer I have been up and down the I-5 corridor, visiting friends from as far north as Bellingham WA to as far south as Oceanside CA. All of the people I have met in these travels, especially the people in SoCal, have been very pleasant and competent people who's company I have enjoyed, and this post has nothing to do with them.

If you fly into LA, visit Disney Land, and fly out, you have no idea how densely populated and geologically vast southern California is. You would think that say San Diego is a geographically unique place from Los Angeles, but you would be wrong - it is one massive interconnected urban sprawl, incomprehensibly large. You can get on a 6 lane highway (12 counting both directions) and drive for 45 minutes, and get off only to find yourself in almost exactly the same neighborhood. People frequently drive two hours one way to attend common social events without really going to a different new place. Traffic (not as bad as Las Vegas, about like Seattle's) does increase travel time, but the absolute vastness of this place escapes our collective understanding.

Now imagine you are from a middle class family in the North East USA, raised on some moderate form of protestant religion, and have 1.5 siblings, each of you proving your uniqueness by playing different sports and musical instruments and getting into different liberal arts colleges. After amassing impressive debt, you manage to graduate from college with a bachelor's in English, and your main ideology is a post structuralist critique of the moderate Christianity you were raised on. Still basically a child, you must pay off this debt, and soon find yourself in LA working in a marketing firm or in Hollywood in movies or TV.

Now you see the world for what it is: incredibly diverse, people from all over the world, all kinds of families, all kinds of politics, all kinds of religion, all kinds of suburbs and inner city ghettos. Whenever you need to study a group you are portraying in the media you are writing scripts for, to get real life experience with that group (Jews, first generation immigrants from any location in the world, millionaires, homeless, Italians, red necks, or whomever,) you only have to call an Uber and you will be seeing this group inside of a few hours. In LA (or some other indistinguishably not-LA part of SoCal.)

Now you portray to the rest of the USA what that group is like based on two things: 1) your post-modern critique of Christianity, and 2) your limited life experience in SoCal. This naive superficial representation is now published all around the world as the most recognized version of that group. This is the mechanism by which post modernism has become ubiquitous in media and politics.

But you can't help it any more than the gang members in Crips and Bloods: Made in America, LA (SoCal) is so vast, that you have never, ever seen the way out. No one you live near or work near know of any way out besides LAX. You live in the economic and cultural center of the universe, all gravitates towards you, and what you would face to get out would be more like an impossible climb than simply a several hour drive as fast as you can go down the freeway. But even when you get north of the Bay Area, outside of San Fransico's orbit you are still essentially on SoCal culture, surrounded by In-and-Out Burger and Del Taco, until you are multiple days drive from downtown LA proper. It would be faster to drive south through Tijuana into Baja California to escape the endless SoCal sprawl. Go east? You hit the Las Vegas vortex, which in the context of SoCal just feels like a SoCal suburb with legalized gambling and prostitution.

But in the end, because of Hollywood's ubiquity, we are all in LA's orbit, with it's incestuous postmodernist tendrils contaminating our perception. Before I left for LA I watched indy vampire film The Transfiguration. We struggled to figure out what city it had been filmed in, and concluded it must have been made in Toronto in spite of the land marks seeming to be from NYC. Because it didn't look like NYC. It didn't look like the NYC we had been served through the post modernist media, through the lens of LA. It turns out that NYC filmed in NYC presenting characters that would live in the real NYC would look almost nothing like what most of us think of as NYC, because our world perception has been warped through the post modernist LA lens.

It isn't a conspiracy of naive and opinionated well-intentioned feminists. No one is trying to poison our minds with eco-primitive nonsense. It is a simple problem of geography: the absolute vastness of LA/SoCal isolates English majors which for generations have used post modernism as their moral compass.