Yakety-Yak, We’re Back on Track

Here is how it became clear to me that normalcy, for better or worse, was returning to Los Angeles. It was midmorning Saturday, about three hours after the verdicts were read. I was roaming about in my car, just looking around, listening to talk radio and generally attempting the impossible--to determine the singular “mood” of this schizoid mass of urbanity we call, for a lack of a more precise term, a city.

The radio was full of nothing but Rodney King. The talk show host was saying what a strange week it had been--all the tension, all the uncertainty. Now, she said, the dread over the pending verdicts had passed. Now, she said, it was time to “think of all the things you have been putting off.” It was time to “go out and do something good for yourself.”

I started to suspect more was at work than hip-shot sociology, and sure enough the host soon lurched to an unexpected conclusion. She said the good thing we all needed to do for ourselves was go on a diet. More to the point, she said we should celebrate the Rodney King verdicts by giving Nutri-System a try.

“Lose all the weight you can for $1 a pound,” the host advised, and then she cut to the traffic report.

*

Listening to talk radio, in retrospect, probably was not a good idea for a pundit preparing to ponder the events of Saturday morning. By the time I sat down to write, I had heard the Rodney King affair picked over from every possible angle. Some of it was quite instructive. On my rounds through the city, I learned about double jeopardy and Dred Scott and appellate processes and the Salem witch hunts and LAPD overtime budgets and Ayn Rand and getting along and “Les Miserables” and not getting long and much, much more.

We went live to news conferences, replayed the whoops of rejoice that followed the verdicts, took calls from across the basin. “We have got to start having respect for ourselves,” said David from Hollywood, or was it Larry from Anaheim? “It’s all so politically correct it makes me sick,” said a woman, Kelly, I believe, who volunteered that she lives “just five miles from Simi Valley.”

I heard former police chief Daryl F. Gates scoff at something Mayor Tom Bradley said. Minutes later, at a news conference carried live on the same station, Bradley was asked about this comment. He countered hotly that “Daryl Gates is irrelevant.” Then Gates came back on the air and re-countered, also hotly, saying: “There is no one more irrelevant than Tom Bradley.” Whap, whap, whap.

The radio’s obsession with King seemed out of sync with the city I saw through the windshield and at various stops. From South Los Angeles to Hancock Park to Glendale, the people were out, engaged in placid Saturday routines. Saturday in Los Angeles is swap meet day (Sunday is open house day), and bad art and broken lamps were on sale everywhere. Also, cars were washed, hedges pruned, groceries bought, mufflers repaired. At the Glendale Batting Cage, three Little League teams waited to take their cuts. At the Mt. Tabor Missionary Baptist Church, not far from the corner of Florence and Normandie, a wedding party filled the hall.

“There is nothing going on,” the radio reporter told the talk show host at 2 p.m. “There is no news. It’s a big non-story.” They cackled about all the out-of-town media who came for a riot that wasn’t going to happen.

“Well,” the host asked, summing up this moment of media analyzing media, “will you be on the streets the rest of the day?”

“You bet!” the reporter replied, without a whit of irony.

*

There were, I should report, also a few tangible signs all was not ordinary. The lines at the Griffith Park pony rides, for instance, were quite short. “The verdict,” the ticket taker surmised. In Koreatown, plywood was stacked outside a furniture store. In Studio City, on Sunshine Canyon Drive, burly security guards were posted outside some of the finer addresses.

All this fit with a line of analysis that cropped up throughout the day, the suggestion that these verdicts actually meant little. Don’t forget the appeals, we were told, and Reginald Denny, and all the hard work of city healing still ahead. I suppose this is true. I suppose Los Angeles is not out of the woods today--but when was it ever, and what city in America is?

I will say this. The Rodney King affair--a weird two-year journey that began with the world’s fastest Hyundai and produced the world’s most famous videotape, along with a new police chief, three bad books, much civic soul-searching, too much political correctness, two trials, a riot, some better notions about police work and a new genre of television show--that matter has ended. It’s over.

That’s my opinion anyway. Now let’s go live to Larry in Anaheim.