CommentsTHE CITY-All cultures have death rituals. America’s is familiar to all. We are shocked when people are killed. Yes, shocked! It hasn’t happened in, well, maybe a few weeks. And we’re shocked that such a thing can happen in America.
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen guns down 49 people inside a gay night club and less than a month later, on July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson guns down five police officers in Dallas. In between, we had daily murders across the nation including what appears to be two executions by police officers – victims Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
Out come the votive candles, the tears, the wailing, the recriminations – oh, it is all so well scripted. We have to hurry up and finish our death ritual over the Dallas police death because in our predatory violent culture, the next mass murder is in the making.
Americans need to take stock of their culture and admit some things to themselves.
(1) We live in a violent predatory culture.
(2) We love our violent predatory culture.
(3) We have no intention of changing our violent predatory culture.
The habitual murders reflect our collective consciousness. Other countries don’t have similar violence, but then they’re pussies. Just ask Donald Trump. Just ask the NRA which insists that the answer to gun violence is more gun violence. Who agrees with the NRA? The United States Congress. Yes, we ourselves and the culture which we have fashioned for ourselves are the problem.
Gun control, however, is a silly place to start. No predatory culture will give up its best weapon to kill other people. We cannot even stop insane people and terrorists from buying guns. Besides, railing against too many guns is merely one obligatory part of the Death Ritual.
As long as we support a predatory culture where the wealthy rape the poor, gun violence will be with us every day, 365 days per year.
What is a predatory culture and how do we know we live in one?
If your country allows a handful of Wall Street investment bankers crash the world economy and your President’s response is to give them trillions of dollars, you live in a predatory country.
If your country locks up more people for longer periods of time than any other industrialized nation, you live in a predatory country.
If your country believes that adequate health care is a privilege for the wealthy, you live in a predatory county.
If 60% of the people in your country think the death penalty is a good thing, you live in a predatory country.
If you live in a city which destroys 20,000 rent-controlled apartments and then proposes to give $1.2 billion to the millionaires who tore down the poor people’s homes, you live in a predatory city.
Recently, we saw the LA City Council once again unanimously approve the destruction of poor people homes so that the Cherokee Apartments could be turned into a boutique hotel.
Right now Councilmember Krekorian, recently famous for his needless destruction of Marilyn Monroe’s Valley Village home (photo above), is now showing more of his sadistic streak with the demolition of more Valley Village homes at the intersection of Hermitage and Weddington.
Let’s be very clear about this project. It will demolish long time Valley Village homes in order to make way for tax shelters for the rich and famous. Few Angelenos have heard about this most recent scam where established homes are destroyed, and in their place, we have In-Fill projects of so-called single family homes (small lot subdivisions), which are nothing more than apartments constructed on top of garages.
The finances behind these frauds took a while to reveal itself. Since Wall Street has soured on the glut of large apartment complexes in Los Angeles, Garcetti, Krekorian, O’Farrell and others have devised a new scam. They still construct apartments, but they call them Small Lot development so that each apartment is treated as if it were a single family home. This charade allows each apartment to be sold individually as a tax shelter.
The key to a tax shelter is that it loses money. That loss is beneficial to millionaires who need write-offs against profits elsewhere in their portfolios. An entire apartment complex is too large and apartments may not be legally sold as separate entities. Thus, we have the new scam, i.e. the apartments are designed to be standing units so that they can be sold to non-investors who need tax write offs.
Thus, Krekorian’s plan is based on the sadistic impulse to destroy people’s homes so that his buddies can build tax shelters for the world’s wealthy.
In our predatory culture, we see nothing wrong with that. Angelenos do not care that their City Hall is crimogenic and the LA City Council is run as a criminal enterprise. If we will not stop Garcetti’s rampage on the poor after 20,000 rent-controlled units were destroyed, if we will not stop O’Farrell as he rewards the Cherokee Hotel for making the elderly, disabled and poor into the homeless, if we will not stop Krekorian in his ravaging of Valley Village, then we are the supporters of the predatory culture which routinely gives rise to these mass murders.
Mark your calendars. The next mass murder has been penciled in for around August 10̀-20th, during which time, LA will have made a hundred or so more people homeless.
Or we could reject the City’s sadistic predatory culture which daily destroys more of our homes, making more Angelenos homeless.
We can Choose Life or continue the American Death Ritual.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Graphic credit: LA Curbed. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
The American Death Ritual, LA Style
