the arab spring. euromaidan. hong kong 2019. los angeles
living close to downtown los angeles, MacArthur Park is about the closest natural green space for me.
yes, the MacArthur Park that has now become a major flashpoint in the ongoing proxy war between kids on e-Bikes and day laborers vs ICE and DHS. a nearby Home Depot in the neighborhood has also been the site of numerous skirmishes in this ongoing warfare. yes, it’s warfare, the same type of warfare that used to mostly be a fixture of the kinds of places america would invade and deploy a burger king in some kind of futile effort to keep the peace between an ethnic kleptocracy and some disenfranchised minority group of a just slightly different language and religion. it’s one group of people that’s trying to make some other group of people stop what they’re doing and they’re willing to use guns to get it done. that’s a war. it’s dangerous and inconvenient for everyone in the surrounding area regardless of their identity or viewpoints on the issues in question.
donald trump’s occupation of southern california has now dragged on for a month of intermittent hassles, during which i was moving house. i saw all sorts of silliness firsthand. a lone troop leaned up against a tree in a different park while i was out getting my steps in and listening to a podcast. helicopters and drones harassing protesters in the orange county suburbs that mostly seemed to be bored high school students looking for an excuse to get out of the house with school out for the summer. on my way to a concert at the Greek Theater i saw tons of military vehicles approaching downtown. while i was looking for an apartment, i dealt with the extended road closures that resulted from the original protests, which were mostly a nothingburger.
a city the size of LA had protests every day of the year last year too, when Biden was president. most of them really garnered no attention and no results, because unfortunately issues like climate change, racism, animal rights, nuclear energy, israel, palestine, abortion, or police brutality are complicated problems that lack simple and straightforward solutions. they will still be problems next year, and the year after that, and 10 years after that, and god, probably another 100 years after that.
add immigration to the list. Donald Trump thinks this will all be simple. yeah, so did the people that invaded afghanistan. you just pick off bin laden, and some of the other big guys, whoever they are, and you spread some democracy, and you read some books to some kids, and you convince everyone in the area to stop doing everything related to drugs, and you spend a year on it, and then another year, and then another 10 years, and another 10 years after that, and…
you give up and you go home because it’s the sensible fucking thing to do when something isn’t working.
does any of this goddamn look like it’s working to you?!
the U.S. government is going to learn the same thing governments in the middle east and asia have learned the hard way over the past couple of decades: it’s really, really hard to outfox people with smartphones and social media, even poor people, even illiterate people, even people without citizenship, even people that say one thing and then do another. the day before the second attempt at winning Westlake, pretty much everyone that actually lives in the neighborhood had already heard this was coming somewhere. it leaked out online all over social media, it was on fliers posted everywhere mostly in languages the invaders don’t even speak, it was in groupchats. really, if this is something relevant for you, you were probably aware before the cavalry horses deployed to MacArthur Park ate their morning oats to fuel a gentle canter across a children’s soccer field.
so everyone in the immediate adjacent area around the park just stayed home until this latest madness was over. no actual arrests were made. the administration claimed it was some sort of ~show of force~, like california is a foreign country that acquired WMD’s. the mayor got a nice photo op saying “please disperse”. by today everyone had forgotten about it and the gym nearby was packed with people from all over the world communicating through grunts, selfies, and Zumba.
but i think we’ve slipped into a situation that will be really difficult to unwind. donald trump has unwittingly given california an identity as something separate and foreign from the rest of the united states. it’s a grievous political error that will be hard to take back later when all of this proves to be a giant waste of effort. there are something like 500,000 illegal immigrants just in LA County. it’s a fantasy to think that most of them will voluntarily go somewhere else, and the effort it would take to force them to do it would amount to ethnic cleansing.
but they’ll keep trying, because it’s humiliating to go in this big and then say, “just kidding, I made a mistake”. if donald trump is still president a year from now, LA will still be dealing with troops periodically entering public spaces and generally just shitting on everything for a day, and by then it will basically just be a habit for people to screen their social media and groupchats for advance warning of a need to shelter in place until the moment passes. it’s going to get even less effective for them to be here the longer they keep doing it.
it’s also not going to endear the local population to them at all. who is still running afghanistan after 20 years of american occupation? the taliban. what will LA look like in 20 years? most likely: about the same. it will still be a city where spanish is the predominant language in many areas, because now even people that aren’t from latin america have to learn spanish to hear about what is going on to avoid becoming collateral damage of all of this pointless warfare.
there’s no realistic scenario coming where in 20 years, LA is a city where everyone speaks english, has U.S. citizenship, and loves donald trump. the conditions for a victory are basically just completely impossible without nuking the entire area and starting over. General MacArthur may have endorsed such a strategy, but the world is better off having listened to the more stable Harry Truman. maybe the park should have been named after him instead.