Lament for a Lost Dream
California was always more than a place, it was a glittering dream
More than the actual physical devastation of Los Angeles, which has all the earmarks of careless evil, corruption and stupidity, there is another loss even greater. It is the end of a radiant dream, the California Dream of a charmed life, one that millions followed. I was one of those dreamers, now become mourners.
It was 1961, and the first time I traveled to California from British Columbia, for a belated honeymoon. This is so long ago and yet I recall exactly what we did and where we went, and the lumpy mattress of the bed in the cheap hotel on Polk Street in San Francisco. But the most powerful impression that has stayed with me all my life and that I have never encountered anywhere else was the generous, joyous, free spirit of the people who lived there at that time. As someone who had grown up amid the oppressive atmosphere of a defeated Germany, it was overwhelming. I had never met people like this, not in Germany and not in Canada either. Such warmth, such creativity, such sheer excitement at being alive—it was a shock. I had not known people could be like this. There was Art, Jazz, Fashion, and dazzling days of sunshine, all mixed together with intense optimism. During those two weeks, I tasted the very essence of what makes America unique; it’s genius for liberty, creativity and good fellowship, alive in the hearts of ordinary people. You could say I fell in love with a dream that was real and happening all around me.
This was the beginning of a long love affair with California. We had friends in San Francisco and almost every summer during the seventies, drove down the winding coast highway, one of the most scenic in the world, stopping in the little towns, marvelling at the Redwoods, sipping Chardonnay in the Sonoma Valley. By the mid seventies, I was so besotted that I seriously tried to persuade my husband to leave Canada for California. More than anything, I wanted to live out my fantasy of being a classic California blonde. But my husband wasn’t interested and that was the end of that. The love affair seemed to be over.
But it wasn’t. After a long absence, I spent two weeks visiting a friend in Altadena, a suburb just north of Los Angeles, in 2016. She was trying to make it as a fashion photographer and living in an adorable two bedroom bungalow on Pine Avenue. Once again, I felt the magic, the lure of California, walking around in the neighbourhood of lovely villas nestled in lush gardens, driving out to Malibu or sipping coffee in a Mexican themed coffee shop full of young people working on laptops. The Mexican influence was so strong that I sometimes felt I was in Spain except it was Spain with an American flavour. Oh, I loved it all over again and when I discovered several second hand shops with charming owners who wanted to show me everything they had, I remembered that the best thing about being there, aside from eternal sunshine, had always been the people.
I haven’t been back, and my friend has returned to Canada. And then the Inferno began. The dreadful count of the dead began. On Fox News, they showed mortuary records of three unidentified bodies on Pine Avenue. I might have met those people, I thought. And there were pictures of Altadena, places I knew that had burned to the ground, one a pizza parlour next to a Mexican restaurant where we had dinner the first night. It all came back, mixed in with sorrow and pain that goes deep and hard.
Douglas Murray says it’s DEI that just went up in smoke. But it’s more than that: this is the end of a way of life, one with few equals anywhere. In political terms, it’s likely the end of a way of trusting those who were supposed to look after Los Angeles and failed. Watching Governor Newsom happily announce that he is ‘on top of things’ is more than eerie, as is the strange smile pasted on mayor’s Bass’s face. A reckoning is coming. It may take a decade but the city of Angels governed by Devils, will never be the same.
I like many others feel only rage and sorrow and the futility of raving at the people who let this happen. It will be a long time before the acceptance of such a dreadful and unnecessary loss is possible.
Los Angeles as we knew it is no more. And what comes next is a very different kind of dream, darker, and yet to be imagined.