Some dreamed of Jeannie.
I dreamt of Santa Barbara (where I hoped to find Jeannie) while freezing my great, white, northern butt back in beautiful Canada.
I had the chance, you see, to visit Barbara for a single day at the ripping age of 16, and that day burned her legs into my mind, like a never-ending Sunkist commercial, un-peeled before my blinking, teenage eyes.
Paradise found.
The sun. The beach. The hills. The people. The food. Ok, let’s be honest, all of Barbara’s women. Beauty was everywhere. The natural world and womankind. The kind of world this young man wanted in one place, integrated better than Frank Lloyd Wright could have done (maybe). Although I was sure that there was a Frank house around somewhere, with Barbara in it.
Many years later, I risked applying to The Brooks Institute of Photography, and Barbara (or Jeannie blessed me). I moved to paradise. It was all there. Pleasantville with just the right touch of color.
The friendships. The romances. The sublime, youth-a-verse of Santa Barbara in all her moments, until, sadly, the real world crashed the party, as it always does. So I took my first job, choosing to leave paradise, promising my Sun-treader friends that I would be BACK (just like Arnie).
And like Arnie, I kept that promise.
But the world of my dreams was no longer. It had dried and blown away, replaced by a dusty clot of wind, shipped from downtown Los Angeles, that curled unceremoniously around Barbara’s parks and dumped zombies, homeless, and friendly neighborhood gang members peddling illegal (now legal?) substances among the not-so-happy looking natives. The new folks–tough, aggressive and pissed off. A very LA experience.
The streets I loved were now drained of vitality. And all of the sunny beach bums, who once wrangled Californian shops, hangouts, and restaurants that ran the last great, all-American beach town were bye-bye.
The beach shocked me the most—homeless, panhandlers, and various thugs piled their garbage everywhere: a flotilla of filth and seaweed.
What hell happened here?
I did a little research and understood WHY.
Looks normal to me!
There she is. The wicked Marxist warrior herself—Mayor Cathy Murillo. Make Socialism Great Again!
The politics are simple. Mayor-neo-Marxist, Cathy Murillo (who dialectically clashes with the American conception of Property Rights) mustered co-conspirators, whose aim was to reshape Santa Barbara into a straw-less, paradise made in their own, (anti)Progressive image.
Of course, to make this possible, the psychotic, huddled masses, burning for something free, shoved the locals and tourists aside, while accosting, extorting, defacing, damaging and killing those beautiful streets and even the people on them. Barbara’s spirit rapidly shuttered. By what means can we stop them? Paper straws?
The local government officials won’t solve the problem because they are the problem. Their feckless, pandering to the social-media-mob of the moment, and their booting of individual rights has birthed a new, kinder, gentler, Santa Barbara pogrom, where hypodermic needles are plucked from the streets by swooping seagulls, who later prick themselves (or you) and die.
And left of left of center is Mayor Murillo, fearless leader of this great leap forward, defending local gangs and their MEMBERS, too! Shocker? Not really.
According to these Flying Spaghetti Marxists, this is what America deserves. In fact, this is what the west coast of western civ deserves. This is what evil, white male privilege and local, surf-style masculinity and beach-blanket-misogyny deserves: to burn and die, baby.
It all needed to go, sacrificed to the Spaghetti society that wants to pin us in a sunny, utopia, to each according to the level of the same crappy, filthy, burnt height as the next person. After all, our hipsters brothers and sisters now look homeless. I couldn’t even tell the difference when one Richard Branson-looking dude, walking down Barbara’s State St., turned out to be some useless millionaire.
But I’m not useless. I am livid. I am disgusted. I hear woman. I am man. And hear me roar at the local government of Santa Barbara, who destroyed this once juicy slice of American earth, while fools, like journalist Glen Mowrer, speak of our ‘duty’ to help our poor, druggy, extortionist, friends.
Momo Mowrer says:‘It is, therefore, the legal, if not the moral, duty of these communities to participate in the programs needed to alleviate the problem. Shelter, food, counseling, health care, and the needs of the mentally disturbed, the addicted, and the confused…’.
Oh, really? Give me a “why?” Why must need be a claim on ability, wealth and success? Why must I help someone who won’t help themselves? Why must I sacrifice my one and only self to a collective of selves, itching to freak?
Oh, I know why! I pulled this out of the the library once:
‘”In socialism of the future…what counts is the whole, the community of the Volk. The individual and his life play only a subsidiary role. He can be sacrificed—he is prepared to sacrifice himself should the whole demand it, should the Commonwealth call for it.”
And who said that again?
The book. The struggle. Mein struggle?
Oh, if it isn’t clear, Glenny boy–I’m saying that your ideas once filled the parking lots of North Sea and Crimea beaches, everywhere, circe 1940s, the asphalt foundation of every total state, both local and national, this world has ever known.
So? Get them OUT (the homeless and the politicians) of our United Nation of Beach and Sun. And let our government, who steals our money at the point of a gun, anyway, find some cash to house and ‘help’ our homeless, but on a piece of land far, far away from this place. And if they relocated back, don’t pass go—JAIL.
Otherwise, your city will remain a ghastly, new saint, stripped of her beauty, and celebrated as a living ghost, baptized in the bloody rust of downtown LA.