When the Empire Fails at Home...

Found at Warren Ellis' forum

“Downtown LA” is kind of a misnomer — LA has no true core, no heart. It is a loose confederation of towns that sprawled into each other, interstitched by freeways. Downtown LA is, generally speaking, a ghost town and a leper colony.

Downtown swarms with the homeless — but these aren’t your ordinary homeless, by and large. There are certainly a great number of functionally homeless individuals who aren’t too strung out or nuts to go about their day-to-day needs… securing food, shelter, hygene, et c.

What’s really going down there is that there is this truly massive number of totally hopeless people. Hopelessly addicted to drugs, no concern for their health and welfare, alternately aggressive and totally withdrawn. Its like walking through Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain”, or maybe the way I picture 1st century Jerusalem, choked with lepers and madmen. The streets are littered with amputees. Half of the homeless get around by wheelchair; it is really surreal. Toothless mouths in perpetual sneers or screams. There are open wounds, boils, sores. It has to be seen to believed. People screaming, just constantly screaming, with no rhyme or reason. People openly urinating and defecating in the gutter — or the street. I saw a woman bathe her baby in a plastic bucket, dabbing the washcloth in the filthy runoff. I was routinely approached with offers of crack, sex for money, et cetera, by utterly hopeless people.

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To call it “heart-breaking” defies the true power of this place. It literally defies description. It really did a number on me — there’s no real SANE way to cope with it, other than the time-honored solution of total apathy, rejection — pretending these people don’t even exist.

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I sort of never ever want to visit it again. But that won’t help — because I know all too well that it exists, will always exist as it does in my mind’s-eye; choked with misery, self-destruction, hopelessness; the sick, the dying, people literally rotting on the ground, urine-soaked gutters and streets hazarding human feces. The Third World in the heart of the First.

So when we're finished wanking about how we've improved Iraq so much since bombing the living fuck out of it, how about we ask Governor Ah-NOLD what he's going to do to rebuild this.

Or ask Governor Bunko what she's doing about the Big NO.