Mugging of America

Daily Express 2nd May 1992

DESPERATE and shameful scenes played again like a bad horror movie through America's second city last night when the nation's legacy as the Land of the Free was eroded.

President Bush ordered in the Army to bring back law and order to the so terribly tarnished City of Angels, and the scenes here in Los Angeles were pathetic. Families had no food, no electricity, no healthy drinking water, no transport and no help, because relief agencies like the Red Cross were being terrorised.. For much of the time there seemed to be no hope either.

This is Hollywood. And Beverly Hills. The home of Disneyland and sunshine and blue skies. This is the American Dream?
It was on a red hot barbecue last night as the political consequences of it all became inflamed.

This weekend Los Angeles is a city of despair.
It seemed to only take half an hour to turn us into El Salvador. And into America's Shame.

A jury in smug, comfortable Ventura County, where only 1.5 per cent of the population are black, had found four white policemen innocent in the beating of black motorist Rodney King.

And that was all it took to start the carnival of carnage? To collapse society?
Of course not. The land of milk and honey has been souring for a long time. Greed and corruption have invalidated lots of dreams and aspirations. The Savings and Loans scandal. Boesky, Milken — names of the bad guys from Wall Street. Boesky and his wife owned the Beverly Hills Hotel. Milken worked from offices along Rodeo Drive. The Fat Cats of the Eighties.

WE'RE all paying for it now. South Central Los Angeles is now Fort Apache, The Bronx and a no-go land. If the Watts riots of 1965 are a precedent, it will still be a tableau of poverty and misery and crack, cocaine and other drugs in another quarter of a century.
It's all part of the mugging of America.

There are armed security guards on every floor of good hotels in America's capital of Washington. There are guards with guns watching you as you-park your car or visit shopping malls in most cities.

A British tourist was killed in New Orleans just last month. After events here it might appear wise to stick to Euro-Disney for the French carry only disdain, not automatics.

Blame? You can name anybody and be accurate. There are no homes and no jobs and, again, no hope for so many. America and especially southern California offered so much, but the promise was broken.
Many of Los Angeles' most visible groups, blacks, Latinos, Asians, workingclass and poor whites, are all fighting for a limited supply of jobs and homes and possible aspirations.
"At the elite level in Los Angeles you'll see a surprising degree of co-operation between Asians, Jews, blacks, Hispanics," said Professor Michael Preston, a race and politics specialist at the University of California, adding: "But below those levels you have clear tensions, because the pie is shrunken.
"Everyone wants a piece and resents it when another group of people have something they don't. And unfortunately blacks always seem to be the last ones to get to the plate."
Dr Billy Hayling, one of this city's most influential black leaders, said: "There's a lot of anger particularly in the underclass. A lot of people have been left out of the system and because they were left out they boil over. As leaders we have to heal but it will take an awful lot of effort." A monumental effort. Last night there were no buses. The supermarkets were closed. So were the schools and the banks and the post offices and in superb irony, city welfare agencies.

You couldn't escape to the movies or the baseball or basketball — they were all shut too.
And money was not a protector. It was an invitation. Especially to the lawless mobs who exploded around the racial time bomb of the Rodney King court verdict.

The flame might have been ignited here but it swiftly fanned up to San Francisco, down to San Diego and across the nation through Georgia to New York and Washington.
President Bush and Democratic Presidential best bet Governor Bill Clinton made all the right political noises, but the looters and killers were bringing a much louder message to the country the candidates want to control.

This law and order issue ironically started in Tinseltown, which makes its living on fictional .High Noons ;and( Lethal Weapons. As Los Angeles burned people were asking where was Rambo? Or The Terminator? Where was Eastwood's Dirty Harry?
Last night 'Dirty Harry' arrived in the form of the troops from Fort Ord, California, where Clint Eastwood did his national service. But why not earlier?

Police Chief Daryl Gates — his controversial autobiography will be published here in two weeks is being replaced by a black police chief. But the city has had a longtime black mayor in Tom Bradley, the one-time contender as Walter Mondale's running mate for the White House
BRADLEY was openly branded a moron by the local media for his provocative  reaction  to  the Rodney King verdicts, which he said could not be tolerated. Don't see Bradley as a fall guy. Any intelligent person here regards him as culpable. And as a curfew was imposed here the looting and killing and burning went on. Affluent and upwardly-mobile areas of Los Angeles prayed they were safe.

But landmark buildings along Hollywood Boulevard, including the Pantages Theatre — where every star you can think of has played — to the naughty lingerie store Frederick's of Hollywood, were in flames. Hollywood Boulevard's stellar Walk Of Fame was covered in cinders and dust.
In Pacific Palisades where Walter Matthau is honorary mayor and stars like Sylvester Stallone, John Forsythe, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Spielberg live, special security patrols were brought in.

In Beverly Hills the chic stores were being boarded up. The Beverly Centre — the epitome of glitterati shopping, the haunt of stars from Madonna to Jane Fonda — was closed down.

Performances of theatre shows, including The Phantom Of The Opera, were cancelled. Movie premieres such as Mel Gibson's Lethal Weapon III were postponed. Authorities did not want crowds anywhere. This weekend we live in a painful paradise.

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