The dream was too recent: has that hurt LA?

Before I get into my argument here, let me preface by saying that Los Angeles is a great city, an unquestionable major player in the global economy today, a city that doesn't stand still and reinvents itself all the time.

That said, I think it also safe to say that LA is the butt of a lot of jokes from fellow Americans, a city not always seen in a favorable light. And maybe, even more important, a city that gets incredibly defensive about itself, even with all it has to be proud of itself.

So why? Why is LA viewed negatively from many outsiders and defensively by Angelenos?

Could the answer lie in history? Recent history?

No US city is as close to its "golden age" as LA, a time when things were going well in town and what happened in it capitvated the nation.

LA projected the glamour of Hollywood to enthrall our nation through the 20's, 30's, and 40's. In the 50's and 60's, it was the California Dream, personaified no place like was in LA, that captured the country with its wide open freeways, beach boy sound, a still glamorous Hollywood, year-round good weather, California optismism.

Many Americans are still "young" enough to remember that special LA.

The problem was, the golden age was far too short. Growth in population changed freeway freedom into gridlock. Immigration and diversity unfortunately led to conflict between groups. LA police came across as brutal, LA prosecutors as inept. South Central exploded, smog blanketed the city, area wide sprawl proliferated, and incompatable regions of unbelievable wealth and third world poverty divided. California's social services, overtaxed, could not deliver....especially in the once vaunted field of education. Secesion movements highlighted a divided city with a government that gave little power to its mayors. Earthquakes, land slides, fire, and houses carried by mud downhill were seen on t.v. nation wide.

It is not that LA is unique to urban problems. Of course, it isn't. But the contrast between the recent past and the current era may be more pronounced than in any other major US city: from the best of times to an era where people have to serious ask...is this place working? While much is working and much is going well, to much isn't to keep the old paradigm alive; this is not paradise among these palms.

Again, no knock on the great city of Los Angeles, but I can't help but feel that all that was so, so good and all that was so, so close in time helps undermind a Los Angeles forced to live where the rest of us do: in a very, very real world.>