(Posted 9/18 due to technical difficulties)
The Los Angeles train station is the most full-on temple of Southwesternness I’ve seen. It’s worth a train trip to LA on its own. Decorous Mission tiles, outrageous deco fittings, gracious palmy gardens: you feel exactly like Cary Grant blowing in from New York. Even Amtrak’s efforts to make it conform to its relentless neo-Post Office esthetic can’t dim the place.We spent the day yesterday (Thursday the 13th) at the La Brea Tar Pits, grooving on extinct ungulates and marsupials. The best part is the big glass-enclosed semi-circular lab, part operating theater and part zoo cage, where the paleontologists, in their classic white coats from Central Wardrobe just down Wilshire Boulevard, brush gunk off bones in dogged search of knowledge.The timing of this trip means Laura hasn’t been exposed to more than a few seconds of media about the events. I’m happy not to talk about it myself. You think that in times like these you’d want to share feelings with your fellow citizens and everything, but not those feelings, thank you. Especially men: all Sunday-morning TV military expertise and apocalypse fantasy.
I can’t stop thinking about Madeline Albright last year, when some reporter finally managed to get in a question on the human costs of the Iraq blockade. I can’t remember how many thousands of civilians the sanctions had killed by then (not few, as Rumsfeld put it at the Pentagon last week) by sanctions enforced by US military power. Albright said something to the effect that the cost was worth it, in view of the political goal of getting rid of their president, and quickly moved on. I wonder if that calculus might finally fall out of fashion now that the civilians are ours. I wonder how all those Americans I saw laughing and toasting the massacres of Iraqis during the Gulf War feel now that other louts are toasting our own massacre.
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