by Michael Ventura
(originally appeared in L.A. Weekly, May 1992)
Yesterday was Judgment Day --
How 'dja do? How 'dja do?
Were you sleeping
When your nightmares and your visions all came true?
Butch Hancock and Jimmy Dale Gilmore
A few doors down the hall of this motel in Austin, Texas, a man is screaming into a telephone. What an image of impotence: raging into a plastic receiver. From my room it's just a wordless din, but when I step out to the ice machine I can hear him clearly: "Gina, tell that bastard to come to the phone. TELL HIM! Do you want me to come over there? Then you tell him. MAKE HIM!" When I return with my ice, my message light is on and I call down to the desk, where a young woman informs me that Lillie Kretchfield has some information and I'm to call tonight. But I've never heard of a Lillie Kretchfield. "It's for Room 327, that's your room," the desk clerk says. So it is. Ms. Kretchfield didn't mention a name, only a number; she has left her message for the wrong room. It's a normal night in America: one man screaming to someone who won't listen; one woman leaving her message in the wrong place; and on the television, L.A. is burning.
Isn't someplace always burning on the television? Isn't that what we take for granted now? Isn't that our century? One by one, country by country, each city and each generation discovers what it's like to be in the midst of a given day's flash point. Beirut, Baghdad, Sarajevo, Kabul, Belfast, Miami, Moscow, Peking, San Salvador, Johannesburg, Philadelphia, Berlin, New Delhi, Jerusalem ... L.A. Speaking as one whose old neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx have been destroyed in similar riots, and who has both made and received the inevitable calls to and from New York, South Florida, Oakland and now L.A. -- riot-time seems to have become part of our shared education. No, strike the word "education"; we learn from history that little is learned. It's just "shared experience" -- though it's fair to say that until the prolonged riot that is the twentieth century materializes in your presence, you are not yet truly a citizen of this age; you do not yet know in your bones the seriousness of the energies afoot.
Now and then the television cuts away from the fires in L.A. to feature a mayor, a governor, a police chief, a fire chief, a president, a candidate, a leader, a film director -- all of whom, whether their names are Gates or Bush or Brown or Jackson or Singleton, say precisely what you knew they were going to say, and what each of them knew the other was going to say, and all of it is uncannily identical to what other fire chiefs, presidents, leaders and mayors have said in other decades, other cities.
There are also interviews with people on the streets, people of all colors and ages. Consistent through their various viewpoints and levels of intelligence is the demand that their riot be viewed more seriously than they themselves viewed the riots in, say, Miami or London. Not bloody likely. Though there have been sympathetic flash points as far off as Seattle and Tampa, other people will, for the most part, treat our riot as we've treated theirs, as a form of entertainment, fast food for thought.
We share something else with those who have made statements at every flash point, riot, flood, earthquake and war: the poignant and fierce hope, voiced by citizens and officials alike, that this event will be a "judgment day," a "defining moment," a day we can frame and point to and say, "Here something ended, and here something new began." We need to think this, we must think this, for it gives us the personal power to act. It's even true on a personal level: during such events individuals experience moments that change them forever. It's even sort of true on a slightly larger, citywide scale: shifts in social forces and changes in the terrain compel our behavior to shift and change with them -- though often that sort of change doesn't go very deep.
In a still larger sense, however, there are no "defining moments" in history, not really. History behaves more like a great wave, rising and falling in vast interconnected patterns, than like a train proceeding from point to point. History behaves like a storm -- wind, humidity, air pressure, terrain, solar phases, tides, a million variables, ultimately uncountable, forming a system that keeps its wholeness, its coherence, for just a short while before it changes into something else, some other pattern, some other weather. In history, one pattern of "weather" can last centuries or decades or just a few days, and the element that seems to change the pattern can be as dramatic as an assassination or as silent as the drying of a water table -- but neither the drama nor the silence holds the key, for the drying of the water table could have influenced the conditions that led to the assassination, or the assassination could have changed how people perceived the meaning of the drought, which in turn changed how they did such and such ... and on and on, in the wild growth that is life rather than history.
In this longing for a defining moment, in this clamor for solutions and proposals lies the assumption that here, at the close of the twentieth century, there's something abnormal about a riot, though it's clear that the whole world is rioting in one form or another all the time, that it's all one vast riot bursting out in one flash point after another, with webs of interlocking causes and ripples of overlapping effects.
For instance, all the street actions in Peking, Moscow, Berlin and L.A. over the last several years have at least one cause in common: the vast amount of money spent on armaments has drastically deprived people everywhere of resources and opportunities. Yet this newspaper, as part of its solution to L.A.'s and America's problems, will probably suggest that you support the same Democratic Party that just overwhelmingly approved President Bush's defense budget without so much as a trim. What does this mean? That hidden in most of our "solutions," no matter how well intentioned, are future riots, here and everywhere. We can't seem to get around that.
What can we do? To say that there's nothing one can really do is to be hopeless, and we don't want to be that. Yet any program, as soon as it's proposed, is revealed as limited and ineffectual. This is because the worldwide riot is happening on the same scale and plane of activity (the political and historical plane) on which the proposal is proposed. The behavior of our legislators has been, in effect, a kind of riot -- a quiet riot, a pervasive and hysterical panic that has them going round and round in circles. Because any new legislator immediately becomes part of that riot, what we can do politically is limited. What is far less limited (and the riots themselves prove this) is how we can behave.
The television, for instance, is at this moment displaying some strange behavior: black, white and brown people are helping each other destroy some property. They seem to be having a lot of fun, and they display no fear or anger toward each other whatsoever. The announcer is saying that this behavior is apparently not uncommon this evening. It's a strange way to conduct what's being labeled a "race riot." It means that within this tumultuous event, where elsewhere people are dying, a few unexpected decisions, and behaviors, are being enacted. Everybody expected the instantly famous image of the truck driver being beaten; everybody expected that somebody - in this case Koreans - would be targeted; nobody expected this image of interracial rioting. If you can distance yourself from your fear of property damage, there's something new about this riot. These people are doing something, choosing something, enacting their own program, and there's something in their behavior to watch and respect. Their solution, tonight, is their behavior. They've decided to fight their environment without fighting each other. They've demonstrated how original and generous behavior can be, even in a riot.
For myself, that's where I look for hope. Perhaps this strikes so deep in me because four days ago I stood outdoors in a crowd of more than 10,000 listening to Al Green in New Orleans. This was at the Jazz and Heritage Festival. At least half, perhaps two-thirds, of Al Green's crowd was black. In this huge mixed crowd there was no forced friendliness, but neither was there fear. As usual at the New Orleans festival, there was a sense of allowing -- of people gathered for the same purpose and without any other agenda. There was a minimal police presence, at the outskirts of the festival -- I barely noticed them. And, standing listening to Al Green give his heart to this crowd as we gave ours to him, I realized that this was the first time in twenty-five years that I'd been in a huge interracial crowd without tension. Without drawing any grand conclusions, it was just so refreshing to be reminded that it's possible.
Notice that both at the Al Green concert, and in the case of those kids happily destroying property together, the society as it's been given to us by our government and our economics was ignored, abolished, discarded -- for a brief time. The lesson I draw? My suspicion is that we must be more and more ready to find our lives at the limits of this society's conceptions. Our solutions won't come from the center and won't be condoned by the center, because the center (government, business, even what passes for culture) is in a state of perpetual riot called "history," a set of preconceptions about what "order" and "prosperity" mean that seem to be systematically destroying the well-being of all of us. The change may be in what we most fear. Metaphorically, if you like, it's not about how you stop the riot, it's about how you join the riot. Because we're all already in an enormous riot, one that, for the present, seems unstoppable.
Once more I try to call a loved one in L.A. Once more the circuit's busy. Once more my gut contracts in fear. On the screen, the city I love is burning, and I find I've been listening to the circuit signal on the phone for several minutes while I think my way to a face in L.A. and try to send some soul there. Yes. It's all a question of how to get through, and can your heart reach out where the system can't?
(May 8, 1992)
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