“The Day of the
Locust: The Burning of Los Angeles”
Leonard opens with a quote from Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (he apparently,
will open all of these essays with quotes from Novels…very cool) in this essay
about the 1992 “Rodney King” riots in LA:
When the bird grew silent, he made an effort to put
Faye out of his mind and began to think about the series of cartoons he was
making for his canvas of Los Angeles on fire…He wanted the city to have a gala
air as it burned, to appear almost gay. And the people who set it on fire would
be a holiday crowd. (Nathaniel West, The
Day of the Locust)
A beautifully written piece about a very volatile moment in
LA. Leonard makes the case that (although Rodney King was the spark), the
tinder that fueled the fire was unchecked poverty in South central LA. Good
quote from the piece:
There are people here and around the country saying
that after the first couple of hours it wasn’t political. Sure, it wasn’t exactly, “This CD player is
for Rodney King,” but a woman looting an armload of diapers that she couldn’t
afford to buy would suggest to me that the insurrection was entirely political.
If no longer a political protest, the riot was driven on by
the politics of poverty.
Leonard also introduces us to his step-daughter, Jen Nessel,
who was writing a piece about the riots for The
Nation and is now the Communications Coordinator fat the Center for
Constitutional Rights in NYC.
Here is the first paragraph from her article:
New learning: “The rapper Ice-T is on record for hating
Koreans.”
New word: Bombazine = material made of silk used to make
dresses, in particular mourning dresses, in the 19th century.
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