avrillavigneamvs240p:

i feel like the only reason there’s a small part of downtown LA with skyscrapers is because people felt like a large city is just supposed to have them in some part

Those skyscrapers are the result of a slum clearance project on Bunker Hill, which was previously old Victorians, once upon a way-back time the classy suburbs of tiny little baby LA, that had become flophouses. Also it was an attempt to lure banks, and their taxes, back from independent cities like Glendale and away from the planned office development of Century City which turned into a giant traffic clusterfuck. (In part because of terrible midcentury modernist planning, in part because of its defeat - the freeway system was designed on the assumption of a freeway decked over Santa Monica Boulevard, but Beverly Hills got it cancelled because ugly and poors and the rest was built intact.)

At ground level a lot of these buildings are blank, multi-story high stone walls. In City of Quartz Mike Davis talks a lot about how this is all militarized fortress architecture in response to riots and poverty but also that hill is really steep such that one side of the building is three floors deeper (or taller, wevs) than the other, and there’s basically no demand for Class A office space in which half of the floor has no windows, and not much foot traffic with any money to spend. So you might as well just stick infrastructure (electrical, water, HVAC, elevators, anti-earthquake suspension systems) in there.

LA has basically been trying to make downtown happen again ever since the 1950s, and it’s always just around the corner, there are some hilarious stories in there. Like, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a classic Gehry design, had to have its curved metal surfaces roughed up after they focused and reflected light so well it was blinding drivers and raising the temperature by 20 degrees in nearby office buildings.

Also LA had this strong-council weak-mayor system where the council kind of lets each councilman run their district themselves with no coherent citywide vision, while departments like the DWP and LAPD got to run themselves. So when Governor Reagan shuttered the asylums and people initially tried to make a “neighborhood services” system to replace it, under NIMBYist pressure everyone refused things in their district, except downtown which didn’t really have any residential constituents of any influence, so all the shelters and rehabs and services ended up there, and in consequence parts of downtown became the homeless district, with tent cities on the sidewalks and addicts wandering zombie-eyed in the street. Downtown’s revival is right around the corner for real this time though promise you guys, lofts and artwalks, so the city’s been sparring with the ACLU and whatnot to get the authority to hassle them away.

It was a big part of the new city charter a decade or so to fix that system (also to preempt Valley secession, also to create Neighborhood Councils as a Potemkin government timesink for Concerned Citizens) but then Villaraigosa (a weak mayor indeed) pissed it away and the council’s clawed most of its power back. Villaraigosa’s election was basically the story of the Eastside Latino/labor branch of the Democratic machine affiliated with Gil Cedillo’s Latino Caucus triumphing over the Westside Jewish/professional branch to install its smile-in-a-suit figurehead.

LA is a terrible place. You’ll notice that anyone who makes money in LA immediately spends it on not living in LA, either through migration or seclusion, or else is an absolutely horrible person.

You know what media property’s due for a reboot? Birth of A Nation.

Griffiths’ movie came out in 1915, The Clansman (and the rest of Dixon’s Klan trilogy) in the 1900s, so it’s all public domain up for grabs. Maybe I should do it.

In honesty I’ve never seen/read either. The summaries I’ve read make them sound pretty damn silly, but it’s easy to make things sound silly in summary. Anyway, you don’t have to be deathly faithful to the original plot, maybe take a few touchpoints and a few character names, and tell a tale of Reconstruction and Redemption. It’s an interesting time that we don’t have many popular representations of.

I certainly don’t think a modern version would end “and then the noble Ku Klux Klan triumphed over vile mongrelization, restored the proper order of things, and they all lived happily ever after”, but it would pretty much HAVE To end “and then Southern Redeemers, including the Ku Klux Klan, did in fact defeat Republican coalitions and establish a white regime”.

See, back when, every Black History month, George Washington Carver came up, the takeaway message was basically

1) Man that guy liked peanuts
or, at furthest
2) Black guys can do peanut science with the best of them

But the really interesting thing about Carver as a historical figure was that for a while there, it was conceivable that a black professor could be the public face of a government program in the American South. Because slavery didn’t transition directly into Jim Crow, there were three steps forward under Reconstruction, and then two back to the “nadir of American race relations”.

(The other interesting thing Carver stands in for in history was that with the shift from the plantation system to sharecropping, crop rotation with nitrogen-fixation crops became pretty imperative, so building a market for peanuts was important. An oft-overlooked advantage to slave labor was that the agricultural economy could exhaust the land and shift towards the frontier with its labor force and labor relations intact. The plantation system relied on taking soil super-rich from aeons of floods and no intensive cultivation and applying a ton of labor to extract the hell out of it. And in contrast, the extension of feudal agriculture to Eastern Europe was slow, for lack of population, and involved offering substantial incentives and concessions to fugitive peasants. Later on the region featured the rankest serfdom, but that’s a whole other worm cannery.)

Every work of fiction is of its time, though, and there’s plenty of modern resonance to be found in the Reconstruction era.

For one, nation-building. The idea that America would invade and occupy countries to rebuild them in accordance with American values… I mean, America invaded and occupied America once to rebuild it in accordance with American values. And failed. In the same way. Not because its armies were defeated in the field, but because local elites, with patience and paramilitary violence, rebuilt their position; and with a combination of weariness, expense, and electoral shifts, Washington eventually shrugged, said “good enough”, cut a deal, and turned to other priorities.

And I mean, America might not have converted the South, but it did keep control. And I expect Iraq and Afghanistan to stay in the American sphere of influence for at least a good generation or two. I suppose there are stronger competing powers in their region, that’s a difference. An independent CSA miiiight have aligned with the British Empire, but it’s not like reconstructed Florida was going to become a puppet state of the Cuban landowners (um). Though I guess Texas and the desert states weren’t firmly distinguished from Mexico until after WWI with the Border War, arguably Operation Wetback in the ‘50s.

(That’s why I don’t dismiss the Arizona anti-reconquistadors as cranks. The notion that after a relatively short period of hegemony, a major population shift could lead to irredentist conflict is… well-precedented, actually.)

So, there’s some lessons about humility in foreign policy. But really, there’s no way to read the history of Reconstruction as a modern liberal parable. (Actually I hear The Traitor, the follow-up to The Clansman, depicts the Klan degenerating into causeless violence and banditry, but ends with an optimistic message of peace and reconciliation through personal openness of the heart and mind. Among the white race, of course. Don’t be silly.) To the extent there’s inspiration to be drawn there, it’s reactionary inspiration. Just because previously subjugated groups have been making advances for a few decades doesn’t mean the worm can’t turn and they can’t be repressed. And heck, even if whites become a numerical minority, with solidarity, cleverness, and a dash of violence, it’s possible to set up a system that leaves them in absolute control.

And let’s not pretend that’d be a message without contemporary relevance or appeal.

Not to say you couldn’t find role models if your politics run the other way. There were carpetbaggers who were activisty true believers in racial equality. There were scalawags who put class before race, solidarity-wise. There were freedmen who, though uneducated and inexperienced in power, took to the democratic project in earnest, with high hopes. (And there were the incompetent and the corrupt and the obnoxious. Always and everywhere.) And in any competent retelling, they’d show up, and be taken seriously, maybe be viewpoint characters for parts. They’d just lose, in the end.

bet you could get more people into preindustrial history by calling it “meatpunk”

For an economic crisis (crisis? it’s at least cris-ish) that propagated by way of household debt and first manifested in evictions and foreclosures, it’s really striking - if you’ve got a background in American history - how little pushback there’s been at the county level.

Nationwide debt crises used to happen regularly, and there were inevitably a few sheriffs or judges who would refuse to go along with the liquidation, creating a point of media focus and kicking the issue up to the state level, where governors and legislatures would usually compromise to some degree (especially if the lower officials had conveniently timed their resistance to match election cycles).

Which, if you’ve ever deplored the effects of “politicizing justice” and wonder why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to subject judges and law enforcement officials to electoral pressure, there you go.

Of course there was also the option of getting a few people with rifles, besieging courthouses and blockading auctions, but that died out even earlier - mind the Grapes of Wrath “Then who do we shoot?” bit - as railroads both enabled rural delivery and thus finance beyond local store credit and the one-branch bank, and also made it practical to send nonlocal militia troops into the boonies (first in coal and iron territory, back before the Rust Belt rusted, and then further west).

Everyone knows that after WWII the federal government grew at the expense of state power, fewer appreciate just how much county power - which used to be pretty much the face of Government - receded. Today movements that aim at its restoration, like Posse Comitatus and Sovereign Citizens, are marginal among the marginal.

I blame the telegraph, for enabling realtime communication across distance and thus obviating the necessity of feudal hierarchies. A court, after all, comes from the term for a retinue of power with identifiable human faces. There was always power, but it used to be close enough and personal enough you could make a CHA check against it. (Or Intimidate, which is STR, iirc). Plus there’s always the tendency to go native.

(The most functional method of countering this tendency was requiring courtiers to spend about half their time accumulating power at their own courts in the field and half spending it down at their liege’s court - this was arrived at independently [as far as I know] by the Japanese bakufu, the French royalty, and the American DoD, where high ranking officers rotate back and forth from field command to the Pentagon. Probably parallels in pre-computerized large firms doing rotations between home and branch offices, but I think that was derived from DoD. Well, DoW, back then.)

Histories of the New Deal often acknowledge the federalization of power but then account for the TVA, rural electrification, Rural Telephone Service, etc. either as the political cost paid for that power, or as something that centralized power made possible, when they were in fact constitutive of that power.

If you actually compare Dianetics with midcentury Freudianism, its original rival, as a theory and praxis of mind, they’re not that far different. Dianetics is a little better, or at least more modern really. It dropped the genital fixation in favor of a foundation in metaprogramming and modular self stuff that rings of the early psychedelic revolution (remember the intellectual 1950s-early 60s part, where it was especially big among the Los Angeles literati?). And its practice isn’t that far off from the modern CBT stuff I’ve heard has largely displaced Freudian approaches.

Yeah, the form their institutions and legacies took is a bit different, but that’s just path-bound rubbage. (Both of them got both the prophet and institutionalizer role in the same person, which is interesting.) Is it any surprise that the WWII-era Navy officer turned SF author built a church on mythological world-building, naval discipline, and the WWII military model of organization that was really the basis for everything in the first two decades postwar? Is it any surprise the turn-of-the-century Viennese Jew founded a priesthood split between the rabbinic model of freelance elder-scholars and academy-credentialed bourgeois professionalization?

Write what you know.