Los Angeles Is the American Dream Made Manifest

As the city that made all my dreams come true continues to burn, a few thoughts on what has always made it so great (and the ghouls with pig shit in their veins currently celebrating its pain)

Source: izayah ramos, Unsplash

Three years after I moved to Los Angeles to pursue a future in screenwriting, I returned to Michigan to spend Thanksgiving with my family. During this visit home, I found myself sitting on the front porch of my oldest friend’s house, catching up with him as he smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and birds squawked around us. But as we talked, it became increasingly clear that something had permanently changed between us.

Anything about my “new life” I brought up was quickly greeted by what I’d describe as polite condescension. I’d sold my first screenplay, and when I told him about its plot, he conflated it with other Hollywood films he thought loud, mindless, and beneath him. Again, he didn’t bluntly say as much, but everything about the industry, about filmmaking, about the career I’d somehow set in motion for myself was no longer worth his attention. Instead, he wanted to talk about video games. He was working part-time as a roofer. He’d inexplicably started listening to country music after introducing me to some of the best rock I’ve ever heard when we were teenagers. More than a decade later, he stopped talking to me altogether because I supported Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary, so it’s important to know the slow-motion dissolution of our friendship had nothing to do with politics.

No, it had everything to do with the fact that I was determined to become what I wanted in my life and he never would. Not because he couldn’t, but because he couldn’t bring himself to try.

That’s what broke up our friendship, in the end. It broke up other friendships, too. It tested and even crippled relationships with members of my family. You see, I had done something unforgivable in their minds — I’d gone off to chase a dream, while they had never dared to even act on theirs.

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As multiple fires continue to burn across Los Angeles – killing untold numbers of people and animals, causing billions of dollars of property damage across tens of thousands of acres, and turning our cultural heritage into ash – the United States’ Right-wing politicians, media, and religious leaders decided not to lock arms with their liberal counterparts and stand together as Americans. You know, “Kumbaya, motherfuckers, we’re going to 9/11 this shit by putting country first!” Nope, instead, they took to social media to attack California’s Democratic leaders with demonstrably false lies and to mock all those rich Hollywood “celebrities” whose homes had burned down — leaving out the fact that most of the city’s residents are neither rich nor famous.

This disdain from Conservative America is certainly tied to its view of California, the fifth largest economy in the world – the backbone of the United States’ own economy – as a liberal stronghold antithetical to the violent slide Rightward in the country’s national politics. But when it comes to L.A. in particular, its artists and “celebrities”, and the bile so many hurl at the film/TV industry and all associated with it — such as myself — the loathing is rooted in something much, much deeper.

They hate us not because of what Los Angeles is, but what it represents to them — a city of dreams and dreamers.

Everyone who moves there is chasing theirs, including the Central and South American immigrants who have and continue to move there for a better life.

That’s certainly what I was doing when I arrived in September 2005 to join a long line of actors, filmmakers, musicians, authors, producers, agents, chefs, digital artists, stuntpeople, and so many others – all driven to make or help make art, to create something from nothing, to add something beautiful to the world.

The thing that truly unites all of the city’s residents past and present — artists, immigrants, and more — is the chance we took just by showing up. We gambled our futures on a dream. We risked everything.

That’s what really galls so many in the U.S., as uncomfortable as that may be for some to hear — L.A. is populated by people who were brave enough to not play it safe, to not set aside our dreams for a practical life, to not settle. Almost everyone there were told what the America dream was at some point in their lives, and rather than set it aside for a stable paycheck, that first mortgage, a bigger pick-up, they instead said, “Yeah, I’m going to go get me some of that, come what may.”

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To be clear, I do not judge anyone who made more responsible decisions than me with their lives. I come from Detroit. I’m blue-collar to the bone. I think working-class Americans are the heart of the country and always have been. I think they’re the heart of every country in the world. But I’m under no delusion all such people only ever wanted the lives they ended up with.

We all dream from a young age. We all want something more, even if it’s just a vague idea of something else, something beyond what our parents were able to have. And then life happens. I saw it happen to my own parents. I’ve seen it happen to so many people I love. And I’ve seen these same people, nested in nicer homes than mine, secure in their jobs, sending their own kids to colleges, complain about what failures they are. This more conservative, traditional iteration of the American dream — a nice house, good job, and healthy family — just isn’t good enough for most people anymore, as it turns out. Resentment seems to be the natural state of things in the United States – especially when you’re white.

This is why I think it’s so easy for so many to react with a lack of empathy for the victims of the L.A. fires – or maybe antipathy is the right word. Many so-called liberals across the U.S. feel something akin to this, too. Because it’s easy to feel smug and hateful toward people whom you’ve convinced yourself are living their dreams while you were denied yours. It’s even easier to do that when the majority of the media – and the majority of it is Right wing – preaches to us daily about the wickedness of the “rich elites” and “the woke mob” and the deviants, commies, women and “gays” and people of color who live there.

These forces have done their best to portray L.A. as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, and they’ve successfully convinced millions of Americans, both conservatives and liberals, that it’s true with disastrous results for the soul of the nation.

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Appreciating L.A. back in 2014

It’s easy to forget that Los Angeles is a city reimagined from desert and orange groves and scrubby mountains into a filmmaking mecca by dreamers who started off with nothing but cameras carried in the beds of horse-drawn wagons. That incubative quality is baked into its DNA now. It’s what allowed me and millions of others to become something new there - despite years of mixed feelings about the place.

I lived in L.A. from 2005 to 2017, first in Echo Park, then Elysian Park, Beverly Hills Adjacent, Angelo Heights, and, lastly, Beachwood Canyon. I spent most of that time confused when other people sang its praises. I preferred New York City, London, and the other major cities of Europe. I found its air abrasive. I found its sky a constant and sickly yellowish blue. I found its confusing roads, its slithering, crawling highways, anxiety-inducing. I found it uglier more often than I found it beautiful. And I constantly thought about leaving it until I did.

But the city also gave me almost everything that matters to me today. I met my wife while living there. We had our first son there. The vast majority of my closest friends were made and still reside there. My greatest dream, to become a professional storyteller, came true there. I watched the dreams of so many people I care about come true there, too.

And while I could never live in L.A. again, I also could never imagine not returning. In fact, I cannot imagine my life without its palm trees, its Mexican street food, its endless possibilities. I can’t imagine a U.S. without it either, calling like a siren song to the desperate, the confused, the artists who will never fit in anywhere else — the dreamers mocked by their more sensible friends and family.

Watching L.A. burn to the ground has broken my heart in a way I could not have anticipated. You don’t understand how much you love something until you see it in pain, as it turns out. So, long story short:

Fuck every single one of you bitter, resentful, inhuman ghouls who would revel in that pain, who would celebrate it, who would seek to profit from it in any way. Your souls are 7-11 Slurpee machines filled with churning pig feces. I have no sympathy left for people such as you - may your cruelty be rewarded with suffering in your own pathetic, warped lives.

L.A. isn’t Sodom and Gomorrah despite how Republican leaders, conservative media, and evangelical preachers want you to see it that way. It’s a place where anything is still possible, where you can still become anything you want to be, where the future really is still yours to forge for yourself with the right amount of skill, hard work, and imagination.

It’s the American dream made manifest – because only a city of dreamers could build something like it.

Please scroll down to donate to charities supporting the victims of and first responders to the Los Angeles fires.

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Community Foundation's Wildfire Recovery Fund

Supports intermediate and long-term recovery efforts for major California wildfires, as well as preparedness efforts.

California Fire Foundation

Provides immediate assistance to victims through programs like supplying disaster relief cash cards to those affected by wildfires.

Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles

Assists in rebuilding homes for those affected by wildfires.

Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation

Registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit that directly supports the Los Angeles Fire Department.

World Central Kitchen

Nonprofit that immediately prepares and serves meals to communities impacted by natural disasters and during humanitarian crises.

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