Dark Thoughts About Freeway Shootings
Road rage isn’t only for criminals, is it?
OK, a confession: The recent spate of freeway shootings fascinates me. This sounds alarming, I know, but what would you expect from someone who calls himself L.A. Sniper, a name that came to mind watching CNN coverage of the Virginia shooting spree blamed on Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad in the summer of 2006?
Calm down, and stop being so judgmental, though intolerance often wins out in a country where presidential campaign coverage can fixate itself for days on Obama’s three ill-chosen sentences. This just in: All the candidates are elitists and despise anyone who doesn’t give them money or votes. Get over it. L.A.’s freeways, on the other hand, are the great equalizers. Anybody can get shot on them.
L.A.’s car-to-car shootings are more than crimes that scream out for the perpetuators to be brought to justice. The carnage – five dead in at least eight shootings in the past two months – also speaks to an out-of-control culture that awards near-sovereign-nation-status to our cars. People who drive Priuses and tank-like SUVs may appear to have little in common, but they are among the worst offenders when it comes to drawing up their own laws, good and bad, for the rest of us to follow.
To try to come to terms with the phenomena of roadway shootings, I gave up the comforts of public transportation for one week and drove to work. It seemed the best way to see firsthand what’s going on out there in the Hobbesian state of nature. A couple theories needed investigation. Are the shootings related? No, I was repeatedly told. Are there any common threads that could suggest anything but random attacks? No, I was repeatedly told.
“We haven’t made any connections in the recent shootings,” said CHP Officer and spokeswoman Heather Hoglund. “It does appear to be random.”
A more thoughtful analysis of freeway conditions may be found in any number of places, but here are the highlights of my week on the freeways:
You people are nuts.
More of you deserve bad-ass reckless driving tickets – or the decrees of vigilante justice.
Prius owners drive like morons. How do I know they own their wheels? Who else would drive so slowly but someone trying to keep their cost per mile close to the price of a piece of bubblegum?
To the guy who cut off the college student trying to shoot across four lanes and exit at Exposition Boulevard, slow the fuck down. It doesn’t matter if you have to brake and fall back in the line of cars on the eastbound 110.
And to the woman on the southbound Pasadena freeway in the Mercedes SUV oblivious to anything but her cell phone and other likely head noises, no fair using the Chinatown ramp to race around the stopped cars and then darting at the last nanosecond back onto the freeway. You’re lucky no one shot out your tires. OK, I take that back.
But exactly how are these drivers any different from someone who walks into your home waving a gun? OK, I take that back, too.
But you haughty Prius owners, please take the clean-fuel-burning Metro bus if you’re so damn worried about your carbon footprint. Or are you really like all the other image-conscious drivers out there auditioning for the next sniper attack every day on L.A. freeways?
King Antonio I: The funniest guy in town
With a few dozen cops and firefighters on display behind him, Mayor V’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign began taking shape in Parker Center on Monday night. You’ll recognize him in a little more than a year as the tough-on-crime candidate who finally called a halt to Los Angeles’s gang wars. The only cautionary notes sounded at the start of the evening when a Stevie Wonder number with the very unambitious title “Living for the City” blared through the auditorium as the mayor made his way to the stage.Give the mayor credit for not blowing any money on this hokey show. But he should remember to bring a speech next time. This one was a bomb for anyone looking for signs of inspiration and loyalty at City Hall. Mayor V rambled on for 40 minutes and never addressed the top question facing the city of Los Angeles: If he wins re-election in March 2009, will he turn his back on the people of L.A. in a few short months to kick his campaign for governor into high gear? Will he have the decency to resign, and when will the special election, at a cost of millions of dollars, be held to find his successor? How does he feel about making us blow that money with a $400-million deficit looming next year?
How can he not lay all this on the line with the Angelenos he claims to love so much? Or, is he a soulless chump who only cares about himself and the next race? Most people wouldn’t keep a dentist as disloyal as the mayor.
He can talk all he wants to about adding 1,000 cops by 2010 (what does Chief Bill Bratton have on the mayor anyway?), putting gang programs under his control (what difference will it make when the mayor abandons L.A.?), infiltrating the byzantine L.A. Unified bureaucracy and installing Ramon Cortines as second-in-command (why can’t his so-called “progressive majority” on the school board fire the do-nothing Superintendent Brewer?), and developing a public-private partnership to take on L.A.’s transit needs (what dumb-ass investment firm wants a piece of money-losing subways and light rail?).
All grand ideas, but who will finish Mayor V’s frenzy of projects? Bob Hertzberg? James Hahn? Karen Bass? Janice Hahn? Bill Rosendahl? Ron Kaye – in his dreams, at least?
Ambition’s fine and blind ambition can be tolerable, too. But is there anything at the mayor’s core, like a heart? Or is that beating sound a stopwatch? If the mayor’s so bored with L.A., he should not even seek a second term. Get some bright do-gooder type who would consider two terms in office a gift rather than a burden or springboard or whatever role it fills in the shallow psyche of our fading star Mayor V.
Just how big of a yawn was the mayor’s speech? It sounded like a compilation of his press releases instead of a narrative of the city’s hopes and dreams. But someone deserves credit for not editing out the most telling line of the evening.
Possibly channeling his worst fears about running for governor against likely challengers Jerry Brown or San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom, the mayor said: “Let’s reach for the future beyond our grasp.” Then he left the stage to Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
Maybe Mayor V’s ego would be satisfied with a new title – King Antonio I – and allow him to stick around long enough to accomplish at least one of his goals.
Fabian, the water boy
Disgraced state Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez no longer can ring up fancy Bordeaux wine purchases or go on $3,000 shopping sprees at Louis Vuitton’s Paris Outlet on the campaign coin, but he still hasn’t found honorable work. Last week, the short-timer was doing a dirty deed for his close pal, girlfriend swapper and confidant, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.The Big F called for the head of Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chief Roger Snoble, blaming him for the region’s failure to bring home billions of dollars meted out for projects by the California Transportation Commission. It was an absurd charge.
If there was any mystery who was behind the threat, hours later Mayor V released a statement urging the full Metro board to review Snoble’s tenure on an urgency basis. (If the mayor ever robs the corner market, expect him to leave fingerprints and his driver’s license behind.)
It looks like the mayor still harbors bad feelings from the 2003 bus drivers strike, when he and fellow board member Martin Ludlow locked horns with Snoble, who was driving more of a hard line with the drivers. The mayor takes over as chairman of the 13-member Metro board on July 1, three months before Snoble’s contract expires. Look out!
Snoble’s been largely credited with restoring order to a transit agency hit by allegations of corruption and mismanagement, and ended the revolving door in the top management position. He also royally pissed off Mayor V, the Big F and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger when he blew the whistle on the heist they pulled last summer by balancing the state budget with Proposition 1B transportation bond money. Snoble made no bones about the theft of $300 million from L.A. transit projects: “That’s literally being stolen to balance the budget. Essentially, we all got hoodwinked,” he said at a July news conference.
So if Mayor V can dump the straight-shooter Snoble, there’s an extra dividend: The governor will be happy, too, a move that could pay off in extraordinary ways – say, if the mayor could talk the popular GOP governor into endorsing him for governor in 2010.
Send insults and ammo to BigAl@lasniper.com.
Published: 04/16/2008
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