Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [147]
California flies in the face of all such wisdom, though, which is the main reason we hate it so ardently. California has in the course of the Seventies managed to convince itself and at least part of the rest of the world that this “pleasure,” “happiness,” “contentment” stuff might actually be attainable on a day-to-day basis. All you have to do is sign an affidavit foreswearing forever any resistance to being a moron. It's the real blank generation. We may be a shuddering heap of ostentatious neuroses, but they are eggs with the yolks surgically removed. One must conclude that they are worse, not only because one is a masochist but because one KNOWS deep in the gut that deep in their guts they all hate and want to kill too. We can proudly point to David Berkowitz as a man unafraid of following his most primal instincts, whereas they would probably have to dig back as far as Charles Man-son (a whole decade) to come up with an action totem nearly as impressive. They have nothing, certainly not conscience, as is proven by the fact that so far they have failed to ship all their Valium scripts they don’t need to us so's to make Hell a wryer vista for those ten days or so each month when so many of us (the author of this article, for instance) have used up ours and are climbing the walls and tic-twitching funkadelically
Because they withhold this balm from us, they all deserve to be killed. Perhaps even before the next seven random strangers in our own neighborhoods. Someone perhaps should look into the matter of booking charter flights to run hourly for those of us (all of us) who’ve had enough. Not only would we not have to go through the guilt of knowing we’d killed human beings instead of mutants, but we’d get out of town for a while, which of course means that this place would look every bit as beautiful as it actually is when we got back. It would be the solution to all our problems except our mayor, and we could kill him before departure, wondering in idle coastal whimsy whether our return would find him replaced by Stanley Siegel or Joe Franklin. Reagan's obviously the next president, and in matters of showbiz and politics nothing combats fire quite so well as fire. While we’re out there eliminating the populace and making the area safe for sagebrush and hodad-free surf we certainly could also see to it that there was never to be a chance of Jerry Brown succeeding Mr. Reagan as Big Kahuna to the fifty fading states. Even remotely considering the prospect of Linda Ronstadt as First Lady is realizing that earthquakes rendering Nevada the last thing before Japan notwithstanding it's them or us, sooner or later.
I know this because I was just out there for ten days, first time I worked up the nerve for such a trek since 1976, and hell, I was born (Escondido) and grew up (San Diego) in the damn place. In fact I thought it was wonderful for years, and didn’t begin to recognize I was actually homesick for Detroit, a city accurately summarized by Ray Bradbury as several thousand miles up the rhinoceroses’ anus. These days I think of Detroit the way many others think of California: as a place to cool out from the anxieties of this town, inasmuch as there has been, is, and will be in perpetuity absolutely certifiably Nothing going on there. As all New Yorkers know, Nothing is the only place where any modern citizen can relax. It is the Californian's inanely niggling insistence on a Something that initially makes you want to invest in a rifle with telescopic