I'm originally from Los Angeles. I was born there. Although I wasn't raised there, I was raised close enough that I read the L.A. Times, and bled Dodger Blue. I went to UCLA for college. I lived within 5 miles of the beach for most of the time I lived there. As a kid I got to watch a fine minor leaguer named Ron Cey develop into a great talent. I watched bad movies on Saturdays with a soundtrack provided at the commercial breaks by Chuck Mangione's "Land of Make Believe". I watched Rose Bowl games.
I was born to be an Angelino.
That changed in no small way in 1994 when I left Los Angeles for San Francisco, but the real nail through the vampire's suntanned heart came in 1997, when the son of the man who brought the Dodgers to Los Angeles sold the team to Rupert Murdoch and Fox. On the surface it looked like a good deal - Fox owned the TV station where the Dodger games were broadcast already and this would turn into a huge revenue stream - but the very first thing they did was to fire (okay, "move into an office role") Tommy Lasorda, the manager behind the Dodgers great run in the 1970s and 1980s. It wasn't about the game, it was all about money. Having met Rupert Murdoch myself I can tell you that it's the man's only motivation.
A few years later he sold the team to Frank McCort and his family, and if you've been paying attention this year you know that Baseball itself took over the company to avoid having game receipts become part of the moneys paid to McCort's soon to be ex-wife. At the same time the bastard cousins of the great publisher Chandler had wrested control of the L.A. Times into the hands of a downsizing incompetent. When the mantra became to treat newspapers the same way you treat anything with public reporting - downsize and watch the stock go up - the newspaper lost its luster and its prize-winning reporting abilities. It's been in bankruptcy for over a year, and was just bought in a buyout so leveraged that it's likely to kill the retirement funds of the Tribune newspaper group.
And how did this all happen? How do you think?
It's all about the dollar, and the lust for it. Two great institutions of Los Angeles life have been brought to ruin by the house of the rising profit margin. George Steinbrenner's Yankees, as much as I hate that team, he lavished money on the team like it was his favorite grandchild and you have to respect what he built from that. The same didn't happen when an even richer man took over the Dodgers - although it could have. Instead it was to make more money off the TV revenues. The same happened to the Times - favorite and capable writers were done away with, ad space grown, features disposed of - all to insure that more profit was made from the same money.
Somewhere along the line, people forgot that when you love something that you work with, it can pay off better than any other type of effort. We've designed our society to do the same. No wonder it seems like we suck so much lately.
And alas, the bad movies run on the weekends no longer have Chuck Mangione either. Sometimes, you have to remember to simply have joy. That's why I've been gone for the past couple of weeks. I rant well, but I prefer to not have anger in my life.
It's why I'm an ex-Angelino.
Cheap shots:
Get you passports now, while you still can.
Buh-bye you racist fuck.
Someone please point Dan Ackroyd to this article.
Chuck Norris doesn't plagiarize. Other articles are so intimidated by his manly roundhouse typing that they insert themselves into his articles.
So you think that maybe, just maybe, we overreacted just a bit?
Just what was he smoking when he said that?
And because I love you, Chuck Mangione
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