2002-01-29 - 3:00 p.m.
So yesterday I went up to Anaheim to visit a coworker who was visiting from back east. Orange County sure has changed since I last stopped there--or at least the formerly seedy area around Disneyland has. Once upon a time, to drive down Harbor Boulevard was like taking a tour of some weird shadow-world that served as a sort of yin-yang counterpoint to the Magic Kingdom�s neatly-packaged wholesomeness: streetwalkers, taco stands, faded tiki- and Tomorrowland-themed motels swarming with crack addicts and teenage runaways packed 12 to a room, shell-shocked tourists stumbling around as if the bus had dropped them off at Hollywood and Vine by mistake, etc. I wouldn�t have wanted to hang around after dark but the neighborhood had a certain charm.
Now it�s like every other part of Orange County. The streets are ridiculously clean, with brand-new stubby palm trees planted along the median at mathematically perfect intervals. The hotels and restaurants are all owned now by the same chains that own every other hotel and restaurant in America. The prostitutes and homeless people are all gone, probably shipped off to some Disney-operated concentration camp somewhere. And you still can�t find a place to park your car.
A friend of mine said it best a few years ago: Orange County is what the world will look like when the government of Singapore takes over after the apocalypse.
The place also has the densest concentration of post-9/11 patriotic kitsch I�ve seen so far. Now, I love my country--I wore a flag pin for a while, I�ve supported most of our actions in the war on terrorism, I choked back my general dislike for President Bush and his cronies in the first months after the World Trade Center attacks because I felt it was important to stand together as a nation and so on and so on--but is it too much to ask that we show just a teensy-weensy bit of good taste about it? Displaying an American flag is patriotic. Leaving it up for month after month after month exposed to the elements until it�s a tattered and filthy red-white-and-blue dishrag is disrespectful. And even my rock-ribbed conservative dad thinks those cheezy plastic flags that sprouted from every SUV window after Sept. 11 have got to go.
But whatever. I had fun anyway. The aforementioned coworker is a member of the Metropolitan Community Church (a gay-friendly church, for those who don�t know) and was there for some sort of theological conference of which most of the attendees are conservative evangelicals. I asked how it felt to be spending a full week in the midst of what had to be an overwhelmingly hostile crowd, and got this as a reply: "Sure, they think I�m gonna burn in hell, but other than that they�re really, really nice."
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