Archive for the ‘los angeles’ tag
Apartheid #
Before making the liberal’s argument against it — “restricting options in low-income neighborhoods is a disturbingly paternalistic way of solving the problem” — William Saletan puts Los Angeles’s fast-food-restaurant ban in perspective:
What we’re looking at, essentially, is the beginning of food zoning. Liquor and cigarette sales are already zoned. You can’t sell booze here; you can’t sell smokes there. Each city makes its own rules, block by block. Proponents of the L.A. ordinance see it as the logical next step. Fast food is bad for you, just as drinking or smoking is, they argue. Community Coalition, a local activist group, promotes the moratorium as a sequel to its crackdown on alcohol merchants, scummy motels, and other “nuisance businesses.” An L.A. councilman says the ordinance makes sense because it’s “not too different to how we regulate liquor stores.”
Visiting the Navajo #
Though Friday’s entry was a tangential meditation on Los Angeles, last week’s Correspondent’s Diary at The Economist is rather good. Two quotes from visiting the Navajo, one of the few casino-less tribes. From Tuesday, on their relationship to the United States:
Just because Navajos are exceptionally good at negotiating between cultural worlds does not mean they do not make mistakes. A few weeks ago the Navajo Times carried a story about a move to create a Diné medal of honour for those who have served in the armed forces. The speaker of the Navajo legislature apparently thought this would be a good idea. Navajo veterans did not. Explaining that only Congress can award military medals, they crushed the plan by a vote of 34-0. Three of the intended recipients responded that they would rather have a sheep.
And from Thursday, on gambling in America:
Indian casinos exist because of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance and everyone else knows as hypocrisy. Americans wish to gamble. Yet they cannot bring themselves to liberalise gambling, which is, after all, a sin. So it is necessary to allow a few exceptions to the general rule. These include Nevada, riverboats (which are often little more than casinos surrounded by moats) and Indian tribes.