Tyranny of the Angeline
Aspen
To the world, this city is a beacon. Dubai among Dubais. The city of the eternal future. An Eden where those pursuing wealth and fame come to take a gambit. A world-emulated culture, envied by the modern peoples of the world due to its high status in the cultural scene. It’s cool, hip, and relevant. Mansions, Lovely Weather, Pop Culture, and a toxic conclusion to the American Dream. This is Los Angeles, the cultural nexus of Modernity. Its façade attracts the modern world to the endless flat roads and horizontal buildings. This city has changed the entire social and linguistic fabric of most of the world and thrusted America into the most culturally powerful entity in human history, moving the world towards Modernity and more proficiency in English. William Irwin Thompson described the world as undergoing “Californication” where Southern California was rapidly becoming the cultural center of the world, or that Southern California was culturally terraforming large swathes of the world. Despite this city being viewed as a future city on the hill to most of the world, the people of the Aridoamerican Plane which this city sits on view this city as demonic.
Tell any American Westerner (And to a lesser extent Northern Mexico) that you are Californian, and you are met with a similar dismay as a rowdy British Tourist in Lisbon. Most Americans west of the hundredth meridian hold an open hatred of California. However, when most express this hatred of California, it can be better described as a hatred towards Los Angeles which is the common image of California. This is a common superstition west of the hundredth meridian and it holds with it a very simple truth, Los Angeles represents everything that angers the people of the Aridoamerica. I find this judgment a bit misguided, more specifically with the locals, who too know the city’s sinister side. The city acts as a lure, vacuuming the materialists of the world into its border, promising them wealth and fame, only to steal their money and souls. The Angelino Locals call these vagabonds Transplants and often exhibit some of the worst narcissism the human condition has to offer. Say if you do make it as a celebrity, whether by being molested by a director, mother selling your soul to a corporation like Disney or Viacom as a kid, or you become lucky; you become subject to cult politics which then suck your soul. Most celebrities in this place are globalized and spiritually dead. Many people within the city and outside know the palpable fakeness, demonic tendencies, and antithetical nature of this place.
The city was constructed in a relatively short period. Ranging from 1910-1950. A remarkably fast stretch of time by urban planning standards. The city was originally designed from an obscure New Spain Village as a bastion of artist and intellectual refugees of the east, looking to escape the prudishness of that era’s America. Hollywood was their point of destination. There were other towns such as San Pedro, Long Beach, Anaheim, Santa Monica, and Malibu. However, when WWI ended and Germany entered its Weimar period, many of those Weimarian aspects of high modernity entered Los Angeles. During the Great Depression, refugees fleeing the ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl would also find themselves here, reaping the consequences of attempting to dominate the nature of the Prairie.
Following WWII, the city would go from a hip up-and-coming city to a cultural center of the country. The suburbs sprawled, and large swathes of California were roped away from the Aridoamerican plane and thus became a colony of the Midwest and Modernity. This town among many merged into a massive megalopolis. Two classes formed during this period that, in many ways were interlinked. The Celebrity Class, which would become ritualistic priesthood in this new Modern Continuum, The other is the 50s Aristocracy who purchased land for cheap during the construction of Los Angeles and became a new contingent of landowners as a diaspora from the Midwest and the Eastern US. Both of these groups will be referred to as the Angeline, a gender-neutral word for a people who have gone out of their way to defile the gendered traditions present in both the Hispanic and Mesoamerican cultures that make up Mexico and blood of the Aridoamerican Plane. Do not mistake Angelinos or the rooted locals for Angeline, as they both live on different planets.
Joe Mathews (The San Bernadino Sun. 2018):
“When whites built Los Angeles as a “city of the future” they “whitewashed,” in the term used by the historian William Deverell, its Mexican history and Mexican-American people. That whitewashing left a permanent separation. In The Labyrinth of Solitude, the Mexican author Octavio Paz described L.A. as having a “vaguely Mexican atmosphere” that felt distant, like it was “floating” in the air. “I say ‘floats’ because it never mixes or unites with the other world, the North American world based on precision and efficiency,” Paz wrote, adding: “It floats, never quite existing, never quite vanishing.”
The city is also very nonsensical in its construction, despite many places around the world copying its design. Many will criticize the Chinese for building roads to nowhere and infrastructural projects that make no human sense. The Angeline has done this to a brutal degree, only more horizontally than the Chinese. The city, built shortly, is thus a maze of concrete but not of the Aridoamerican Radiating form, nonsensical corners, and roads. Many in the Urban Planning community call it Car Centric, and they would be correct. However, the nonsensical aspect isn’t just with the car-centeredness. Certainly, it was created by the 50s Aristocracy and his love of cars. Los Angeles also sits on a massive oil field, so many derricks have been covered. Thankfully, these covered oil rigs match very well with the cultural and aesthetic tastes of the Angeline.
The 50s Aristocracy, referred to by the Urban Planning community as the NIMBYs, has also made nonsensical reforms to make it impossible to build any substance. They have adopted a progressive stance from their original transplant, but it’s a mere veneer. This does not just apply to this aristocracy. The Celebrity class too takes this stance. Actors such as Mark Hamill will espouse progressivism as a veneer for America (Contempt towards all Americans) and Modernity, but allow Palestinian families to get brutally butchered. This aristocracy progressive veneer has resulted in the most absurd homelessness rates for most middle and high-income countries when both Mexico and the US have astronomically lower homelessness rates. This fact is made even worse by the fact that the kin of the Angeline, the Midwesterners enjoy dumping their poor in this city. A beacon to high Modernity.
The West’s Modernity can be argued to be a separate civilization from the older West, which some believe the proper Faustian World died after the world wars, leaving Modernity as an ossified skeleton. I tend to agree with this, and its Prime Symbol is The Tower, the skeletonized remnant of Faustian Man’s attempt to reach the heavens. The Tower in Tarot is the bringer of change and upheaval likely owing to its rebirth from the death of the proper Faustian tradition following the world wars and Modernity’s persistent attempt to change the human condition. The Tower also odes to one of the Tower of Babel, the attempt to unite the peoples of the world which inevitably draws the ire of god. Modernity is a moonlight civilization that spreads across large swathes of the world and attempts to unify it; a massive push of the city upon the world and has thus unified most of the world’s Megalopolis’ under its banner. Los Angeles is the firm center of this new Modern Civilization from a cultural perspective. However, as this Modernity was formed from the skeletonized remains of the proper Faustian tradition, it is fundamentally not a creative entity and in many ways seeks to scavenge and destroy the older versions of the Faustian tradition.
The city has become a hub of the world’s decedent elites mobilizing the forces of the height of centralization both to spread its cultural forms to the world and also to deconstruct the remnants of the previous West and replace it with pure modernity. Television and later large portions of the internet can determine entire generational cultures. The whole idea of the Generational Zeitgeist is an astroturfed and inauthentic fake culture pushed by Angeline elites to further their motives. This is why it has become the cultural center of Modernity, it has become a cultural parasite sitting atop the fertile soil of the Aridoamerica Plane’s true expression. It leeches off of the new spiritual revelations and internal truths of the people of the Aridoamerican Plane, repackaging them and selling them to the world. Modern Pop Culture (Both the Angeline and its Tokyo-Anime Counterpart) is a Kachina Tradition under the veil of Hyperreality. Los Angeles is a materialist extension of an already dead, and ossified culture, imposing its imposition on the still very young Aridoamerican Plane and is indeed spreading across the world.
This is William Irwin Thompson’s Californication, it’s the bastardization of Aridoamerican forms stripped of their deep internal meaning to sell to the ever-globalized world, in pursuance of The Tower. This exportation has become so serious that many people within the plane, but especially the local Indigenous and Hispanics have become highly calloused of having their art forms stolen from them and made soulless. It is either condescension of the midwestern colony, or culture theft for them. When one hears concepts like Cultural Appropriation, it may have come from postmodernist intellects, but the term thrives here due to this simple reality.
There are no Moroccan-Dutch, Algerian-Parisian, or Black-Londoner cultural emulators around the world, but there is a substantial community of Chicano emulators in multiple East Asian countries. While indeed these East Asian communities do no harm and look at these cultural forms with more respect than the Angeline, it does show the extent to which the Angeline has cannibalized the new creative Aridoamericans. The current environmental narrative, as exported through Los Angeles, was taken from the Aridoamerican perception of indomitable nature which views (correctly) that industrial civilization as a decedent and excessive force. The indigenous communities as champions of nature trope comes from them being the first victims of technics which the Aridoamericans have grown to loathe. Los Angeles and its cultural exports are thus a permanently televised spiritual war between the authentic Mestizo Soul firmly planted in the land against the forces of Modernity and Industrial Civilization which they view as demonic.
One aspect to come from the increasing neurosis of the Angeline is the concept of Diversity. While Aridoamerica is a diverse place, forming an ethnic makeup of Anglo, Hispanic, and Indigenous Southwestern Community. More recently Indigenous People from Mesoamerica who themselves are ethnically close to the Southwestern Community have percolated into this area. Diversity as a concept has become a propagandized tool for these Angeline both in the form of the Celebrity Class and 50’s Aristocracy to justify ruling in a land that fundamentally hates it. However, despite this internal diversity present in the plane, Los Angeles has become the most cosmopolitan city in the world with ethnic groups from all over the planet, forming enclaves here, many of which don’t mess with the true locality. An Iranian, a Swedish, a German, a Japanese, and a Bengali in this city all have more in common with each other than and the Angeline than they do with the Aridoamerican Plane. Diversity to these people doesn’t mean celebrating culture, it is instead hellbent on cosmopolitan decadence, destroying culture, as well as attempting to justify enslaving the many immigrants of this land, many of these said “immigrants” being children of the Aridoamerican soil. With this concept, the Angeline is able to fulfill both the destruction of the remaining Western Culture under the wishes of The Tower and justify its mass industrial slavery and control over the population. When they see their city fill up with migrants, many of whose ancestors wore Jaguar Skins and bore Macahuitls into battle, they view it as more serfs to cater their galas and mow their lawns rather than celebrate cultural forms. Their brother and kin aren’t Aridoamericans, but other lofty elites in other Megalopolis' which can be described as “The Global Community” or Curtis Yarvin’s Blue Empire.
The construction of Los Angeles serves as the beacon of the larger pseudomorphosis on the Aridoamerican Plane, one which includes other large cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, and Monterrey. All unified by a similar attempt to dominate nature by cannibalizing its resources and a sea of concrete. Many early forms of the Aridoamerican expression have been forced to find themselves in the eternal concrete landscape built by the Angeline attempt to rewrite the human condition, motivated by the demons of the Celebrity Class and the omnipresent decaying force of The Tower. It is a city that projects its will upon the world by cannibalizing the land that hates it, and by luring those who express it in with its promise of riches and fame only to leave those it spits out as both Materially and Spiritually bankrupt.
The city will decay, more specifically its rotten core. It so has been doing with its 50s Aristocracy creating regulations to make this place among one of the worst places in the world for homelessness as previously mentioned, and making its cost of living horrifically expensive, showing the true cultural decay. The Angeline is destined to be brutally devoured by the nature it attempted to dominate. While it’s easy to get angry with Angelinos, know it is not their fault. Many people within this city are good souls contending with a city of demons, built by the stewards of a decaying civilizational form. Despite this, the city carries a deep spiritual undertone. Kultur has also come from this place. Despite the cannibalization, it has concentrated artistry here as well. Underneath the cracks of this false city lies the Mestizo Soul present in the Aridoamerican Plane, one where people have continued to engage in the new ethos of the land. They stand at the edge of this false pseudomorphic city, and in the adjacent lands such as the Central Valley, gradually expanding from the periphery. One day, the true Angelino will supplant the Angeline which used the city in an attempt to dominate nature in a land that never allows for such a thing. The Tower will fall, verticality was always for the mountains and mesas.
An Excellent Tour De Force by Sir Aspen explains (at length) the various Demonic Subtleties of 'Los Angeles,' that vile wretched Hive of Scum & Villainy...
Have a look when you can, Dear Readers & Listeners! 😉