Wanted: A Black Newspaper

Ari L. NoonanSports

      I keep hoping that a smart entrepreneur will open a black newspaper in this town.
      A sober observer of black cultural, political and social life in Los Angeles is strongly needed.
      I am not aware of one outlet where such a view is available.
      Isn’t this one of the two or three most important black communities in America? What is the temperature in the community? I don’t know.
The once-venerable Los Angeles Sentinel has fallen — no, leaped — off the cliff into that sad abyss called We Don’t Know What We Are But It Ain’t Much.

Psst, What About Culver City?

Ari L. NoonanSports

   On the other hand, if I could interrupt the naked power grab by Mayor I.M. Wrong of Los Angeles and convince him to shift his attention from Los  Angeles schools to a takeover of  Culver City schools, we could at least dicker.
   There is an opening.
   A role for Mayor Wrong, demagogue-in-training, has been on my mind ever since Dist. Supt. Dr. Laura McGaughey announced her retirement a fortnight ago.

   I would have commented sooner. But I have been busy, in service to the School District,  driving my shoulder into the door of Dr. McGaughey’s office.

Mom and the N A A C P

Ari L. NoonanSports

   The NAACP probably knew what it was doing when Dr. Geraldine Washington, an educator, was made the Los Angeles face of the venerable group.
   Even though she is undoubtedly younger than I, President Washington’s  appearance is pleasingly matronly. She looks either like everybody’s mother or the way you would like Mom to look.
   In sports, you may want to present a fearsome appearance to make your opponents quiver like year-old grape preserves.
   But in the fiercely competitive world of cultural marketing, Mama is the ticket if you want to make friends and believers fast with other kinds of people.

Art of Self-Perpetuation

Ari L. NoonanSports

    Once established, do-gooder organizations are like new taxes — they are in your life for all time. They promise to go away when the need dries up. 
    The trouble is, only they can judge when the need dries up. Too many easy, profitable livelihoods are at stake. They ain’t going away, pal, as long as you and I are alive to support them. 
     Back in the 1980s, I wrote tens of thousands of words about various Committees to Rescue Soviet Jews, a group the overweight windbag Zev Yaroslavsky of the County Board of Supervisors used as a springboard to a career on the dole. Eventually, Soviet Jews were rescued. Made no difference. The people at the top did not go away.

Albania Forever

Ari L. NoonanSports

   If you will forgive me, I shall bid adieu for a short while, only in part because the holiday of Passover begins tonight.
   I shall be traveling, practically incognito, to Albania. Following Passover, it is my intention to spend a number of days touring the fascinating hill country bordering – how I love that word – the Adriatic Sea.
   Taking my cue from an extraordinary thinker named Juana Sosa, my plan calls for bicycling through the mountainous terrain of Albania for at least two weeks. Owing to aching anxiety,unattractive red welts have broken out inside my body in anticipation of the coming excursion.

Tell Me, Is It March or April?

Ari L. NoonanSports

       On the inerrant scales of honesty, yesterday’s mischaracterized “pro-immigration” rallies that soiled the streets of Los Angeles and other cities, dutifully billed as “spontaneous” by news organizations, ranked just below the latest television wrestling for calculated spontaneity.
       The off-stage orchestrations by political movements with international agendas —including the diminution of America — was the news of yesterday that will not be told except in small pockets of media.
       Instead, today’s storylines have been crafted to resemble a Sunday School picnic benignly overseen by that elderly spinster in the corner, the one with the rimless glasses, an unflatteringly undersized hat and a blue-polka dot dress that only a maiden lady would buy.

Case of a Man Born Wrong

Ari L. NoonanSports

      Some people were just born to be sub-fortunate.
      Take me. Middle class, solvent, employed and white. Drat the luck.
      Had I been born in Mexico, I could have crossed the border into America any day I wanted. At a San Ysidro deli, I would have been welcomed as this country’s newest instant citizen hero by Mayor Wrong and Cardinal Wrong. No questions asked.
      Even better news arrived this week.
      Lost my job. Lost my family. Lost my home. No problem. All I have to do is hang out a little longer.
      The County Board of Supervisors voted four to one to activate a ten-year plan to end homelessness.

Doing Everything by the Book

Ari L. NoonanSports

      For genuine uncomplicated pleasure, bow-tied with intellectual stimulation, walking out of a chilly, rainy night into a bright, warmly bathed library is nearly unsurpassed.
      When I stopped in two nights ago on the way home, there were enough City Council and School Board members to form a basketball team, if only I had remembered to bring either a gavel or a ball.
      Phil Simmons, the most important person of the evening because his company was the sponsor, was sitting with his wife Linda. Surrounded by other Reasonably Significant Personages, including School Board members Saundra Davis, the President, and Jessica Beagles-Roos, all sat in a neat row, across the front of the room. Everyone looked washed and scrubbed for this special evening.

How Swede It Is

Ari L. NoonanSports

       In the yawning absence of courageous Catholics who will correct the errant Cardinal of Los Angeles and courageous Hispanics (legal or illegal) who will correct the errant Mayor of Los Angeles, we bring you today a Culver City gentleman of my acquaintance.
       A legal, they say, as if he were an oddity.
       Before shaking hands, printedly speaking, may I be granted two presumptions:
That all Catholics in the Los Angeles Archdiocese shipped out to Mars last night at the very hour every Hispanic in this town was returning to his homeland?
How else would you explain the staggering failure of two sprawling communities to react to the outlandish claims by their two most admired leaders.
What is the difference between your mother saying that murder is acceptable, and the Mayor and the Cardinal agreeing that illegal aliens and legal immigrants are equivalent?

How Do You Spell Wall-Mart?

Ari L. NoonanSports

       Adhering to one of the sacred principles of liberal political lore, the protesting high school students last week thoroughly confused the masses about the goal of their immigration-law protests.
       Probably not deliberately. They were just imitating their whining, dishonest elders, and following the directions of their handlers.
Nevertheless, the students (and their elders) blew a chance to attract Americans who otherwise might have felt rays of empathy.
       Instead of clarity, audiences were greeted with rambling, imprecise, indiscernible rhetoric. They also seemed to be turned off by hordes of Latin American flags and un-cute homemade dandies, including this one in Costa Mesa: “All Europeans Are Illegal on This Continent Since 1492.”