LA passings: watching big America diminish on the small screen

Somewhere in Los Angeles, the very other side I think, city councillor Kevin de León is not having a good time. On the screen hanging over the baggage carousels at LAX — yes, it’s the venerable article-from-the-airport, connecting flights, deadline, no time no time — vision fills of Black Lives Matter protestors surrounding de León’s modest very-outer-suburban home, having set up camp, demanding his resignation and staying put until they have it.

The news report shows them putting up tents, cooking and playing UNO to pass the time. People still play UNO! That’s almost sweet.

De León has decamped to a hotel for the duration. His days as a councillor seem numbered, possibly in single digits. Caught on tape with two other Latinx councillors disparaging Black people, and making some nasty remarks about a white councillor with an adopted Black child, de León is holding out — the other two councillors have already resigned.

The issue is, of course, one of principle and a fierce determination to confront aggressions micro and macro, and a mayoral election for this vast city being fought as hard as any of the hundreds of races in the midterm elections around the country.

Race is the word. LA Mayor Eric Garcetti is retiring after two terms and all is up for grabs. The city that was run like a southern state for decades, and then like Vietnam, with white cops regarding its Black and Latino population as in-country insurgents, now has a competition that is like something out of James Ellroy.

Black federal Congresswoman Karen Bass is running — LA mayor is a step up — against Rick Caruso, an Italian-American property developer. Bass is a former social worker who was a prominent organiser of the pro-Cuban Venceremos Brigade, sympathisers who organised work trips to Cuba in the ’60s and ’70s, and a community activist. Caruso is a former president of the police commission and on LA’s Board of Water and Power Commissioners.

With LA’s council elections already held, whoever leaked the tape wanted to mix it up a bit for whoever the incoming mayor will be. The politics of it are too complicated to detain us, but the battle is really for Latinx affiliation: with a guy named Caruso — who’s kinda Latinx-adjacent — versus a Black leader, in a city where Black and Latinx residents have been fighting over such spoils as available for decades. The protestors are sincere.

But someone had the recording for quite a while, and it just came out now…

This is one of hundreds of electoral races around the country in what is turning out to be a fraught and contestatory set of midterm elections for the US. All 435 House of Representatives seats are up for grabs — although only around 75 are in any way real competitions — plus 33 or so seats in the 100-seat Senate, numerous governorships and state assemblies, and an unusually wide range of special ballot measures, from the usual obscure tax breaks to drug legalisation and pronouns in public documents.

The Democrats are fighting to retain control of the House, which no one expects they will do, having only a five-seat-or-so majority at the moment, and they were initially hoping to get some wins in the Senate and take a full majority there (though not a filibuster-proof one). 

The Senate hope may now have departed. Inflation is on the rise again, gas prices are soaring, and the Republican Party right is pushing hard on half a dozen cultural and social war fronts, from crime to abortion to book banning in libraries. 

In Arizona, “stop the steal” candidates won every major Republican nomination. If they win the state, there is no way it would certify a Democrat vote in 2024. In Ohio, Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, a once-reasonably reflective right-wing writer, has made himself over as an extreme Trumper and a “Great Replacement”-ist to squeeze out the sluggish midterm Senate vote. 

In Pennsylvania, for the Senate, Trump-favoured TV doctor Mehmet Oz is up against dank hipster and state lieutenant governor John Fetterman; the latter campaigning after a recent stroke, the former being assailed for experiments on dogs (standard medical research ones).  

In Georgia, Black Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who is opposed to all abortion — including life-of-the-mother cases — is accused of paying for an abortion himself. The accuser is the woman whose abortion he allegedly paid for, whom he claimed to have never met but who is the mother of one of his children.

Biden and the Democrats, taking a look at inflation — which is roaring, the prices are insane, and, yes, I know I’m in an airport, but even so — have gone culture war too, with the president promising a “Roe vote” in a majority Senate to guarantee abortion rights.

Culture war doesn’t cut it. It’s a political life war, about the fundamental rights and control of bodies. 

Those are the highlights, but with hundreds of smaller contests such as the LA mayoral race still being fought hand-to-hand on the screens, as the protestors dig in to eject Kevin de León from the city council.

And your correspondent rushes for the next flight…