Newport Beach Philosopher Watches Sick City Implode

It’s a city of 66,643 people and if Orange County were a hand, it would be perfectly suited both by geography and its own sparkle to be a diamond ring on the pinkie finger.

It’s a city of yachts and sailboats and deep dark tans, of Porsches and sushi and busy travel agents booking exotic ports of call. It’s a city where the last census listed the average home value at $500,000 and above, because that’s as high as the category goes. It’s a city where 5-year-olds take ballet and karate lessons and high school kids car-pool in Beemers and watch hired help mow the lawn.

We ain’t got Beverly Hills, but Newport Beach will do.

Now, we’re watching it implode right before our very eyes. Three of the bulwarks of any community--city government, the school district and the Police Department--have all been blasted this year by scandals. Admitted embezzlers rocked the city and school district, while indications grow that every week was a Tailhook convention around the Police Department.

I can’t psychoanalyze a city, but I know a man who’s lived in Newport for more than 35 years. I asked him to describe his town to me. A successful professional man during his working years, he’s now part street philosopher, part town crier.

“It’s a city of liars,” he said. “We’re falsifiers of reality. We falsify the truth, which is how money is made. Big money is a characteristic of Newport Beach, and I don’t exclude myself. I live here, I’m part of it, I must like it. We thrive on the lie, we thrive on that which is false. That’s how we accumulate most of the money in Newport Beach.”

For fear that he’d wind up on the bottom of the Back Bay, he didn’t want to identify himself. But he’s been thinking a lot of his home city in recent years, he said, watching with increasing trepidation at what it’s doing to itself and its children.

“Newport Beach is a concentration of all that is good and bad in Western culture,” he said. “Western culture thrives on waste. We waste everything. Most of our activities go to waste. You have to understand Western culture to understand Newport Beach.”

He got me thinking about the Newport Beach image: houses too big to even use all the rooms; cars in the garage that are seldom driven; million-dollar yachts in the harbor that are used twice a year; money in such excess it can’t be spent.

“What we have in Newport Beach is not wealth. We have money,” he said. “Wealth is food, machinery, clothing, shelter, bridges, things like that. Money is a symbol of wealth that has nothing to do with wealth. So we all wind up down here owning a lot of stuff, occupying a lot of space while other people do the work. It’s an easy-come, easy-go place, because we don’t do our own work. We bring people in from Santa Ana to do our work. Every day there’s a lineup of guys in trucks doing these people’s work--mowing their lawns, washing their windows.”

I had to tell him that he sounded uncommonly harsh toward his townsmen.

Sad to say, he said, the local scandals aren’t mere coincidence. “Businesses die at the top, cities die at the top, and the kind of leadership we have selected is representative of the people of Newport Beach. I’m only explaining why we hire people who steal from us. We admire the slick, the smooth, the well-dressed. . . . It’s the ability to accumulate money without doing any work.”

My friend says he knows a man with three Mercedes-Benzes. He doesn’t drive them, he washes them. “You know why he’s so highly regarded as a man of acumen? Because he can waste more than anyone else on the block.”

His worst fear is that the younger generation will follow its elders’ footsteps.

“They’re going to be dyed the same color and, yes, I’m concerned, because parents reproduce themselves. Each generation gets a little more immoral, enamored of the lie, seduced by money, and these are the kids who get the best education, who turn out to be the more influential citizens, and then come back here to live. And the whole thing is exacerbated because they have more money and more technology. The process is speeded up with each generation.”

Even outsiders’ glamorous image of life on the beach is a ruse, he claimed.

“People (who live near the beach) don’t use the beach physically as much as they use it to represent who they are. Everything we do down here is used to represent who we are. People in Newport Beach have an identity problem. They go to USC for identity; they live on the beach for identity, they strive to have millions for identity. Not for use or value but for what it says about us. Because we’re brighter down here, and sicker, than they are in Garden Grove.”

It was all I could do to work a minor concession out of him that he might be generalizing a bit too much.

“Not individually, maybe, but this is what motivates the typical person in Newport Beach,” he said. “I’ve been to their parties, their museums, their tennis courts, their golf courses. I’ve watched them, and I don’t think I’m maligning them by pointing it out. I think the more thoughtful of us will agree. They’d say, ‘Yeah, we’re sick. So what?’ ”