Suburbia’s Simmering Class Struggle

The Love Machine arrived unbidden, just materialized one day down by the middle school. Retirees on their morning walks cringed as they passed it. School kids snickered and gave it a wide berth.

This being Southern California, it was--what else?--a car. A junk car. With a gigantic sombrero on its roof. And one of those horns that plays “La Cucaracha” when you honk it. Plus, tasteful splotches of primer. Also “LOVE MACHINE” scrawled on the door.

To whom did the aforementioned Love Machine belong? As you can tell by the use of such words as “whom” and “aforementioned,” certainly not to one of us. The stay-at-home wives staked it out to see who’d drive such an affront to the suburban aesthetic, but the culprit never showed himself.

No, the Love Machine just sat there mostly, its big, chipped grille grinning under its stupid hat. It didn’t belong! This was the suburbs! It didn’t even have four-wheel drive, God help us! Though when the neighborhood discussed it, the aforementioned objections were much more delicately put.

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It’s probably an overstatement to say that every neighborhood has its Love Machine, but there’s probably not a place in Southern California that hasn’t experienced its equivalent. The jalopies on blocks. The garish McMansions. The lawn jockeys. The bloody, decapitated dummies on the front porch at Halloween.

They’re a staple of local discourse. You laugh unless the offending item is on your block. Then you get to feel the signature emotion of the suburb: the fight-or-flight instinct of the affronted property owner when confronted with the encroachment of--and there’s no delicate way to put it--the accoutrements of the have-nots.

Some people, some of them very smart, believe the key issue in Southern California is race. They point to the clash of languages and cultures and skin tones and historical perspectives and expend much valuable effort gauging whether we all get along yet.

But as anyone with a kid in high school here can tell you, race in many ways is yesterday’s local news. Horror stories notwithstanding, there’s not a clique in the cul-de-sac that isn’t a little of this skin tone, a little of that one. Their parents may see themselves as black or white or Latino or Asian, but kids sort by much subtler rules.

Now, class . . . well, class is a deeper matter. A matter, in fact, that we don’t know quite know how to discuss. It makes us uncomfortable, this unbidden interest in status. We’ll find any euphemism--a concern for aesthetics, for the environment, for safety, even for racial sameness--anything to keep from seeing ourselves as snobs.

And yet what is it but rank class-consciousness that makes the filthy rich divide themselves from the merely affluent along Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue? Or that recently drove the upwardly mobile Latinos of South Gate to crusade against the proliferation of little Mexican-from-Mexico houses that are painted turquoise and purple and parrot-green? In Laguna Hills and Irvine and La Habra, people are cracking down on portable driveway basketball hoops--the kind you buy when you can’t afford to install a concrete court in your backyard. Meanwhile, Huntington Park has launched something called the “White Picket Fences” program: If you put one in your working-class yard (giving it a middle-class look), the city will share the cost.

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Class, of course, never gets directly mentioned in such cases. Ask Santa Monicans why they go into hock just to live north of Montana and you’ll get a bunch of steaming baloney about houses as investments and the importance of larger lots. Go to blue-collar South Gate, and the mayor will go Martha Stewart on you, insisting that muted tones are just more tasteful than gaudy paint jobs. In Orange County, safety is said to fuel the crackdown on those (evidently lethal) portable hoops. In Huntington Park, they want “to make the properties more attractive,” though they never quite define that word.

But it’s really class-consciousness. And it deserves a more straightforward treatment than the tippy-toed approach so common here. Isn’t classism one of the things people come to Southern California to escape? Isn’t this where you flee if you can’t stand the pecking order back home?

Besides, class is an interesting subject that raises good questions. For what do we strive? From whom are we running? How much of our quest is healthy, natural ambition? How much is fear of true equality? Uncomfortable thoughts, and we spend lifetimes struggling to buy into “good communities” where we might elude them.

But trust me. You can’t outrun the Love Machine.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com