Doing Fine Without MSNBC or NFL

My wife and I were approaching the Bay Area for Christmas with family when we came upon a pickup truck plowing toward Oakland from the Tracy area. Scrawled on the windows were large white messages with frightening attention to penmanship.

Commitment to Excellence, said one. Just Win, Baby, said another.

I explained to the lovely and talented Alison that this was neither a traveling philosopher king nor an Amway salesman, but rather an Oakland Raider fan who felt compelled to advertise team slogans, if not his abundance of free time.

“Go team,” said the understated Alison.

This got me to thinking about how refreshing it is that Los Angeles, divorced by both the Raiders and the Rams, seems to have survived the breakups without any apparent loss of identity or self-esteem.

It might be nice to have an NFL squad to scream about, but relatively few Southern Californians seem to have put their lives on hold in anticipation of the blessed day. I guess you could say we live on a different planet in many regards, and upon my return from the holiday, I saw two stories in The Times that address this very subject.

One story suggested Los Angeles doesn’t know how to celebrate the New Year with the same pizazz as, say, New York or Paris. The other pointed out that we on the West Coast don’t tune in to all-news television with nearly the same regularity as East Coast residents. That was the case before and after Sept. 11, and some observers suggested we lack the same interest in news and feel less of a connection to traditional civic life.

Let’s start with TV.

I frankly cannot think of a more flattering measure of California’s sophistication than the news that we’re not dropping everything to watch networks that bring us the likes of “Hardball” and “Crossfire.”

Brian Williams is a pro, and certainly worth watching. But once you’ve gotten a quick review of warmed-over news from a cable anchor with just the right calibration of earnest brow and ready smile, it’s best to change the channel while you still have some self-respect. The rest is parody, and here’s how it works:

Eight or 10 professional yackers, who live in one of two ZIP codes, check in each day with the same six or seven sources. Then, each night, these yackers appear on television with the same four or five politicians to stage essentially the same debate: Who are the bigger bozos and knaves, the Democrats or the Republicans?

The network bosses are well aware that footage of a burning yule log is more compelling. But they are clueless as to real fixes, and averse to spending money to have someone leave the studio in pursuit of an actual news story in, say, California. At one point about a year ago, CNN was so close to rock bottom it briefly considered putting me on the air to read the American Scene column I used to write for Time magazine. That’s when I knew it was time to dump the stock.

So yes, here in sunny California, we’d rather relax on the back deck with the L.A. Times than sit on the couch and watch cable TV all-stars who couldn’t find their way out of New York or Washington without Mapquest and a fleet of limos. It’s a matter of taste, I suppose. Besides, when we find ourselves in the mood for horrid TV news, the local product can’t be beat.

Now let’s talk about this New Year’s thing.

There’s nothing in L.A. that rivals the ball-dropping show at New York’s Times Square, a colleague of mine reported in a story that went on and on and on about how we can’t get the party right here in Nowheresville, which, if you haven’t heard, is a sprawling metropolis with no true center.

Let’s forget, for the moment, that Pasadena is, has been, and will be, one of the nation’s New Year celebration capitals, regardless of what day they hold the parade or the Rose Bowl.

It just so happens that last year, while living in New York City, I began my New Year’s Eve evening at a concert just off Times Square. I say “began” my evening because the aforementioned Alison and I made sure to get tickets to the early show so we could high-tail it out of Times Square before it was overrun by a half-million revelers.

The people who go to Times Square must be out-of-towners, because I never met a New Yorker who wanted to be anywhere near there when the clock struck midnight. They were all at parties or clubs or at home with their families, same as we’ll be here in Los Angeles.

However you choose to celebrate on Monday, my guess is we’ll all get through the night without a Times Square.

We’ll get through the year without the NFL.

And we’ll get through the war without MSNBC.

There is much to celebrate.

*

Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com