L.A.’s Greatness Makes It Prime Target for Terrorists

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It would be na & #271;ve to suspect that Los Angeles, as a major world city and center of the hated materialist mass culture, will remain safe from the schemes of terrorist leaders. Last week’s attack was not merely aimed at specific targets, but on the entire expression of contemporary society.

“This was not war on New York or Washington,” suggests historian Fred Siegal at New York’s Cooper Union. “These people cannot deal with modernity and never will.”

Make no mistake about it the assault on New York was an assault on all cities, particularly those associated with the triumph of modern global capitalism. Los Angeles may not have been ground zero, but it well could be the next time around.

Great cities are prime targets and vulnerable ones because security is one of the prerequisites for urban growth. The planes that knifed through New York’s World Trade Center punctured that patina of security.

In a sense, it was an assault on the vulnerability of cities. Intense concentrations of workers, intelligence and infrastructure are the most susceptible to terror. If properly placed, one blast can cut off the entire central nervous system of a city, or in this case, the world financial community.

“When there is a general change of conditions,” notes the 14th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, “it is as if the entire creation had changed and the whole world been altered.”

Security has always been critical to evolution of cities. “Human beings have been drawn to cities because of security. They wanted to get into areas safe from the barbarians,” says Matt Walton, president of Canoga Park-based E-Team, which provides Internet-based services to numerous government agencies, including the City of New York and the Federal Aviation Administration.

This has been true since the beginnings of urban history. Ironically, the first great wall-less cities arose in the third millennium before Christ in Mesopotamia, in the heart of the very region where terror now largely emanates.

Ever since, the most lavish concentrations of commercial services whether the Greek agora, the 16th century Arab suq or the American downtown always have depended on a presumption of security amid the inevitable chaos and unpredictability characteristic of any thriving marketplace.


Replay of Rome?

Take away security, as in the European Dark Ages, and cities shrink. Barbarian invasions, endless wars and political insecurity have turned even great cities into desolate ruins. Rome, once the imperial capital and the world’s greatest city, became dirty, dangerous and virtually uninhabitable by the 7th century.

Will we see a replay of the medieval decline today? Given the events of the past week, Walton suggests that some companies and investors may be re-thinking the need to be located in an urban center, particularly in high-profile buildings.

“The whole essence of terrorism is symbolic,” Walton believes. “It’s a stab to the psyche they picked the most vulnerable target in the world.”

In this sense, Los Angeles, a city without great symbolic buildings like the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower or the Capitol, can be considered less vulnerable. But Walton warns that our lack of symbolic edifices something that has long troubled civic boosters is no guarantee of future safety. This is especially true given that our region has become the center of global entertainment and culture.

Take, for instance, the inviting target that the Academy Awards would provide future terrorist cells, particularly given its new setting along rebuilt Hollywood Boulevard. On the night of the Oscars, Walton notes, a half billion people have their eyes on Tinseltown. Many of the world’s most famous names and faces will be in one room.

There is an ideological (or if you will theological) justification here. Hollywood culture is seen as the incubator of moral decline across the world. Arab children, particularly those with access to European or Israeli TV, are exposed to the bawdiness of Hollywood.


Targeting excellence

Furthermore, the terrorist attacks are a response to the West’s fundamental need to compete and advance. The village culture celebrated by the Islamic extremists celebrates conformity. This makes as potential targets any exceptional individual or company that represents individual competence, power and strength say a Steven Spielberg, a Walt Disney Co. or a Morgan Stanley.

If recognition or success brings danger, there may be a shift towards less exposure. One possible reaction to this crisis, according to Walton, may be an accelerating shift to obscure locations. People may not want that office at the top of the Sears Tower, or downtown’s Library Tower, but instead may look to the most obscure locale possible.

It’s unlikely anyone would bother to pile a 747 into an office complex in Newbury Park or Rosemead. Companies could even cite fiduciary responsibilities to clients and investors for a shift away from high-profile locations.

It would not be the first time this has happened. Many companies cited the damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake as reason to shift some facilities away from the California fault lines. After a respectable silence, industrial recruiters from Nevada, Arizona and Texas swooped into Southern California using precisely these arguments.

Today, companies like Merrill Lynch, which maintained large offices both at the Trade Center and in more bucolic Princeton, N.J., are probably glad that they did not leave all key operations in the city.

Yet despite the horror of the situation, urbanites anywhere should not allow the terrorist to drive us back into the 21st century version of medieval castle towns. Certainly, security needs to be beefed up and companies may have to look to disperse some of their top human assets to varied locations. But we should not forget that the urban fabric that is vulnerable to terror also gives us much that makes life worth living the opportunity for people to work, live life and worship together in a diverse, stimulating environment.


Life goes on

We in Los Angeles should know this better than most. In the early 1990s, wracked by riots and then a devastating earthquake, many predicted that our city would become something of a modern-day Carthage. Yet in less than five years, we have rebounded to a new era of metropolitan growth and self-confidence.

Ultimately, this scenario of recovery and change will be seen in New York as well. Once stronger security measures are in place, that city’s very dynamism its concentrations of intelligence, arts, culture and diverse populations will provide an irresistible spur to renewal.

Cities, the philosopher Jacques Ellul once noted, are “the antecedent” to civilization and all its “great ideological developments.” It is impossible, he reminds us, to think of Plato without Athens, or Racine without Paris. Similarly, can we conceive of the great thinkers of the last generation musicians, artists, filmmakers without the nurturing influence of a New York or Los Angeles?

And although the Islamic terrorists denounce the city and its instruments, even their own culture arose in an urban setting Mohammed was a merchant in the thriving market town of Mecca and found his faith in that setting. Islamic culture reached its high point in urbanity, and in an atmosphere of tolerance, in Medieval Baghdad, Damascus and Cordoba.

God whether called Allah, Yahweh or Jesus does not hate cities. Only ugly souls do. It is in cities that people, and enterprises, create the greatest achievements of our mutual civilization.

Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University and at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica. He can be reached at [email protected].

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