I Leave My Closet Yet Again

Once more, I actually went outdoors and am now reporting back on what I saw.

The lawns of the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood used to be Los Angeles’s premiere destination for angry protests, often multiple opposing ones at once. When I went to UCLA in 1980-82, they were full of anti-Shah and anti-Ayatollah demonstrators, Nuclear Freeze activists (remember them?), Armenians denouncing Turks, and so forth.

So, with lots of publicity about protests in Los Angeles (such as the above headline in the New York Times), I was wondering if my appointment today at the Federal Building’s passport office would coincide with mobs of irate Iranians, angry Antifa, hot-blooded Hondurans, peeved Palestinians, irredentist Israelis, or whomever.

Paywall here.

But, it turns out that much is different from the 1980s and the Mostly Peaceful Protests of 2020, or even the Robot Car-Be-Ques in downtown L.A. of a couple of weeks ago.

Instead, there were a few dozen Marine infantrymen carrying M27 automatic weapons and flirting with the lady cops of the “FBI Police” as they strolled about the extremely serene grounds of the Federal Building.

This is apparently a pretty standard look in Europe in this century, but it’s fairly new here.

So far, it seems to work.

Another thing that has changed since the Shah’s days is that the Feds got rid of almost all the lawns that once accommodated thousands of protesters. Today, the grass is mostly gone and replaced with an unwelcoming xeriscape of native Southern California scrub brush. No doubt this was ostensibly done in the name of ecology, water conservation, fighting The Drought, saving taxpayer money on lawnmowing, and other worthy causes.

But, coincidentally enough, the grounds of the Federal Building now look like an awfully scratchy place to hold a protest march.