Los Angeles Loves America More Than You Do
Other towns’ feeble fireworks are a national betrayal.
As all sensible people know, Los Angeles California is the most patriotic city in America. Ruby-red Tulsa? Royal-blue Boston? Barney-purple Omaha? Compared to LA, they’re all borderline traitorous Mexicos that should be immediately deported. And how do we know this? Simple — because each and every July 4th, the City of Angels’ fireworks make everyone else’s fireworks look like an insultingly pathetic patriotic fail. Indeed, only the citizens of mighty Tinseltown give perfect, magnificent America the million-megaton explosive fealty it so richly deserves!
In recent years, a silly narrative has emerged — driven largely by testosterone-poisoned tribal blowhards — that Los Angeles is some alien, un-American place. They use “Hollywood” as a sneering pejorative, and would have you believe it’s ground zero for America hatred — a foreign hellhole where legions of pinko Commies shit on the Constitution and wipe their bleached assholes with Old Glory. (Or is it the other way around? I always get confused.)
Either way, this is absurd. After all, we Americans wouldn’t even know how to America if not for Los Angeles. For over a century, Hollywood has tirelessly, lovingly shaped our collective nationalistic identity of “USA #1” with a veritable cinematic river of narcissistic jingoism. Perhaps you’ve seen Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, True Grit, The Right Stuff, Top Gun, Red Dawn, Air Force One, Captain America, Saving Private Ryan — need I go on? Why, to even question LA’s Americana bona fides is to basically hock big, glistening loogies right in the faces of John Wayne, Charlie Heston, and failed mayoral savior Spencer Pratt!
Sure, people who live in embarrassingly less American places like Vermont, Texas, Oregon or West Dakota make futile attempts at patriotic bragging rights. They’ll tell you how their Wal-Mart parking lot has more Ford F150s rocking star-spangled truck nuts, or how their Hobby Lobby always sells out of Ted Nugent garden gnomes, or how their town won tri-state hootenanny gold for barbecued beef pizzle. Well sorry folks, but speaking in my inestimable authority as an All-American Straight White Cis-Male, that’s all pussy stuff. Because there’s only one metric of love of country that truly matters, and it’s measured in TNT kilotons, blinding explosions, and millions of foofy kick-me dogs cowering under beds in primal terror. That’s right: FIREWORKS.
Now I’m not just talking about the large city-produced fireworks displays. Everyone knows that the NYC Macy’s show has long been America’s biggest, and that “America 250” will see Big Daddy Donny launch everything short of a hydrogen bomb to paint Washington DC’s sky gold with his own bloated grimace. No, I’m talking about grassroots We the People fireworks — regular folks getting our rockets-red-glare freak on with personal bombs-bursting-in-air. And on that front, Los Angeles is second to none.
There’s only one indicator of love of country that truly matters, and it’s measured in TNT kilotons, blinding explosions, and millions of foofy kick-me dogs cowering under beds in primal terror.
I’ll confess that as an adult transplant to Los Angeles, I long struggled to accept that I’d been born and raised in patriotically inferior locales — the kinds of places where people call themselves Americans, but have never even worked craft services on a Fran Drescher show. But then one fateful July 4th evening some years ago, I hiked up a 1500 ft. summit in the Hollywood Hills — to a dusty plateau with sweeping 360 degree views of the entire Los Angeles basin, from the Pacific Ocean to the jagged peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. And it was there I finally accepted the undeniable truth of LA’s utter supremacy — because for miles and miles in every direction, there is a spectacular, uninterrupted tableau of booming patrio-passion.
Most conspicuous, of course, are those dozens of ginormous municipal fireworks shows happening concurrently, from Santa Monica to Burbank, Tarzana to Pasadena — any one of which already eclipses most towns’ feeble displays of glorified sparklers. But far more impressive than those perfunctory military-grade mortars — and proof positive of LA’s uber-Americatasticness — are the gazillion low-altitude consumer-grade fireworks set off by regular Angelenos. They begin several days in advance, with scattered soft booms and sizzles starting at sunset, building to a thunderous crescendo around 10pm on Independence Day.
Alas, these private fireworks are all illegal — because California is also a finger-wagging nanny state that plasters cancer warning signs everywhere from fresh produce bins to the gates of Disneyland. But proud Angelenos, like our 18th century teabagging forefathers, will not be tread upon by tyrannical government overlords. Instead, we bravely light the fuse on our hulking American love cannon.
As an adult transplant to Los Angeles, I long struggled to accept that I’d been born and raised in patriotically inferior locales — the kinds of places where people call themselves Americans, but have never even worked craft services on a Fran Drescher project.
And when we do, LA’s sparkling urban grid, that vast iconic backdrop to every teen car makeout scene you’ve ever watched, is transformed into a 4000 square mile carpet of patriotic fervor, shimmering and undulating with continuous multicolor eruptions like some epic hallucination, and blanketing an entire mega-metropolis in a sulfurous cloud of burnt gunpowder — that glorious perfume of revolutionary battlefields littered with the vanquished carcasses of redcoat Limey scum.
How much hotter does LA’s patriotism burn than literally everywhere else? So damned hot, we blow up enough shit to render our own air unbreathable. How’s that for ultimate nationalistic sacrifice? And yes, we know it’s not safe. We even know it could trigger another inferno that burns down half the city. Nevertheless, we persist. Because Los Angeles loves America more than you do.
Or then again, mayhaps we’re just a pack of sociopathic pyros…
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About John Allen Wooden:
Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com
