Underground Stars

The War Train

I’m sitting on the B train from Hollywood/Highland to Vermont/Sunset. To get to the train station near me, you need to walk across the Walk of Fame, on top of which is one of the most confusing subsections of the United States I have ever seen. There are poorly-costumed superheroes who, I assume, run every time they see a copyright lawyer approach, nestled against booths where people in silk shirts offer rental Lambos. I never see anyone approach these booths, because I’m sure the insurance agreement involves you putting up part of your mortal soul as collateral. There are food vendors and tour bus pick-ups, and people charging the outrageous sum of $20 to stand on a platform while a camera on a rod circles around you. The person who runs this enterprise is a concerningly-thin man in a fedora wearing a vest over a t- shirt. Next to him is a shockingly-old TV--which I’m sure is attached to some hijacked form of electricity--that’s playing a video of two models standing on the platform as the camera circles them like a buzzard attracted to botox rather than rotting flesh. These women look very glamorous and pose seamlessly with the camera’s movements. Many of the couples I have seen get on the platform have trouble fitting (that’s not a fat joke, the platform is very small, but you would think with the amount of tourists the fedora man could expand the platform to more of a San Antonio capacity) and they simply stand there, moving awkwardly and smiling like it’s prom and their date’s father just told them, “if you touch my daughter, I’ll touch you.”

I am still deeply confused about how Hollywood Boulevard operates. I doubt any of the superheroes or camera-tornado operators are government subsidized, but I don’t know how any of it makes money. Obviously, the prices are predatory, and the clientele is generally intoxicated on cheap alcohol and car fumes, but it all seems too obviously scam-ridden for anyone to fall for it. And yet they do.

All of this is in stark contrast to the subway, which exists many levels down, below the Walk of Fame, where you can imagine the stars of hundreds of unconvicted pedophiles shining above you. Being in the LA subway is like being in a computer that was designed in the late 90s. It looks cool, but it functions poorly, and you feel like it would be really easy to get a virus. In comparison to the New York subway, you can tell LA has put its money into more important things like adding extra lanes to our highways and giving the LAPD Panzer tanks and Luftwaffe aircraft. You can’t pay directly with a credit card, the trains run infrequently, and even the displays which are supposed to show how long a train will take are inaccurate. Every time I go into the train station I imagine I’m inside of some massive injured creature, its veins and arteries no longer working in chorus with its massive organs, everything slowly shutting down.

What stuck out about this trip was the amount of people who were also in the subway. I assume they were there for the same reason I was--gas is now, as I write this, around $6 a gallon in LA and rising. Beyond that, I think any time the American war machine ramps up to bring sweet, sweet freedom to the Middle East, we are all confronted with the reality of fossil fuel dependence. I assume no one down there with me was an economist--if you have a degree in economics I’d guess you’d be above ground dressed as Spiderman so you could afford to eat--but I’d bet a lot of the people in that train station, particularly the tattooed young people, would tell you about their uneasiness with the war in Iran.

As I stood on that platform, waiting for a train that was said to be arriving in 5 minutes, then ten minutes, then the screen was replaced by the pagan symbol for infinity, I thought to myself how the train in LA is a great example of how the world works. There were no wealthy people on that platform--call it profiling on my part but I could tell all the carpenter pants were worn by actual carpenters there. There are rich people in LA who oppose the war, but what they do, rather than effectively change their lives around their moral convictions, is lament about how high gas prices are while shoving the end of a nozzle into their G-Wagon that has a Kamala bumper sticker on it. We go to war, and people without a lot of money take the train, and people with even less money die.

As I sat on the B line, which eventually did come, I thought to myself about the chain of events that led me to where I was. The United States military, acting against the will of the majority of the country, decided to go to war with Iran due to a foreign policy which in that region seems to be based mostly on Islamophobia and Israel. Due to these attacks, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, and now I’m on a train getting coughed on by a guy dressed like a Minion.

While the United States inflicts pain and suffering on the population of Iran, it becomes clear what the goal of the American project has been since well before I was born. We are not only willing to kill, maim, and displace people overseas, we are willing to inflict hardships on our own most vulnerable citizens to do so. I am fine financially and trying to reduce my driving more because it makes me feel gross to act like nothing is happening, but the financial strain on people at this time, especially after all the cuts to social welfare programs, will be real and devastating.

The big takeaway from taking public transit in a city where that is not a normal or popular form of commuting, is that people in cities live in different worlds from one another even if they are close in proximity. You could be standing at a cross walk with someone making their way to the bus while you’re heading to your car, and you would have no idea how uncomfortable their experience is compared to yours. Some people will see a Lamborghini and think, imagine what that guy had to do to buy that, that is so impressive, but do you know what’s more impressive to me? Anyone who gets anywhere on a bus in this city. I think it’s time for a massive shift in what we demand from our government. In fact, I think we should ask for infrastructure and public works projects that we don’t even need. I think we should demand golden trains and basic universal caviar, because the more we spend on our people the less money we have left over for missiles.

I’ve made it a priority to not use my car, and I carpool as often as I can. This is not because I think it will save the world, but because I think it’s important for your actions to align with your moral values as much as possible. I don’t know why we always need to look at things in terms of completely solving an issue. I think this macro-brained approach to life is a recipe for disappointment and disconnection. Why not just look at your own existence and shift your own actions while simultaneously looking at the big picture? That way, you won’t be complaining about how predatory Jeff Bezos is while surrounded by empty Amazon boxes.

I will continue to take the bus and train as much as possible, not because I think it’s making a major impact, but because it’s making a small, microscopic assertion that this infrastructure is important and needs to be used. Be a drop in the bucket, because being a drop in the bucket is better than being outside the bucket.