Behind the Orange Curtain

I spent my formative years in Irvine, deep in the heart of now-famous "O.C." We used to refer to Central Orange County as "The Bubble." Its the last stand of Southern California's "white flight," a prosperous suburban community located exactly midway between the Los Angeles and San Diego Metropolian Areas. If you go any further away from L.A. than Irvine, you start getting closer to San Diego.

It's all based around this fraudulent sense of security and control. Greenbelts are everywhere so kids don't have to cross busy intersections. Many streets have electronic gates that require passcodes for entrance. There's even bogus fake concrete walls bordering the freeways once you get to Irvine, warning all passersby that they are not welcome, to just keep moving on down the road until they get to some city that welcomes transients, losers and scum. Maybe San Clemente.

It's the Orange Curtain effect. But that's all it is; an effect. An illusion used to sell people expensive homes, to sell office space in corporate parks, and to sell movie tickets, haute cuisine and whatever shit they sell in Hot Topic at the Irvine Spectrum.

In fact, a surprising amount of shocking, bizarre and wacko crimes happen to go down in Orange County. More than you'd maybe expect.

When I was still in high school, the entire Country went bankrupt when the (all Republican) Board of Supervisors lost $1.7 billion in taxpayer money on the stock market.

Did you know that in 1999, Huntington Beach had to close down because of the massive level of fecal material found in the water there?

In 1992, also when I was in high school, an honor roll student at nearby Foothill High in Tustin, 17 year old Stuart Tay, was brutally murdered by his classmates for no good rason.

I think I've even blogged before about the remarkable story of Dr. Larry Ford, the Mormon Orange County pharmaceutical executive who killed himself after a botched attempt to murder his partner. It later came out that he had worked for the CIA, possibly in the development of biological weapons. Many hazardous materials were found on his property after his death.

In 2003, a schizophrenic named Joseph Parker showed up at the Albertson's at which he once worked and killed two people, wounding three others. He was shot and killed by police.

And today, we can add another horrifying story of insanity, rage and terror. A 19 year old, wearing a cape, went on a kill-crazy rampage in Aliso Viejo today, murdering a father and daughter before killing himself.

Now this is very strange. Events like the murders at Columbine High School are extremely tragic, but also isolated incidents. If we continually heard about teenagers in Littleton, Colorado going on murdering sprees, we'd start to wonder what was going on there. Moreover, if Littleton, Colorado were an area known for massive governmental corruption, if the local parks and recreation areas were coated with feces, and if people sometimes killed themselves and left their houses filled with botulism and toxic spores, we would probably declare some kind of government emergency.

But Orange County gets "The O.C.," a TV show glamorizing the beautiful, perfect lifestyle of all who dwell within, suffering only from bland interpersonal disagreements about who is really in love with who.