[Los Angeles] When we were at Francis Polytechnic High in Sun Valley, Steve Paddock and I were required to take electrical shop class. At Poly and our junior high, we were required to take metal shop so we could work the drill presses at the GM plant. We took drafting. Drafting like in “blueprint drawing.”
Paddock. Palast. We sat next to each other at those drafting tables with our triangular rulers and #2 pencils so we could get jobs at Lockheed as draftsmen drawing blueprints of fighter jets. Or do tool-and-dye cutting to make refrigerator handles at GM where they assembled Frigidaire refrigerators and Chevys.
But we werenāt going to fly the fighter jets. Somewhere at Phillips Andover Academy, a dumbbell with an oil well for a daddy was going to go to Yale and then fly our fighter jets over Texas. We werenāt going to go to Yale. We were going to go to Vietnam. Then, when we came back, if we still had two hands, we went to GM or Lockheed.
(Itās no coincidence that much of the student population at our school was Hispanic.)
But if you went to “Bevvie” – Beverly Hills High – or Hollywood High, you didnāt take metal shop. You took Advanced Placement French. You took Advanced Placement Calculus. We didnāt have Advanced Placement French. We didnāt have French anything. We werenāt Placed, and we didnāt Advance.
Steve was a math wizard. He should have gone to UCLA, to Stanford. But our classes didnāt qualify him for anything other than LA Valley College and Cal State Northridge. Any dumbbell could get in. And it was nearly free. Thatās where Steve was expected to go, and he went with his big math-whiz brain. And then Steve went to Lockheed, like we were supposed to. Until Lockheed shut down plants in 1988. Steve left, took the buy-out.
And after NAFTA, GM closed too.
Land of Opportunity? Well, tell me: who gets those opportunities?
Some of you can and some of you canāt imagine a life where you just werenāt give a fair chance. Where the smarter you are, the more painful it gets, because you have your face pressed against the window, watching THEM. THEY got the connections to Stanford. THEY get the gold mine. WE get the shaft.
This is where Paddock and Palast were bred: Sun Valley, the anus of Los Angeles. Literally. Itās where the sewerage plant is. Itās in a trench below the Hollywood Hills, where the smog settles into a kind of puke yellow soup. Hereās where LA dumps its urine and the losers they only remember when they need cheap labor and cheap soldiers when the gusanos donāt supply enough from Mexico.
Iāll take you to Sun Valley. Itās in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. In the movie, a kind of dream scene, the actress Shailene Woodley takes me back to my familyās old busted home in the weeds and then down San Fernando Road, near Steve’s place. Take a look, America. Along the tracks that once led in to the GM plant, you see a bunch of campers that the union men bought for vacations. Now they live in them.
No, Steveās brain was too big to end up on the tracks. He lived in empty apartments in crappy buildings he bought, then in a barren tract house outside Reno. I laugh when they say he was “rich.” He wanted to be THEM, to have their stuff. He got close.
Itās reported that Steve was a “professional gambler.” Thatās another laugh. He was addicted to numbing his big brain by sitting 14 hours a day in the dark in front of video poker machines. He was a loser. Have you ever met a gambler who said they were a Professional Loser?
Itās fair to ask me: Why didnāt I end up in a hotel room with a bump-stock AR-15 and 5,000 rounds of high velocity bullets?
Because I have a job, a career, an OBSESSION: to hunt down THEM, the daddy-pampered pricks who did this to us, the grinning billionaire jackals that make a profit off the slow decomposition of the lives I grew up with.
But Iām telling you, that I know itās a very fine line, and lots of crazy luck, that divided my path from Paddockās.
Dear Reader: The publication that pulled this story at the last moment was plain scared ā that theyād be accused of approving murder.
Paddock slaughtered good people, coldly, with intense cruelty, destroying lives and hundreds of families forever. If you think Iām making up some excuse for him, then I give up.
But also this: The editor of the Beverly Hills-based publication, a Stanford grad, could not understand that, just like veterans of the Vietnam war who suffer from PTSD even today, so too, losers of the class war can be driven mad by a PTSD that lingers, that gnaws away, their whole lives.
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it …fester like a sore? Does it stink like rotten meat? Sag…like a heavy load?
Or does it explode?
Steve, you created more horrors than your cornered life could ever justify.
But, I just have to tell you, Steve: I get it.
Poem by Langston Hughes
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2 Comments
Except that this article by Palast is complete nonsense. He never even males it clear whether it is a real persola account or not. Paddock was hardly a member of the salt-of-the-earth working class and there is no understanding about the alienation of the working class that can come from his horrible act.
“Relatives said Paddock was worth at least $2 million when he sold off the real-estate business. Among his most profitable investments was an apartment complex purchased in 2004, which gave him more than half a million dollars in annual income by 2011. The IRS records show he made $5 million to $6 million in profits from its sale in 2015.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Paddock
The editorial sloppiness at ZNet has gone TOO FAR when the articles that it republishes are assigned wrong authors. This article was written by Greg Palast, not by anyone named Grace Livingstone.
PALAST’s article is important for uncovering the roots of the Las Vegas shooter’s motive and also of his competence to do it. The FBI lacks the imagination to grasp such causes.