Garrison Keillor wrote this great essay on LA in today's Trib:

Midwesterner finds beauty in unlikely place

Published June 13, 2007

It used to be that Los Angelenos were much too cool to express outright pride in their city, feeling that boosterism is for yahoos from the Midwest, but when I was there last week I got an earful about what a good place it is from friends who never said anything like that to me before. They always talked about choking traffic, the unreality of real estate prices, the smog, blah blah blah, and now they were saying, "I couldn't live anyplace else."

The bright burst of civic feeling might have been due to the bad brush fires -- it had been a very dry winter and spring -- with a major blaze a month ago right in Griffith Park in the heart of the city. Eight hundred firefighters put that fire down and immediately became heroes to everybody, and it showed people how much they loved L.A., just like your mother's colon operation jolts you into reality.

Everybody knows the comedy version of L.A.: the celebrity-crazed city of skinny tanned women, cell phones in hand, driving Suburbans the size of personnel carriers at 80 m.p.h. taking a tiny child to the therapist to address self-esteem issues. Those jokes play well out in the flat parts of the country. A Midwesterner goes to L.A. and feels a certain sense of moral disapproval. The squalor, the opulence, the expense of natural resources to support middle-class life in an arid place, the fascination with the misshapen lives of young celebs. It isn't the Canaan it was for our grandparents. We look at it and see a run-down bungalow selling for a half-million and cars inching along the 405 and say, "No thanks."

But it's good to know there's another point of view. The sun does shine there, and people enjoy their lives -- the spirit of "la pura vida," or the love of life for its own sake, the opposite of Calvinist America, as Randy Newman sings:

From the South Bay to the Valley

From the West Side to the East Side

Everybody's very happy

'Cause the sun is shining all the time

Looks like another perfect day

I love L.A.

And then you run into extraordinary young people there who typify California, bright, motivated, disciplined, idealistic women and men who climb the slopes of academe and also surf and swim and play beach volleyball and who love the climate and nature and culture. It is more than ever a city of immigrants, the Europeans diminishing, the Rodriguezes and Jimenezes and Marquezes burgeoning. Immigrant culture isn't so pretty -- you rent a cheap storefront, work 16-hour days, scrimp on landscaping, make your kids toe the mark -- but there is dignity to it.

Unrestricted immigration is a dangerous thing -- look at what happened to the Iroquois. They failed to impose border controls and before they knew it, they were dying of infectious diseases they had no names for. In California, however, it was Spanish before it was English and now it's simply tending back that way.

I met up with a niece from Boston for dinner in L.A. She told me she was there for the first time in her life, so I did my uncle duty, got a car and took her for a spin as the sun was setting. We walked along the beach in the dark, the Santa Monica pier glittering in the distance, and then we cruised some lush streets and headed east on Sunset Boulevard, the sunroof open, traffic bopping around us, and then, looking for Melrose Avenue and the Paramount Studios with the classic front gate from "Sunset Boulevard," I lost my bearings and circled for a while, but it felt good to promote L.A. to an Easterner.

We live in a snarky time, heavy irony clacking everywhere like people walking around in tap shoes, and it's a privilege to speak up for a despised city. Seattle, sit down. New York, shut up. Vermont, this is not about you. You want to hear about New Jersey or North Dakota or Nebraska, just ask.

I like this essay for two reasons. First, I appreciate that someone is writing something nice about LA for a chance. Ever since my first day of New Student Week, I have met numerous people in Chicago who've decided, without spending any significant time in Los Angeles, that they don't like the city. More often than not, these people attribute their displeasure to traffic and superficiality, which I totally understand. But what annoys me is that they overlook the wonderful things that LA has to offer, like the beach, the variety of cultures, the proximity to beautiful and/or fun places (Baja California, Vegas, SF, and everything in between), and everything that Keillor praises in his essay. I'm not saying that everyone should be in love with LA, but they should at least give it a chance. I absolutely hated Chicago during college. It was until about four months before graduation that I even entertained the idea of staying, and when I finally did stay, it was because I realized that Chicago had so much more to offer than Century 12 in Evanston and Old Orchard.

The other reason I really like this essay is this line: We live in a snarky time, heavy irony clacking everywhere like people walking around in tap shoes. Since I tend to study in cafes and don't talk to anyone in my bar classes, I overhear many conversations everyday. Out of every 10 conversations,8 centers on complaining about other people -- neighbors, friends, family, co-workers. I know this is how people bond; I'm just as guilty of it anyone. What bothers me is that most of those complaints are delivered with a tone of disdain, as if each person being complained of has to be a complete idiot for not conforming to the complainer's world order. I've never had a good way to describe this. To myself, I identified it as the Seinfeld phenomenon because it seems like so many people have adopted the somewhat arrogant tone that the Seinfeld foursome assumed. Keillor's line, however, more precisely describes how I see these complaint-laden interactions.