Letter to the Editor:
Los Angeles, hosting the Summer Olympics in 2028, is already a spectacle of infrastructural negligence and, thus, may well become a permanent place of overtourism by disaster looky-loons. Meanwhile, Burbank is un-reeling economically from outmoded Hollywood’s decline..
When exaggeration is inappropriately pessimistic, we might conceive of that error as alarmism. The City Council Meeting of 7/15/2025 was a forum rife with absurd public comments on Burbank’s sustainability, a collection of citizens exuding in synchronicity as a horrifying gloom-club chorus.
“Sustainability” has become a buzzword of little actual consequence because people using the term do so uncritically, without reflecting on its implications or the metric standards associated with the fluffy definitions utilized. It is surprising so many “art” job applicants seem to have inflexible, biased mental structures in terms of ideas. All of them seemed oblivious to the gap between the extant real-world and the aspirational future! In short, no practical dreamers, and too many applications made their requests for a socially vaunted position conditional on their openly pledged allegiance (fealty) to “whatever the City Council wants”.
The City of Burbank is like the ancient riddle of Theseus’ ship. Is Burbank still Burbank? The large-scale use of Internet facilitated services–such as e-banking, e-commerce as well as “e” et cetera–has converted single-family residences and rental abodes into places where its domestic geographical dimension is increasingly mixed with the community’s collective and public life and results that shapes the consequential network of interaction between private citizens, bureaucrats, politicians and urban geography.
Apparently no Hollywood storytellers (living as Burbankers) have yet to predict our City to come. Why not? The word “cool” gained popularity in the early 1960s. The Malvina Reynolds and Ernie Ball 1963 song “Little Boxes” has these lyrics:
…the people in the houses
All went to the university.,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
Unfortunately for Burbankers, many of those who sought jobs with the City last Tuesday appear to be Sociology majors, realtor renegades, egotistical sorts of every gender and social strata. In other words, the same as their future bosses! YIKES.
Richard B. Cathcart
Burbank
