Lunacy Layer Cake

In Los Angeles, even the dead can no longer count on arriving anywhere on time. Forest Lawn Drive, the road that runs along the northern edge of Griffith Park and delivers mourners to Forest Lawn Cemetery, is now the target of what city planners lovingly call a “road diet.” Phase one installed a dedicated bicycle lane along the route, which raised a question no official ever bothered to answer — who rides his bicycle to a funeral? The cemeteries themselves pleaded with the city to stop, observing that there is “no substantial bicycle use” on the road. No matter. Phase two now aims to eliminate one car lane in each direction, cutting the road’s capacity in half in the name of safety. The communist councilman championing this plan, Nithya Raman, happens to be running for mayor this November against the incumbent, communist Karen Bass — one committed communist challenging another — and just this week publicly attacked Bass for not shrinking the road to the cemetery fast enough. The predictable result will be congestion, idling hearses, and mourners arriving late to funerals. In the city of angels, even grief must now yield to bollards.

I am a psychiatrist, and my profession trains me to assess a patient’s reality testing — the capacity to distinguish what is real from what is imagined. What I observe in this country today is something stranger and more corrosive than individual delusion. It is the steady collapse of the boundary between entertainment, farce, and reality, at every level of American life, until no one can say with confidence what is real versus what is merely normal. Those are not the same thing. A society can normalize almost anything if the absurdity arrives in layers, each one softening resistance to the next. Los Angeles, as usual, serves the confection first, but the recipe is now national. Call it a lunacy layer cake — local absurdity stacked on municipal farce stacked on national delusion, frosted over by a media that reports each layer with a straight face. The road diet is the bottom layer. The next two arrived in my news feed within a single day.