Larry Vaughn Is Perfect for a City Determined to Ignore Serious Threats
This column is published by Zócalo Public Square. Image by Joe Mathews using Gemini.
To: Mayor Larry Vaughn
From: Joe Mathews
Re: Your Next Gig
I hope this memo finds you retired and happily lounging on a porch on Amity Island, safely distanced from large bodies of water or oversized oceanic carnivores.
If so, ignore the rest of this. But if you have any itch to come out of retirement and serve the public as only you can, then please move out here. Take over as mayor of Los Angeles.
Why? Because these are peculiar and perilous times for our city. And because L.A. hungers for a leader with your peculiar brand of pathological optimism in the face of certain carnage.
I know what the critics say. They point to your 1975 mayoral record, as portrayed in the Steven Spielberg film Jaws. They say you ignored the experts. They say you failed to warn the public. They say you let a Great White shark turn a picturesque New England summer into a buffet to protect your town’s tourism economy. “We need the summer dollars,” you said.
But none of that matters anymore. Transparent lying is now the essential political skill, the foundation of the American presidential system of government. That you’re just a movie character is hardly disqualifying, since you’re no more fictional than the concept of civic leadership in L.A.
In the City of Angels, irresponsibly defiant behavior like yours isn’t called “official negligence.” It’s called “locking arms.”
And it’s the political norm.
What unifies city politics in Los Angeles is collective denial of threats. The mayor and her challengers, the labor unions and the business establishment, all just keep pretending that that no big changes are necessary. They, as you once did, stand on the shore and stare at the fins circling yet declare: “It’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time.”
You, of all people, have to admire L.A.’s obliviousness. Neighborhoods may burn in fire cyclones, but L.A.’s most powerful people won’t add emergency capacity to meet combustive threats. AI and monopolistic tech companies may threaten the city’s signature industry, but L.A. and California respond with little more than ineffective production tax breaks.
And when the federal government sends the military and masked agents to abduct foreign-looking people on the street, our leaders don’t fight back. To the contrary, they partner with those feds to bring in even more feds to “protect” L.A. during major international events, like the World Cup and Olympics.
Now, I can guess your next question. Why do you need me, Mayor Larry Vaughn, when L.A. already has so many leaders with their heads in the sand?
Because our people are tiring of our oblivious homegrown leaders. Mayor Karen Bass is politically dead, unable to crack 30% in election polls. Her primary challenger on the left, Nithya Raman, is weak and unprepared in debate, and offers a center-left program indistinguishable from that of Bass. None of the contenders has experience managing anything like a $40 billoin city government. The only candidates with anything close to a vision of the future, philanthropist Adam Miler and progressive pastor Rae Huang, barely register in the polls.
Now if you entered the race in these last two weeks as a write-in, you might appear too similar to Spencer Pratt, a reality TV villain running on a MAGA-style platform. But you’d quickly separate yourself, since he’s a far more cartoonish character than you are, and his authoritarian instincts are the very opposite of your “live-and-let-the-sharks-feed” style.
And Angelenos definitely prefer your style. Just look at how we’ve kept LA28 Olympics chair Casey Wasserman in power, even though he’s preparing a financially disastrous Games that will be a pageant for Trump and his federal agencies. If Wasserman is forced out, it will be because of long-ago ties to Jeffrey Epstein. In that event, you could do both jobs, mayor and Olympics chief, at the same time.
The question for you, of course, is why L.A.? I know you have other options. You’re still popular—Jaws showed more box office bite during its 50th anniversary re-release last year than most new Hollywood features. And you have fans among some of the world’s most irresponsible officials.
“The real hero of Jaws is the mayor, a wonderful politician,” Boris Johnson argued while running for London’s top office. “A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beach open.”
But L.A. is your best opportunity to utilize your unique expertise—upbeat defiance in the face of danger and disaster. Ultimately, L.A. will benefit, too. By letting all the sharks devour Los Angeles, you can give the city the chance to be born again.
Like Amity Island, Los Angeles desperately needs tourists to show up—in our case, to pay for the multibillion-dollar Olympics and World Cup. The city government, in an act of criminal foolishness, has signed a deal that says if the Games go bust, the city treasury—already facing a $1 billion deficit and billions more in underfunded retirement costs—will pick up the tab.
But the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric—travel bans, aggressive vetting, threats to bring ICE and the military out to the Games—will visitors. Who wants to fly halfway across the world to attend a sporting event in a city where a fascist government is hunting people?
That’s where you come in. You, by declaring that the Games and World Cup will be fine and that people should come to L.A. anyway, will seal the deal. Everyone knows what you did in Jaws (and its sequel). They’d be crazy to show up!
The Games will lose billions. This shark of Olympic debt will eat the city alive, triggering municipal bankruptcy and governmental meltdown
This Olympics-inspired governmental meltdown would be a feature, not a bug.
Our current city government is a failure, producing non-stop corruption while failing to fix street lights or sidewalks. Bankruptcy could inspire the dissolution of a municipal mess, forcing L.A. city to merge with more competent L.A. County to create a powerful regional government.
Such a government might have the capacity to provide great services, house people, fix infrastructure—and meet 21st century threats.
In this movie, you wouldn’t just be the mayor who let the shark in. You’d be the mayor who bankrupts us into the future. You’d be the hero.
So come to Los Angeles, Mr. Mayor. Help us ignore the fins in the water.
