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War Zone
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Allen Cooper, a.k.a. Big Al, an ex-gang member, ex-con, and current activist for the national truce movement. Cooper talks about the crimes of assault and battery the LA Four were accused of committing. He asks the LA Four’s accusers a series of questions: “What did the government dig for? […] / Stoppin’ traffic of a truck? Are they sure that truck belonged in that area?” Cooper thinks it was an “intimidation move” for Reginald Denny to drive into an area in the midst of an uprising: he might have been “tryin’ to prove he can get / past,” and any sensible person would have gone around another way.
Cooper’s thoughts on Denny contrast sharply with Tur’s: unlike Tur, Cooper thinks Denny isn’t an entirely innocent victim and should have had the common sense not to drive a semi-truck into a riot. Cooper goes a step further, suggesting that Denny’s decision to drive through the riots was an “intimidation move” intended to put Black rioters in their place and coerce them into submission. He may have ended as a victim, but he started as an aggressor.
Themes
Cooper states that nobody is “basin’ [their] life on Reginald Denny” or “on Rodney King.” These beatings only show how Black people get treated in their own communities. He accuses the law of handling King’s beating unjustly, and “like a soap opera.” Besides, law enforcement have been beating people for years. King is not an unusual case, it’s just that the video recording showed the world the extent of police brutality. Cooper also predicts that had a police officer been beaten, it would have resulted in national riots.
Cooper’s stance on the Denny and King beatings—both of which were recorded on video and met with widespread outrage when they were broadcast to the public—derives from his personal experience with police oppression. As a Black man, he doesn’t see King’s beating as a spectacle because he knows that the police treat Black people this way on a daily basis. Cooper insinuates it’s not in the best interest of justice for the news media to sensationalize King’s beating “like a soap opera” because it gives ignorant viewers the impression that King’s beating is an anomaly, when, in fact, such incidents are commonplace in marginalized communities.
Themes
Cooper sees injustice as larger than Rodney King. “it’s the ghetto,” he explains. As an example, he describes going to a swap meet and seeing a bubble gum machine man with a pistol. Cooper thought it was crazy to think anyone would want to rob a bubble gum machine man. Yet, the “ghetto’s” dangerous conditions require the bubble gum machine man to arm himself. Cooper states that a person has to live in the “ghetto” to understand what it’s really like.
Cooper believes that the law, media, and public’s impulse to see Rodney King as a symbol of injustice distracts from the broader problem of “the ghetto,” or the larger systems that keep Black people in violent environments from which they can’t escape. In Cooper’s monologue, “the ghetto” becomes a metaphor for the way forces of police brutality, constant exposure to violence, and unequal treatment under the law combine to completely warp a person’s sense of themselves and the world. Cooper insists that people who haven’t lived in the “ghetto” can’t understand how completely it alters one’s sense of the world. To an outsider, it would be ridiculous to think a bubble gum machine man would need to arm himself against theft. To someone who’s grown up in the “ghetto,” violence is such an accepted part of daily life that a bubble gum machine man needing a pistol to defend himself is no longer surreal.
Themes
Cooper talks more about racial discrimination, noting how “Anything is never a problem ‘til the black man gets his hands on it.” For instance, everyone was free to have fully automatic weapons until Black people started to carry them; then it was suddenly a crime. Cooper concludes by stating that the uproar over Reginald Denny “is a joke” that distracts from “the real / problem.”
Cooper identifies the double standards that society applies to white people and Black people, such as the right to possess fully automatic weapons. When Cooper describes the public outrage over Denny's beating as “a joke,” he’s criticizing the mainstream media’s attempt to use a single instance of Black-on-white crime to discredit the ways in which the law discriminates against and harms Black people on a daily basis.
Themes
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