Roof Rats on Overpriced Stucco

Keep in mind that the writer of Salon's review of Showtime's "Nurse Jackie," has, as she admits, an "ultra-crabby, dystopic perspective on LA." She starts with the fires and points out a few LA cliches, all of which leads up to this: "I wonder if, so many decades ago, the robber barons of Los Angeles paused in their diligent and important work of bloodily oppressing various indigenous and imported brown peoples to gaze across this scrubby desert basin with a sense of awe at what it might one day become: an enormous maze of pavement, thirsty lawns and overvalued stucco. How proud they might be, to see that their selfless efforts to rape the land and disempower the laboring classes have paid off in acre upon acre of foreclosures, punctuated only by auto body shops and shitty Chinese restaurants! Los Angeles, glorious and vast, land of roof rats, home of the Whopper!" [Salon]