{"id":194544,"date":"2026-06-21T15:38:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T23:38:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194544"},"modified":"2026-06-21T15:38:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T23:38:28","slug":"the-hero-system-of-los-angeles-times-columnist-steve-lopez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194544","title":{"rendered":"The Hero System of Los Angeles Times Columnist Steve Lopez"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Lopez<\/a> (b. 1953) keeps a private appointment with the obituary page. He has described the moment a newspaperman dreads, when the names there stop belonging to strangers and start belonging to men he knew, men he stood beside at a bar or a city council meeting. The page turns from news into a tally of his own losses, and then into a forecast.<\/p>\n

Two terrors sit under that habit. Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) named the first and built a whole anthropology on it. A man knows he will die and rot, knows it as no other animal knows it, and he cannot bear to be only a creature that ends. So he builds what Becker called a hero system, a set of rules for earning a place in something that outlasts the body. The second terror belongs to Lopez in particular. It is the fear of the unrecorded death. To die is the common lot. To die unseen, to be swept off a downtown sidewalk before sunrise by a sanitation crew and bagged with no name, to leave the world without leaving a single line in it, is the horror a columnist spends his life pushing back against.<\/p>\n

His answer is the byline. The column hands a man a small, secular afterlife. A man Lopez writes about gets a name in the Los Angeles Times<\/a><\/i>, gets quoted, gets a face. The street crew might still come, but now there is a record, and the record says this man was here and this man counted. Lopez built a career out of handing that record to people the city had filed under surplus.<\/p>\n

The clearest case is the one that made him famous. On Skid Row<\/a> he found Nathaniel Ayers<\/a>, a man trained at Juilliard<\/a> and broken by schizophrenia, playing a violin with two strings in an underpass near a statue of Beethoven. Lopez wrote him into the paper, then into a book, The Soloist<\/i>, then into a film with two movie stars. The arc looks like rescue. Read it through Becker and it looks like something more exact. Lopez took a man the economy had discarded and granted him the one thing the economy cannot grant, a place in the permanent record. He answered the terror of the unrecorded death on another man’s behalf, and in doing so he fed his own hero system.<\/p>\n

Under every hero system lies a story about what has been taken away. Becker’s heroes never simply build. They build against a loss. Lopez’s loss story is the one he has told for nearly fifty years across several cities. A society once held to the idea that a man was owed something for being a man. It owed him a roof, a wage that fed a family, a place at the table when his working years ran out. That idea has been subtracted, piece by piece, until what remains is a verdict delivered by the market: a man is worth what he produces, and a man who produces nothing is worth nothing and may be left on the pavement. Lopez writes to register the subtraction. Each column is an entry in a ledger of what the city removed and hoped no one would notice.<\/p>\n

Stand at the center of that ledger and you find a single word doing all the work. The word is use. Lopez believes a discarded man still has worth, that his use is not the only measure of him, and that a society which prices men by output has lost its soul. But use is not a fixed thing. It changes shape depending on the hero system that holds it, and the same word means different things to men standing in different rooms.<\/p>\n

Take the founder in a glass office in Palo Alto<\/a>, thirty-one years old, two exits behind him, a third company hiring fast. For him use is throughput. A thing is useful if it scales, and a man is useful if his output climbs faster than his cost. He is kind, he gives to the food bank, and he cannot see Ayers as anything but a tragedy of misallocation, a brilliant input with no working channel to market. The terror he builds against is irrelevance, the dead startup, the man whose product the world routes around. His hero is the builder who leaves behind a machine that runs without him.<\/p>\n

Carry the word up to the high desert, to a Carmelite<\/a> who rises at two in the morning to pray for a world that will never learn his name. For him use is the trap. The contemplative life produces nothing the founder could put on a slide. Its whole point is to stand useless before God, to refuse the verdict of output, to insist that a soul has worth before it does a single thing. The byline Lopez offers Ayers might strike this man as a vanity, one more bid for a name to outlast the body, when the only afterlife worth wanting requires the surrender of the name. His terror is not obscurity. It is pride.<\/p>\n

Move again, to a gunnery sergeant who has buried four men he trained. For him use means something the founder might call madness. The highest use of a Marine is to be spent, to be used up for the man beside him, to become a name read aloud at a ceremony and cut into a black wall. He does not want a byline. He wants the wall, and he wants the men who pass it to stop. His terror is the fear that the dying bought nothing.<\/p>\n

Now the hospice<\/a> nurse on the night shift, who measures her years not in deeds done but in deaths attended. For her use has nothing to do with output and everything to do with presence. She sits with men who will never make another thing, who have passed beyond the founder’s ledger and the sergeant’s mission both, and her work is to make the last hours of a useless man tender. She might understand Lopez better than the others. She might also tell him that the dignity he hands a man through a column is thinner than the dignity she hands a man by holding his hand while no one writes it down.<\/p>\n

Four rooms, one word, four different gods. This is Becker pressed to his edge. A sacred value never floats free. It is the local answer to a local terror, and it makes sense only inside the hero system that needs it. Lopez’s use, the worth of the discarded man, is the answer of a working-class kid from Pittsburg, California<\/a>, who watched the world sort men into the useful and the surplus and decided to spend his life arguing the sort was a lie.<\/p>\n

Few men in his trade know their own machine as well as he does. Lopez wrote a whole book, Independence Day<\/i>, interrogating his refusal to retire, and the book is a long act of self-examination by a man who suspects his need to keep working is the same need that drives the men he covers, dressed in better clothes. He went part-time at sixty-eight rather than stop. He turned his beat toward aging and the old, which is to say he turned it toward the discard pile he is himself approaching. He sees the trap. A man who builds his worth on usefulness cannot retire without facing the verdict he spent his life fighting.<\/p>\n

What his ledger cannot price is subtler, and it sits at the root of the whole structure. His usefulness requires a steady supply of the discarded. The witness needs the wounded. For the column to confer dignity there must be men stripped of it, and the more he restores a man to the record, the more his own place in the record depends on the supply never running dry. Ayers becomes a book. The man on the sidewalk becomes nine hundred words and a photograph. Lopez does more good than most men do in ten lifetimes, and still the engine runs the way all hero systems run, by converting one man’s terror into another man’s significance. He cannot wish away the suffering that gives him his subject without wishing away the work that gives him his answer to death. That is the one cost the ledger will not show, because the ledger is the thing being paid for.<\/p>\n

Three coordinates locate the man. The shape of his hero is the witness, the boy who escaped the sort and now hauls others out of the surplus column one byline at a time, granting a secular afterlife to men the city filed under waste. The rival he fights without naming is no politician and no developer. It is use, the market’s quiet verdict on who is worth keeping, the actuarial shrug that prices a human being by his output and sweeps the rest into bags at dawn. And the cost his ledger cannot price is the supply line at his back. A witness needs the wounded, and the man who spends his life restoring dignity to the discarded depends, in the part of the account no column will print, on there always being more of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Lopez (b. 1953) keeps a private appointment with the obituary page. He has described the moment a newspaperman dreads, when the names there stop belonging to strangers and start belonging to men he knew, men he stood beside at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,50,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-los-angeles","category-los-angeles-times"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t