The Holdout

by Graham Moore

Los Angeles had been built on a desert, just an afternoon’s drive from Death Valley. So in the 1930s, the city had planted tens of thousands of the lush trees, all imported from Mexico. She couldn’t remember, now, what his point had been. All she could remember was how animated he’d gotten, his nude body draped over the ugly hotel comforter while she gently stroked his back. Maybe Rick had meant that nothing was supposed to thrive here. Los Angeles was either an inspiring tribute to civilization’s ability to withstand an infertile soil, or the withering edifice of a generation’s best-laid plans to grow something that should not live.

When was the last time that Jae had seen a movie where the hero was a businessman? Where the guy who built something from nothing wasn’t a criminal poisoning the groundwater, but dredging wells in a once-arid stretch of desert? How come Hollywood never made those movies? He was pretty sure he knew why. Because the Hollywood liberals, up on those hidden cliffs above Beverly Hills, felt so ashamed about the poor people nearby that they locked themselves away in their mansions and made movies that glorified the very victimhood that they couldn’t stand to be near.

You had to really care about someone to fight with them this hard. You had to deeply care about someone’s opinion to be this offended by how totally wrong they were.