Politics & Power Quote by Saul Bellow

Los Angeles appears here as America’s accidental drawer: the place where the nation’s spare parts, misfits, dreamers, dropouts, hustlers, and reinventions end up when the rest of the country gives them no clean category. Bellow’s image is comic, but it’s not gentle. “Loose objects” turns people into clutter, not citizens; it implies drift rather than pilgrimage, gravity rather than choice. The joke lands because it treats migration like physics: tilt the continent and watch what isn’t “tightly screwed down” slide west. That’s funny in the way a hard diagnosis is funny.

The subtext is Bellow’s suspicion of a culture that rewards mobility without demanding anchoring. “Tightly screwed down” isn’t just stability; it’s obligation, lineage, and restraint. Los Angeles becomes the promised land of the unmoored, a city built to accommodate perpetual starting over. In Bellow’s mid-century context - postwar prosperity, mass car culture, the entertainment industry’s magnetism, the West’s marketing as freedom - Southern California is less frontier than sorting bin, where the country’s unresolved longings and half-finished identities are stored.

What makes the line work is its double motion: it mocks LA’s self-mythology while admitting its real power. The city doesn’t merely attract; it collects. That verb suggests inevitability, and a faint dread. If a nation can be “tilted,” then the forces shaping character are structural: economics, spectacle, opportunity, disposability. Bellow’s wit lets him critique that system without sermonizing - the cynicism is baked into the metaphor’s smooth, effortless slide.