LOS ANGELES--Like rush hour traffic on the southbound Santa Ana Freeway on those days when Al Cowlings and O.J. Simpson aren't driving with a police escort, Los Angeles--if you believe the elite, non-avaca-do-eating East Coast media--is in a bad way.

According to these narrow, Eastern minds, L.A. is being overrun by a slew of evils, including earthquakes, fires, riots, mudslides, defense cutbacks, immigrant bashers, Forrest Gump lovers and the aforementioned Mr. Simpson's defense team.

Readers of the New York Times could be forgiven for thinking that California's economy is in free fall, that illegal immigrants to the state are more often harassed than employed, and that our police chief takes orders from Satan and not Mayor Richard Riordan.

But a late March week in Southern California provides ample evidence that Los Angeles remains our nation's brightest symbol of the triumph of the democratic experiment. Like the weather this week, the area's future is sunny, with almost no clouds in a very blue sky.

Angelenos know that America, no matter what Washington pundits tell us, is not about politics, finding consensus or trying to get 51 percent of the people to agree with you. America is great because it's a place where we celebrate craziness and disagreement.

That's why the most important news last month was that rap singer Eazy-E (a.k.a. Eric Wright) had died March 26 of complications of AIDS.

For many, Wright was a hateful figure. His death, with his parents, new wife and a personal security representative from the Nation of Islam by his side, will do nothing to dispel that notion for some.

But Wright, a poet from the bad neighborhoods of Compton, was a prophet. In 1989, the group N.W.A., which he co-founded, produced one of the most important songs of the past decade, "Fuck tha Police," Police officers around the country objected strongly to the song; an FBI official sent N.W.A. a threatening letter.

The song was no love ballad. Its images were graphic, and many of the lyrics on the album, "Straight Outta Compton," were downright misogynist. But Wright was dead on in describing the rage minorities feel, often justifiably, towards law enforcement. After the Los Angeles riots bore out his point, Wright told the L.A. Times: "We were criticized a lot when we first released that song, but I guess now after what happened...people might look differently on the situation."

Many Easterners, particularly white ones, look at Wright as a symptom of an ugly, ultimately passing phase in American culture. In point of fact, Eazy-E was a thoughtful entrepreneur who helped start the careers of Dr. Dre and Ice Cube (although he exchanged angry words at times with both former N.W.A. members).

He was politically involved enough to receive an invitation from Bob Dole to a Republican "Inner Circle" luncheon in 1991. And he fended off criticism after courageously defending Theodore Briseno, one of the officers in the Rodney King case, because "he was the only one I saw who was trying to stop the beating."

His death was the loss of an important young American, the kind of compelling person that only L.A. seems able to produce these days.

East Coast types think of race relations as a Black-white project, but they often fail to recognize that the most important trend in Southern California's racial mix is the growing number of Lations.

Lations constitute an estimated 40 percent of Los Angeles county residents, and they will likely be a majority within a decade. Their presence in the city is strong. Many public messages are printed in both English and Spanish. A scan of the radio dial reveals almost as many Spanish-language stations as English-language.

The sheer number of new arrivals from Latin America has given many Latinos the cultural room to preserve the Spanish language and culture. The use of Spanish among second-and third-generation Lations is growing. Both liberals and conservatives misunderstand this trend. Both sides see it as a triumph of multiculturalism, which, depending on their politics, can bode well or poorly for the nation's future.