The Golden State has become a
cruel and unusual place because callousness and narcissism were redefined as
caring and compassion.
One way of understanding California is simply to invert
traditional morality. What for centuries would be considered selfish, callous,
and greedy is now recalibrated as caring, empathetic, and generous. The
current ethos of evaluating someone by his or her superficial appearance—gender
or race—has returned to the premodern values of 19th-century California when
race and gender calibrated careers. We don’t pay medieval priests for
indulgences of our past and ongoing sin, but we do tweet out displays of our
goodness as the penance price of acting amoral.
A
paradox ensues that Californians both have a high, indeed smug, view of
themselves and yet do a lot of damage to their fellow human beings. Their
haughtiness is based largely on the reality that Silicon Valley, sandwiched
between Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, became the
birthplace of the global computer, internet, social media, and a high-tech
revolution. For progressives who deprecate the capitalist lifestyle, having a
lot of money still allows one to say one thing and live out the opposite.
The
state’s multi-trillion-dollar companies have hired tens of thousands of
seven-figure, mid-level executives and computer experts who assume that life in
the California coastal corridor is a birthright paradise.
The
resulting tax revenue bonanza to the state allows one-party-rule to rid
California of the old bothersome Reagan-Deukmejian-Wilson working- and
middle-classes by embracing not-in-my-backyard zoning, identity politics,
anal-retentive regulations, steep tax rates, utopian green agendas, open
borders, and decriminalization of things that used to be felony offenses.
Indeed,
the bigger and wealthier California became, the more the rich sought to
privatize their lives and to give up on public services, the more the middle
classes left the state, the more the poor from Mexico and Latin America crossed
the southern border illegally, the more its schools deteriorated, and the more
its infrastructure ossified and became decrepit, from century-old power
transmission towers to pot-holed and jammed highways.
The
resulting medieval society is now one of a few thousand millionaires and
millions of lower-middle-class wage earners as well as millions of abject
peasants and poor serfs. Those on the bottom receive relatively generous
subsidies to just get by. Over a quarter of the state’s population was not born
in the United States. A fifth lives below the poverty line. One-third of
welfare recipients in the United States live in California. These are
statistics of which our moralists in Malibu or Mill Valley either are ignorant,
or simply shrug that they don’t care.
In a
paradoxical way, California would have to become much more impoverished than it
is now to seem a far worse abode than the birthplace of most of its current
immigrants from southern Mexico, Central America, China, and Southeast Asia.
That is, while the middle class has been leaving in droves, given the abject
decline of their beloved native state, the even poorer newcomers have a quite
different benchmark of comparison. Compared, to say, Oaxaca, or rural China,
California’s is rich, free, and eager to subsidize even illegal arrivals.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
The
coastal rich and professional classes make so much that they are willing to put
up with the state’s high taxes and poor services on three assumed premises.
First, state redistribution of some of their vast incomes
doesn’t hurt all that much, while offering atheists, agnostics, and secularists
generous medieval penance and fides as
true-blue progressives. As long as the coastal tech economy, financial services,
entertainment, tourism, and blue-chip research universities keep booming, the
state within a state doesn’t worry about the funding-to-benefit relationship
between soaring California taxes and commensurately declining public services.
Second,
the coastal enclaves have enough money to navigate around the ramifications of
their own ideology, whether by avoiding much of the state’s interior, putting
their kids in private schools, living in tony gated communities, buying
concierge private healthcare, and ensuring that the Other, who daily ventures
into their neighborhoods to do domestic and outdoor chores, leaves by
nightfall. Buying a Range Rover or Mercedes SUV or even a Gulfstream is a good
way to ease the burden of fighting climate change, just as one’s concierge
doctor can galvanize his support for Medicare for All.
Third,
our blessed lords and earls envision California not as a single state. Indeed,
most coastal dwellers have never visited the small towns of the Central Valley
or the Sierra foothills or the northern third of the state. Instead, they see
these areas the way Manhattanites look at Rochester, or Chicago looks at
southern Illinois. In their view, freakish 19th-century mapping created
California, and so they have no concern what Outer Californians think of the
way they govern the state.
The
result is abject cruelty. How can state leaders impose the highest gasoline
taxes in the country, and then allow sections of their main longitudinal
freeways—large swaths of the 99, the central coastal 101, or most of the West
Side I-5—to become gory 4-lane motorized gladiatorial arenas?
As
traffic quadrupled over the last half-century, the state’s freeways necessary
to drive across California remained calcified. And the result was that lots of
people simply died, and that calculation was always baked into California
governance as tolerable. By that, I mean, our masters of the universe couldn’t
care less that the 99 “freeway” has become, by most metrics, the most lethal
major thoroughfare in the United States. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Winners” and “Losers”
Much
of the state is a natural desert—ironically in some of the toniest places where
the rich dwell, from Montecito to Carmel.
Yet
no major reservoir has been built in nearly 40 years, a period during which the
population doubled. No doubt, 19th-century California was a paradise—Hetch
Hetchy undammed, the lush delta flooding over millions of acres, upstream
salmon fighting the San Joaquin River white water from the Bay to the Sierra
Nevada.
But
such fantasies are no way to run a 21st-century state with open borders, 40
million people, and a population that to survive and eat needs daily vast
transfers of irrigation and municipal water from the wet north and east to the
parched center and west.
Releasing
to the sea millions of acre-feet of reservoir water or never allowing it to be
banked in established manmade lakes means that millions of struggling rural
residents drill new, multi-thousand-dollar domestic wells to survive, farmers
idle land, and the poor lose jobs. The elite response is that there is no
mental connection for them between what is sold at Whole Foods and what is
grown outside of Bakersfield or Salinas. They muse why do such exploiters of
nature have to drain our state’s aquifer? And they assume that while Hetch
Hetchy and the Owens Valley are critical to bring the anointed water, all other
such huge water transfer projects should become negotiable.
One
of the strangest sights in California is the horde of trailers, ratty cars, and
dilapidated Winnebagos parked throughout moralistic Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and
Sunnyvale, juxtaposed with gleaming high-tech corporate campuses. The most
empathetic and caring people in the world, as they remind us hourly, turn out
to be pretty callous about the “losers” in their midst who live in mobile and
makeshift quarters on the street to keep Silicon Valley humming.
At
least 19th-century company mining towns did not have the percentages of
transients and homeless as does the richest, most caring landscape in the world.
Those who can afford $1,000-a-square-foot coastal cottages assume that the
losers who can’t code just couldn’t cut it. If you insist on driving a semi, or
welding tanks, and you are not willing to program, then why in the world should
you dare imagine that you deserve to live within 50 miles of the California
coast?
To
walk in areas of downtown San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, or Sacramento is
to venture into the pages of Boccaccio or Dickens, as thousands defecate,
inject, eat, drink, and urinate on the sidewalks. Should the coronavirus ever
incubate there among California’s hundreds of thousands on the street, the
result would make the current nationwide caseload look like the common cold.
Indeed, an epidemic among the tents and grocery carts of the state’s main
cities would become hideous and terrifying—and right out of the accounts of
Thucydides or Procopius.
These
ebbs and flows of homeless villages often lap up near the commuting corridors
of the hyper-wealthy pedestrians and commuters. The former appeared bothered
and so play the role of mounted knights that rode on by beggars outside the
walls of the keep.
Truth and Consequences
In
California’s upside-down morality, what is ethical is allowing thousands to
live in fetid filth and to endanger their own health and that of an entire
city, or waving in millions of foreign nationals without health audits,
background checks, or legal permission. The Silicon Valley moralist at coffee
seethes that Trump “put people in cages,” while in private is relieved that
there are not caravans of tens of thousands headed his way from Central
America—in the age of the coronavirus.
What
is now considered unethical would be either to provide planned suburban or
rural homeless campuses with sanitation, clean food, and dormitory shelters, or
to ask illegal immigrants in their home countries first to apply for U.S.
residence through legal channels, to undergo legal, health, and job audits, and
in the interval to learn English and the customs and laws of their desired new
home.
Instead,
opening the southern border to millions of destitute Central Americans and
southern Mexican nationals is proof of one’s morality among the wealthy of La
Jolla, Santa Barbara, Pacific Heights, and Sausalito—again at least in the
abstract. Few of them venture to a Merced, Sanger, Madera, or Firebaugh school
to see the impact of tens of thousands of immigrant youths, without English,
money, or skills suddenly overwhelming local school districts.
Fewer
experience the effects on driving and law enforcement when millions of foreign
immigrants navigate without prior experience of U.S. traffic laws, and without
licenses, insurance, and registration.
No
moralist seems to worry that tens of thousands of Americans, among them
Mexican-American citizens in particular, depend on access to state and federal
dialysis centers and hospital emergency rooms, many of which are now
overwhelmed with non-citizen new patients.
To
write the above is proof of one’s callousness, to be its architect evidence of
one’s caring.
So
those who craft sanctuary cities never venture into the Reedley emergency room,
or know what a rural Tulare County sheriff encounters on a Saturday night, or
what it is like to drive late on a Saturday night on a rural road in Central
California, or would dare put their children in the Delano public schools, or
to live outside of Mendota with the house pump sputtering sand. Those who
insisted on continuing with a money-draining, high-speed rail boondoggle rarely
try to drive east on Highway 152 outside Gilroy and thereby learn the
consequences of allowing roads to become Road Warrior death zones.
Those
legislators and executives who dreamed up decriminalizing thefts under $950
never worried about how the lost inventory of a family-owned store destroys
middle-class aspirations. They certainly are careful about where not to shop,
especially not where hordes of teens swarm and walk out each with mysteriously
less than $950 in loot.
California has become a cruel and
unusual state because callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and
compassion.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/08/california-is-a-cruel-medieval-state/#edit-4826330921
