Thread: California at Twilight

California at Twilight

January 29th, 2013 - 12:01 am
by Victor Davis Hanson

We keep trying to understand the enigma of California, mostly why it still breathes for a while longer, given the efforts to destroy the sources of its success. Let’s try to navigate through its sociology and politics to grasp why something that should not survive is surviving quite well — at least in some places.

Conservati delendi sunt

The old blue/red war for California is over. Conservatives lost. Liberals won — by a combination of flooding the state with government-supplied stuff, and welcoming millions in while showing the exit to others. The only mystery is how Carthaginian will be the victor’s peace, e.g., how high will taxes go, how many will leave, how happy will the majority be at their departure?

The state of Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson, and George Deukmejian is long dead due to the most radical demographic shifts of any one state in recent American history — as far away as Cicero was to Nero. One minor, but telling example: Salinas, in Monterey County where the murder rate is the highest in the state, just — at least I think the news story is not a prank — named its new middle school after Tiburcio Vasquez.

A convicted murderer.

He was the legendary 19th-century robber and murderer who was hanged for his crimes. But who is to say that Vasquez is a killer, and Henry Huntington a visionary?

The New Demography

California has changed not due to race but due to culture, most prominently because the recent generation of immigrants from Latin America did not — as in the past, for the most part — come legally in manageable numbers and integrate under the host’s assimilationist paradigm. Instead, in the last three decades huge arrivals of illegal aliens from Mexico and Latin America saw Democrats as the party of multiculturalism, separatism, entitlements, open borders, non-enforcement of immigration laws, and eventually plentiful state employment.

Given the numbers, the multicultural paradigm of the salad bowl that focused on “diversity” rather than unity, and the massive new government assistance, how could the old American tonic of assimilation, intermarriage, and integration keep up with the new influxes? It could not.

Finally, we live in an era of untruth and Orwellian censorship. It is absolutely taboo to write about the above, or to talk about the ever more weird artifacts of illegal immigration — the war now on black families in demographically changing areas of Los Angeles, the statistics behind DUI arrests, or the burgeoning profile of Medi-Cal recipients. I recall of the serial dissimulation in California my high school memorization of Sir Walter Raleigh:

Tell potentates, they live/Acting by others’ action/Not loved unless they give; Not strong but by affection; If potentates reply/Give potentates the lie.

There were, of course, other parallel demographic developments. Hundreds of thousands of the working and upper-middle class, mostly from the interior of the state, have fled — maybe four million in all over the last thirty years, taking with them $1 trillion in capital and income-producing education and expertise. Apparently, they tired of high taxes, poor schools, crime, and the culture of serial blame-gaming and victimhood. In this reverse Dust Bowl migration, a barren no-tax Nevada or humid Texas was a bargain.

Their California is long gone (“Lo, all our pomp and of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre”), and a Stockton, Fresno, or Visalia misses their presence, because they had skills, education, and were net pluses to the California economy.

Add in a hip, youth, and gay influx to the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and coastal Los Angeles that saw California as a sort of upscale, metrosexual lifestyle (rule of thumb: conservatives always find better restaurants in liberal locales), and California now has an enormous number of single-person households, childless couples, and one-child families. Without the lifetime obligation to raise $1 million in capital to pay for bringing up and educating two kids from birth to 21 (if you’re lucky), the non-traditional classes have plenty of disposable income for entertainment, housing, and high taxes. For examples, read Petronius, especially the visit to Croton.

Finally, there is our huge affluent public work force. It is the new aristocracy; landing a job with the state is like hitting the lottery. Californians have discovered that, in today’s low/non-interest economy, a $70,000 salary with defined benefit public pension for life is far better than having the income from a lifetime savings of $3 million.

Or, look at it another way: with passbooks paying 0.5-1%, the successful private accountant or lawyer could put away $10,000 a month for thirty years of his productive career and still not match the monthly retirement income of the Caltrans worker who quit at 60 with modest contributions to PERS.

And with money came political clout. To freeze the pension contribution of a highway patrolman is a mortal sin; but no one worries much about the private security’s guard minimum wage and zero retirement, whose nightly duties are often just as dangerous. The former is sacrosanct; the latter a mere loser.

The result of 30 years of illegal immigration, the reigning culture of the coastal childless households, the exodus of the overtaxed, and the rule of public employees is not just Democratic, but hyper-liberal supermajorities in the legislature. In the most naturally wealthy state in the union with a rich endowment from prior generations, California is serially broke — the master now of its own fate. It has the highest menu of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation, and about the worst infrastructure, business climate, and public education. Is the latter fact despite or because of the former?

How, then, does California continue? Read on, but in a nutshell, natural and inherited wealth are so great on the coast that a destructive state government must work overtime to ruin what others wrought.

Also, when you say, “My God, one of every three welfare recipients lives in California,” or “California schools are terrible,” you mean really, “Not in Newport or Carmel. So who cares about Fresno, or Tulare — they might as well be in Alabama for all the times I have been there.”

So Much Taxation, So Little in Return

Thank God for Mississippi and Alabama, or California schools would test dead last.

Somehow, in just thirty years we created obstacles to public learning that produce results approaching the two-century horrific legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. About half the resources of the California State University system are devoted to remedial schooling for underperforming high school students (well over half who enter take remediation courses; half don’t graduate even in six years; and well over half have sizable financial aid). The point of CSU’s general education requirement is not so much any more to offer broad learning (who is to say what is “general education?”), but rather to enter a sort of race, class, and gender boot camp that allows some time off to become familiar with how the culture and politics of the state should continue.

The majority of the once-vaunted upper-tier University of California campuses now resemble second-tier CSU of old. Yet I think a Fresno State graduate of 1965 was far better educated than a UC Irvine or UC Santa Cruz student of today.

The state’s wealthiest and best-prepared students are perhaps only well-taught at its elite schools — the two UC campuses at Berkeley and UCLA, Stanford, Caltech, USC, Pepperdine, or Santa Clara — while the poorer but still serious students increasingly enroll in the new private online and tech schools that sprout up around failed CSU campuses. Why pay for the farce of GE, when you can just get the nuts-and-bolts job skills cheaper and quicker at a tech school?

Stagecoach Trails

Little need be said about infrastructure other than it is fossilized. The lunacy of high-speed rail is not just the cost, but that a few miles from its proposed route are at present a parallel but underused Amtrak track and the 99 Highway, where thousands each day risk their lives in crowded two lanes, often unchanged since the 1960s.

The 99, I-5, and 101 are potholed two-lane highways with narrow ramps, and a few vestigial cross-traffic death zones. But we, Californian drivers, are not just double the numbers of those 30 years ago, but — despite far safer autos and traffic science — far less careful as well. There are thousands of drivers without licenses, insurance, registration, and elementary knowledge of road courtesy. Half of all accidents in Los Angeles are hit-and-runs.

My favorite is the ubiquitous semi-truck and trailer swerving in and out of the far left lane with a 20-something Phaethon behind the wheel — texting away as he barrels along at 70 mph with a fishtailing 20 tons. The right lane used to be for trucks; now all lanes are open range for trucking — no law in the arena! The dotted lane lines are recommendations, not regulations. (Will young truck drivers be hired to become our new high-speed rail state employee engineers?)

When I drive over the Grapevine, I play a sick game of counting the number of mattresses I’ll spot in the road over the next 100 miles into L.A. (usually three to four). Lumber, yard clippings, tools, and junk — all that is thrown into the back of trucks without tarps. To paraphrase Hillary: what does it matter whether we are killed by a mattress or a 2 x 4? In places like Visalia or Madera, almost daily debris ends up shutting down one of the only two lanes on the 99.

Wrecks so far? It is not the number, but rather the scary pattern that counts. I’ve had three in the last 10 years: a would-be hit-and-run driver (the three “no”s: no license, no registration, no insurance) went through a stop sign in Selma, collided with my truck, and tried to take off on foot, leaving behind his ruined Civic; a speeder (80 m.p.h.) in L.A. hit a huge box-spring on the 101 near the 405, slammed on his brakes, skidded into a U-turn in the middle lane, reversed direction, and hit me going 40 m.p.h. head-on (saved by Honda Accord’s front and side air-bags and passive restraint seat harnesses; the injured perpetrator’s first call was to family, not 911); and a young woman last year, while texting, rear-ended me at 50 m.p.h. while I was at a complete stop in stalled traffic in Fresno (thank God for a dual-cab Tundra with a long trailer hitch). She too first called her family to try to help her flee the scene of her wrecked car, but my call apparently reached the Highway Patrol first.

Drive enough in California, and you too, reader, will have a ‘”rendezvous with Death, at some disputed barricade.”

West and East Californias

The coastal elites unite politically with the interior poor, in the fashion of the Caesarians and the turba. I suppose that their common adversary is, as was true of Rome, the disappearing middle class.

Along the coast, elites have harvested well California’s natural and acquired wealth. I’ll again just toss out a few brands; you can imagine the lucre and jobs that are generated from Santa Rosa to San Diego: Apple, Chevron, Disney, DreamWorks, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Hollywood, Napa Valley, Oracle, PG&E, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Wells Fargo, the ports of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Oakland.

So let us not speak of California decline, but of California’s decline and another California boom — one of 6% unemployment and another of 16%, one of $100,000 per capita income and another of $15,000, one of cottages sold on the first day on the market in Newport and another of vacant McMansions molding away in Stockton.

Success continues on the coast and is managed by very wealthy and mostly liberal residents of the sprawl that surrounds Los Angeles and San Francisco. For the five million or so who are enriched in enterprise zones like these — and there are thousands more spin-off and smaller such companies — life is pretty good if you keep your household small, inherited a house, or make enough money to buy something at about $500 to $1,000 dollars a square foot. In Selma, new 1800 sq. foot homes sell for $140,000; in Palo Alto, dollhouses go for $1.5 million. So who is the prince, and who the fool? Are opera tickets and a street light that still has its wire worth it?

The Cost of Doing Business

Coastal folk seem to view high taxes like Mafia protection money, but in the sense of psychological satisfaction and freedom from guilt. For now, sales, gas, and income taxes are not so high as to matter to those who voted for them, at least in view of the social and political advantages of coastal living: the beautiful weather, the Pacific panorama, the hip culture of recreational light drug use, neat restaurants, sports, fine wines, solar and wind romance, foreign cars, and general repugnance at religion, guns, conservatives, and traditional anything.

To the extent that “they” (i.e. you, reader) exist, the distant others are nebulous, rarely thought-about souls. Perhaps they really do enjoy polluting the planet as they generate the electricity, pipe in the natural gas and oil, refine the fuels, grow the food, and cut and haul the lumber that gives a Palo Alto or Santa Barbara the stuff to go on one more day.

Vote For Me Not To Represent You?

I still can’t figure out politics and culture of our vast interior, both the enormous and mostly empty state above Sacramento, and the huge Central Valley and Sierra. As my neighbors put it, life would have to get pretty awful here to be worse than in Oaxaca. I once asked a neighbor why he was hauling wrecked trailers onto his small parcel. He smiled and told me California was “heaven.” From my few trips to Mexico, I could not argue.

One of the questions I always hear from strangers: “Why doesn’t everyone leave?” The answer is simple: for the coastal overdogs there is nowhere else where the money is as good and the weather and scenery are as enjoyable. How much would you pay to walk in cut-offs in February and not in three jackets in Montana? And for the interior underclass, California’s entitlements and poor-paying service jobs are paradise compared to Honduras, Jalisco, or Southeast Asia.

And, yes, the middle-class small farmers, hardware-store owners, company retirees, and electricians are leaving in droves.

Weird Politics

The Latino population, I would imagine, would be in revolt over the elitist nature of California politics. Of course, thousands of second-generation Latinos have become public employees, from teachers to DMV clerks, and understandably so vote a straight Democrat-public union ticket. But millions are not working for the state, and they suffer dramatically from the ruling Bay Area left-wing political agenda of regulations, green quackery, and legal gymnastics. It is not just that the foreign national illegally entered the U.S. from Oaxaca, but entered the most complex, over-regulated, over-taxed, and over-lawyered state in the nation — hence the disconnects.

Take energy. California may have reserves of 35 billion barrels of oil in its newly discovered shale formations, and even more natural gas — the best way to provide clean electricity and, perhaps soon, transportation energy for the state. Tens of thousands of young Latino immigrants — given that agriculture is increasingly mechanizing, construction is flat, and the state is broke — could be making high wages from Salinas to Paso Robles, and along the I-5 corridor, if fracking and horizontal drilling took off. Even more jobs could accrue in subsidiary construction and trucking. And for a cynic, billions of dollars in state energy taxes from gas and oil revenue would ensure that the state’s generous handouts would be funded for a generation. Did someone forget that the California boom of the 1930s and 1940s was fueled by cheap, in-state oil?

More importantly, our power companies have the highest energy bills in the nation, given all sorts of green and redistributionist mandates. The costs fall most heavily on the cold winter/hot summer interior residents, who are the poorest in the state. Those who insist that the utilities invest in costly alternate energy and other green fantasies live mostly in 65-70 degree coastal weather year-round and enjoy low power bills.

Yet the liberal coastal political lock-hold on the state continues.
No one in San Joaquin or Tranquility cares about a baitfish in the delta, but they do vote nonetheless for the elites who divert water from farms, put the poor farm worker out of work, and feel good about saving the smelt in the process. Go figure.

Soft Apartheid

How then does the California coalition work, and in some sense work so well?

The coastal elite offers an agenda for more welfare funding, scholarships, class warfare, public unions, diversity, affirmative action, open borders, and amnesty, and in response the interior voter signs off on everything from gay marriage, solar and wind subsidies, gun restrictions, mass transit schemes, and the entire progressive tax-and-spend agenda. Most of this coalition never much sees one another.

The young Mountain View programmer keeps clear of Woodlake. He even has only a vague idea of what life is like for those who live in nearby Redwood City and make his arugula salad at the hip pasta bar in Palo Alto. In turn, the Redwood City dishwasher has an equally murky sense that the wealthy kid who works at Google does not wish to deport his uncle — and so the two become unspoken political partners of sorts. One of the state’s wealthiest cities, a gated Atherton, is juxtaposed to one of its most Latinate communities, Redwood City. But they might as well be Mercury and Pluto. Or should we applaud that the owner of the manor and his grass cutter vote identically — and against the interests of the guy who sold and serviced the Honda lawn mower?

In the flesh, the energetic people I associate with during the week in Silicon Valley and see on the Stanford campus and on University Avenue are, it must be said, innovative folk, but soft apartheidists: where they live, where their kids go to schools, where they eat, and whom they associate with are governed by a class, and de facto racial, sensibility that would make Afrikaners of old proud.

The liberal aristocracy is as class-bound as the old Republican blue-stockings, but saved from populist ostracism by what I have called the “hip” exemption — liberalism’s new veneer that allows one to be both consumer and critic of the Westernized good life, to praise the people and to stay as far away from them as possible. Mitt Romney is an outsourcer; Google’s offshore holdings are cool.

Hope?

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Is there hope? Can there be honesty about our crises and courage to address them? If there is not to be assimilation and integration at the rate as in the past, then I sometime fantasize that a new conservative movement of second- and third-generation upper middle-class, over-taxed Mexican-Americans will demand competitive schools for their children without the fantasies of Chicano studies and coastal global warming indoctrination.

They will push for energy development, beefed-up law enforcement, and reasonable taxes and power rates, and so lock horns with the coastal elites, well apart from abortion, the death penalty, and the constant alternative lifestyle agenda. Some already are heading that way; more would if the borders were closed and the old forces of the melting pot were not impeded.

Or maybe change will come from the other end of the surreal coalition.

I talk to young, high-end yupster couples and wonder how they can vote for 40% federal income taxes, 11% state income taxes, Obamacare, and payroll and Medicare surcharges on their hefty incomes when increasingly they don’t use the public schools. Or if they have children, they pay exorbitant prices for private schooling and coastal housing that anywhere else would be laughable. I don’t think Menlo-Atherton High School, or the average paving on any residential street in Palo Alto, or the security on Willow Avenue, or the square footage of the typical Menlo Park bungalow is all such a great deal for losing 55% of your income to the local, state, and federal redistributionists.

Will Howard Jarvis return, with Birkenstocks and ponytail?

Would some young visionary see that just a few ecologically correct new dams, and a well-run development of the Monterey shale formation, would enable vast new increases in California energy and agriculture — food and fuel are what sustains mankind — and launch another Gold Rush?

Then I wake up and accept that contemporary California is a quirk, one governed by a secular religion, a non-empirical belief system that postulates that natural gas is bad because it produces heat and that dams that store precious water are unnatural. So far the consequences of such thinking rarely boomerang on the cocooned fantasists.

We are like the proverbial spoiled third-generation progeny of the immigrant farmer: the first-generation toiler lived in a hovel until he bought his 80 acres with paid cash. The second remodeled the old house, had a nicer car than a tractor, doubled the acreage, but took the weekend off and had less money in the bank than did his dad. The third fantasized and puttered about in his hiking boots, went through the inheritance, mortgaged the land — and was as glib and mellifluous as he was broke.

California is a tired idea.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast.


Works and Days » California at Twilight

"California is a tired idea".

Truer words were never spoken, but there will always be those who will gleefully trade cold winters and a state that still "feels like America" for the one that is turning into mexico.

(Some) comments from the blog ..

170 Comments, 63 Threads, 8 Trackbacks

1. Jim in Merced

I wish I could say that you’re wrong. Except for when I was in the army I have lived my whole life in California. That’s half a century.

This is no longer the place I grew up in.
January 29, 2013 - 12:48 am Link to this Comment | Reply
rjh

This is no longer the country I grew up in.
January 29, 2013 - 6:23 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Rik

I have a morbid desire to return to Merced. I almost did for my 25th High School reunion, but I thought better of it.
January 29, 2013 - 8:21 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Old School

Haha … me too! Passed up my 25 year High School reunion at Atwater High School next door to you Rik. I was last through the Central Valley in 2010 for Christmas and it was depressing. Atwater looks like third world country. I almost cried driving by the house I grew in. Merced is no better. Highway 99 is dump.

I said this way back in the late 80′s … CLOSE DOWN CASTLE AIR FORCE BASE AND WATCH THE AREA TURN INTO ONE LARGE GHETTO/BARRIO. All that military housing in Atwater … Hello Section 8!

Sad!
January 29, 2013 - 3:03 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
Clare Spark

Jim feels that vast changes have overtaken California, whereas I see it as a locale where the Reformation and Counter-Reformation are still slugging it out, with great implications for our social policy and for how we educate our children. I first wrote about this issue here: Unfinished Revolutions and contested notions of “identity” « YDS: The Clare Spark Blog.
January 29, 2013 - 10:11 am Link to this Comment | Reply
CombatMissionary

Good luck with that. California’s hit the tipping point. The welfare class will continue to be bought with more promises of handouts at the expense of middle-class producers until all the producers are gone (and they’re fleeing more quickly these days). Then the ruling class will have the gall to be amazed that THEY’RE going to have to foot the bill for handouts or flee. Shortly thereafter, it will be torches and pitchforks. California’s in a death spiral.
January 29, 2013 - 5:46 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
CombatMissionary

I feel bad for the huge number of Californians who spent their whole lives there only to have the rug pulled out from under them one tax bracket at a time. This IS the California I grew up in: the ruling class liberals continually voted in by the bought-and-paid-for welfare class, all at the ever-increasing expense of the ever-shrinking middle-class struggling to own a home and raise a family.

I’m lucky. I got out when I was a newlywed with nothing invested. I warn my own parents to sell out while they can and get out before exit taxes grow and they’re walking out with nothing. I tell them to come to a red state, where whatever they get for their Pyrite State properties will probably buy them a very comfortable home, and they can retire comfortably on pensions that are taxed at a far smaller rate.

A friend of mine has in-laws who sold their So-Cal home for $750k and bought a red-state home for $185k. They were sad to sell the home they raised their kids in. After a brief period of mourning, they heard a knock on the door, and met their neighbors who both spoke their language and welcomed them to the neighborhood with delicious treats and offers of help with anything they needed.

They’ve never looked back.
January 29, 2013 - 5:43 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
2. East Bay Mike

I gave up on this fight a long time ago. I recently posted elsewhere on PJ my comments below, which I will abbreviate. VDH’s story sounds all too familiar to me.

Three years ago, an illegal alien woman broadsided me, fled the scene of the accident and left me behind, injured. A cop arrived as I was being treated. In the meantime, she returned. The cop then interviewed her and spoke to me. He explained that she was illegal and had no license, no insurance, no proof of ID and that her car had out-of-state plates. Furthermore, he pleaded with me not to push the issue as she might get deported and separated from her children. He let her go.

In short, a policeman, a union-member public employee, instructed a woman who had fled the scene of an accident, to leave, as he wouldn’t recommend pressing charges. I ended up with a fresh car payment, jacked up insurance rates and a permanently damaged eye.

And no doubt the children of the woman who broadsided me will receive Affirmative Action benefits, and once legalized, will all receive Obamacare. Democrats clearly feel that the suffering of people like myself, and thousands upon thousands of others, like me, is worth it. Democrats are very cruel people. We always need to remember that. And I have one and one-half eyes that remind me of that fact every day.
January 29, 2013 - 12:53 am Link to this Comment | Reply
FeralCat

Just feel fortunate as the next person she hits, she may kill. Could well have happened already and maybe more than once. Sounds like the police officer didn’t care about such a possibility/probability.
January 29, 2013 - 1:55 am Link to this Comment | Reply
sule

Oh, that train has sooooo’ left the station…Illegal Immigrant Charged With Homicide in Deadly Minnesota School Bus Crash | Fox News

Oh, wait, I forgot; she complained of discrimination, through her court interpreter. (Minnesota’s courts have a hard time finding interpreters for all the varieties of immigrant criminals.)

But, no worries; soon we’ll have about 10 million more through amnesty, turning law breakers into citizens, and they’ll legally (this time) climb onto taxpayers backs and apply the spurs.
January 29, 2013 - 4:21 am Link to this Comment | Reply
ARKYDOG1

A very solid answer: He does not care. He has a good job and it pays well. The
very soon ‘future’ holds for him, a very nice retirement. His only concern is,”the NOW”. As I near ninety, I echo earlier stated sentiments; “This is not
the country I willingly went to war for in 1943.
Jim Limerick
Mtn.Home,AR
January 29, 2013 - 5:21 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
TPM

He may have “recommended” not pressing charges, but why didn’t you just demand to so so anyway? If he refuses file a lawsuit against the police department. I would suggest filing a lawsuit against her personally even though you probably wouldn’t recover anything, but if it went to a jury trial you’d be virtually guaranteed to get a jury of her peers, not yours, and she’d be let off. At the very least I would’ve gotten her identity and consulted with a lawyer to see if there’s any legal shenanigans you could do to make her life difficult. Maybe go over the local cops direct to ICE and try and get her deported, something, anything, to extract some justice. The only thing required for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing and this sort of thing is happening because too many do nothing.

And yes the Democrats are cruel people, but in their secular faith they justify their cruelty as compassion. Make no mistake, they revel in your suffering at the hands of one of their “victim classes”, they probably consider it some perverse form of “social justice”. Remember that their vision of “social justice” is to real justice as sarin is to man. Deadly poison.
January 29, 2013 - 6:08 am Link to this Comment | Reply
SongDog

Understandable thoughts. But he would be unlikely to file a lawsuit unless he could pay every nickle of the costs, and that would likley be a bundle, just to make a statement. Plaintiff’s counsel that work in this field just won’t touch a case where the possibility of a monetary recovery is not pretty good. For them it’s a business.
January 29, 2013 - 7:23 am Link to this Comment | Reply
East Bay Mike

“The only thing required for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing and this sort of thing is happening because too many do nothing.”

Well, I think good men have been doing quite a bit for 20 years, including countless lawsuits and ballot propositions and national forums and debates, and it does nothing but come down to the argument that the good men are racists and the illegals are the victims in the matter.

At the time, by the way, I had far more to deal with than I could either handle or afford, such as medical costs, doctor’s visits and getting my eye fixed, and finding an affordable car, than trying to prosecute her. And what would have happened, realistically? Even my insurance company wasn’t interested in pursuing it. And by the way, my insurance rates went from $1100 per year to $3200 per year. Thank you Farmers, despite having had but one prior accident (also not my fault, and in that case a legal immigrant who was a lousy driver was the cause) many years before and never a ticket. I have a different insurance company today.

I am tired of it all now. Even essays such as these leave me too agitated for my own good. I accept that they have won the war. I was just one of the minor casualties on the battlefield, so to speak, as others have been killed. I have zero faith in our government — local, state or federal. They have all failed in their most basic duty, and the fact that both parties publicize this as a strength rather than a weakness is beyond comprehension. The writing is on the wall for the United States and it isn’t in English.
January 29, 2013 - 9:21 am Link to this Comment | Reply
East Bay Mike

Accepted. And indeed your point is very well taken also; just telling a tale of woe is rarely, if ever, productive. God willing this kind of accident doesn’t happen to me again; however, if it does, I can follow your command chain to help both myself or friends confronted by the same mess.
January 29, 2013 - 11:10 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Colorado Guy

After reading the LONG article and some of the complaints, I can only wonder why you (collectively) put up with the dump. There’s not that much ‘California Dreamin” in the world, and I occassionally have to go there on business.
January 29, 2013 - 3:11 pm Link to this Comment
Micha Elyi

The writing is on the wall for the United States and it isn’t in English.

+5 Insightful
January 29, 2013 - 1:21 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
Dwight Lee

As indicated above, the victim of the hit-and-run is under no legal obligation to follow the officer’s suggestion to refrain from pursuing criminal charges against the perpetrator. If the officer refuses to cooperate or otherwise engages in harrassment of the victim, then the victim should obtain the officer’s name and badge number and send a detailed, written complaint to the chief of the officer’s department. In addition, the incident should also be reported to Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE will follow up on a report of a felony committed by an illegal alien. This can result in deportation of the perpetrator, without the victim of the crime having to spend personal funds on legal counsel.

The bottom line is that one should not expect any justice if one does not report incidents to the proper agencies. I’m sorry, but if you truly think that this is all just a waste of time and “all is lost” anyway, then you have already lost the battle without a fight (read: pathetic!). I, for one, refuse to give up that easily!
January 29, 2013 - 9:29 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Mike East Bay

Again… “At the time, by the way, I had far more to deal with than I could either handle or afford, such as medical costs, doctor’s visits and getting my eye fixed…”

“Pathetic,” thank you, and eff you.
January 29, 2013 - 9:58 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Dwight

I apologize if you were offended by my response. I can imagine that the experience of the accident (and its aftermath) must have been extremely upsetting for you. I hope that you recover from your injuries.

“I have zero faith in our government — local, state or federal. They have all failed in their most basic duty, and the fact that both parties publicize this as a strength rather than a weakness is beyond comprehension.”

Your point is well appreciated.
January 29, 2013 - 10:42 am Link to this Comment
CombatMissionary

Nothing like fighting a battle on principle on your own dime.

So you sue her. You get to pay attorney’s fees up front, plus court costs. After tens of thousands, you win. She has no assets. You go to collection. She takes the kids and leaves the country. You’ve now lost your house to fight your battle, and she’s no worse off.

You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, or money from one with no assets.
January 29, 2013 - 5:51 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
Dutch 1960

I had a similar situation. 15 year old drunk illegal with no ID, beer in the unlicensed, unregistered car. The cop released him on the spot, he drove away in his slightly damaged Pontiac, my Mazda was totaled. The cop said he would have me prosecuted if I complained. This was in 1978. This stuff has been going on a long, long time.
January 29, 2013 - 8:13 am Link to this Comment | Reply
urbanleftbehind

I guess that van full of surfers was right about Officer Poncharello!
January 29, 2013 - 8:22 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Jacobite

VDH seems hard-headed. Race and culture are related. Culture is the individual personality of a people writ large. Italians will never, in a million years, have a culture similar to Finns or Chinese. They are different peoples and will create their own cultures according to their strengths and weaknesses. Blacks have lived in the US for 350 years, and still retain their own, unique, separate, culture — not having assimilated to white culture in all their time here. The Amerinds from south of the Rio Grande are no different, except that their homelands are close and reinforcements ready to ride. Only Americans (i.e., NW Europeans) created American culture, and only Americans can assimilate successfully into it. I’m sorry, but these people coming from Latin American sh*t-holes are not like the people who immigrated here from Sweden or Germany. They are exactly as different as Sweden is from British Honduras.
January 29, 2013 - 4:24 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
BJK

I would have insisted the cop follow the law and if he didn’t taken his name and badge number in order to file a complaint. However, I would have taken the woman’s name address, relieved her of her cell phone and told her I would pursue damages so she had to leave the country.
January 29, 2013 - 5:02 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
3. Robert Haymond

Professor Hanson: I’d just like to say how worthwhile this essay on California is, as have been those published in the past. You are familiar with the state and I am not (reside in Israel) but I also derive benefit because it (the essay) also provides for a model of the welfare society and “modernism” and its tenets can be found elsewhere so what I learn from your writing is transferable to other situations. And most noticeably, I appreciate how you employ classical learning to understand current times. The most advanced thinkers and modellers of society are able to provide others with models and understandings from our own classical (Hebrew) learning to comprehend what is happening now as well as providing models for clarifying the sanest direction in which we should be heading. Incidentally, I’ve read several of your books on military strategy and warfare and hope to read still more. It’s a delicious feeling to know that there are so many more outstanding works by a particular author still available. I recall, many years ago, how sad (bereft) I felt when I had completed reading all of Doystoyevski’s works.
January 29, 2013 - 1:11 am Link to this Comment | Reply
4. STALLION

This battle is lost.
There is simply no way that the progressive crowd in California will ever wake up to the disaster that they have wrought. They will go to their graves mouthing platitudes that would make Pangloss red-faced with shame.
I’m leaving this state before memorial day, going to a part of the country that hasn’t yet been destroyed by the Left.
Unfortunately, I think we’re all living thru the time of the End of America. I fully expect that within my lifetime America will either break apart or the nation in it’s entirety will be dragged down to a third world status, broken and never able to recover it’s past glory.
My dad’s and granddad’s generation split the atom, invented the laser and transistor, and went to the moon. My generation will be the last to know what such people were like.
It troubles me profoundly that the last glowing embers of the Enlightenment will go dark during my days. I don’t see how not just this nation, but the world itself, will ever recover.
January 29, 2013 - 1:18 am Link to this Comment | Reply
fred-m

“I don’t see how not just this nation, but the world itself, will ever recover.”

The coming biowars will thin the herd. Be prepared.
January 29, 2013 - 6:27 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Bill Lawrence

The battle is never lost as long as one breaths.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter will return. It’s our obligation to minimize the terror and slaughter.
January 29, 2013 - 7:23 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Harry the Horrible

Or at least try to direct them to our enemies…
January 29, 2013 - 9:23 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Rb London

‘They will go to their graves mouthing platitudes that would make Pangloss red-faced with shame.’

Very well put.I is cognitive with these people.
January 29, 2013 - 8:05 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Oracle

“This battle is lost. There is simply no way that the progressive crowd in California will ever wake up to the disaster that they have wrought.”

Yes, but the parasite shall feed upon the host until both the host and its parasite perish. Beware!
January 29, 2013 - 11:12 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Mike G

“The battle is lost”

I do not take issue with anyone who sees things this way. Indeed, I fear that to think otherwise is just wishful thinking. Two years ago I created UCAPS , a concept that I thought might be able to wake up the private sector middle class in California.

It was based on the theory that the powerful public sector unions are the root of almost all of our problems here. The strategy was to provide a similar advocacy engine for the “rest of us” . Some of the key concepts:

1) Private sector workers and professionals actually out number public service workers – but the public unions are ultra organized and we are not.

2) The only reason they can receive such lavish benefits is because the rest of us don’t get them. If we all got such wonderful lifetime benefits for such meager production, the prices for everything would go through the roof thus wiping out any lifestyle differential. UCAPS’ first campaign would try to shut down the use of public funds for public pension and benefits shortfall unless an equivalent per capita amount was assigned to a fund available to the private sector.

3) Politicians who serve at the pleasure of public service unions can create with impunity any number of extreme environmental, social, regulatory or entitlement programs. So long as they take care of the unions, they have carte blanch to do whatever feels good. They cannot be defeated no matter how harmful their governance is to the private sector. UCAPS would seek to create a counterbalancing voter block.

There are more but unfortunately I had to let the concept go dormant in order to attend to making a living as the local economy has not been kind to me or my business. But if anyone is interested in helping, I can be reached through the site.
January 29, 2013 - 3:28 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
5. Subotai Bahadur

Dr. Hanson, we may well have lost the entire country. There is no doubt that we have lost California and it is not redeemable. I know I am not the first to say it, but it would relieve a number of people if you would move back to America.

#2 East Bay Mike

Democrats clearly feel that the suffering of people like myself, and thousands upon thousands of others, like me, is worth it. Democrats are very cruel people. We always need to remember that.

Well said, and well worth repeating. I am pretty sure that we are going to get more examples of their cruelty soon. The question is, how long will it remain unanswered?

Subotai Bahadur
January 29, 2013 - 1:19 am Link to this Comment | Reply
6. Fail Burton

Welcome to the Third World, or at least a strange fusion of success and failure we haven’t really seen in America before. Whatever it is or whatever you call it, it will spread to the other states eventually; our lax policy and politically correct attitude towards illegal immigration says so.

The problem is that this new demo shift is still in flux, and not tipping towards a positive paradigm but a negative one. If Latin America could do what old America could, they’d already have done so. Shifting millions of Hispanics here won’t mean “same as the old immigrants” but an influx of culture that still isn’t as sophisticated as mid-18th century England, which is where many of the old immigrants came from. Bolivians today still can’t invent the time-keeping at sea that was being bandied about in England in 1750. Instead they fly over cables in the Yungas valleys like a circus act. The goal? To get to the other side. A Third World solution using a 20 yr. old iron cable they can’t even reverse engineer themselves. No bridge for the exceptional.

Modern day Cairo isn’t as advanced as NYC a hundred years ago.

What will emerge is anyone’s guess but failure will be high on the list. Failure in education, social mores, individual initiative, cultural innovations, etc.

In Calif. what will increasingly emerge are upscale shanty towns clustered around the diminishing gold mines of gov’t work and Google. Eventually the goose will stop laying golden eggs and those Third Worlders will have only each other to look at, and a slightly upscale fusion of the sad polities they once sought to escape from.

But the sad truth is that, as Dr. Hanson points out, a stupid and lesser version of America is still a shining city on a hill to someone from Asyiut, Mumbai or Chiquimula. The influx won’t stop until Asyiut, Mumbai and Chiquimula are here to stay, and trust me, it will happen. The potholes of Calif. mirror the potholes of Kathmandu.

America a hundred years from now will not be a success, but a ravening failure of hordes of failed dog-eat-dog generational veterans of Third World life. Liberalism, and its racial PC which has the old guard on the run, also has success on the run and failure is lapping at the bulwarks. That is why liberalism is a suicide cult in generational and cultural terms.

The bottom line is that liberals are naive morons who live on a faith in something that quite literally does not exist, and that is the idea of the Oaxacan and Somali whose children will innovate the latest aircraft carriers and fractal geometry.

Good luck with that one. Reality dictates that those who can do a thing will have done such a thing. Potential is an illusion; history is reality, and it’s coming to America. No force in history has stopped Latin America from success but themselves. They’d already be riding donkeys in Detroit if it weren’t for the people they hate all the while they huddle up to them as close as possible, the better to not sit by the side of a road and sell razor blades and Bic pens, or deforest a jungle while taking gold out of rivers by handling mercury with their bare hands, or burning out precious metals from English TV sets in Ghana over an open fire.

This is the exceptionalism coming to America.
January 29, 2013 - 1:28 am Link to this Comment | Reply
blackelkspeaks

I find your vision of the future quite astute and highly likely. We will see a new dark age unfold, complete with monasteries and castle keeps. Like “Zardoz”.
January 29, 2013 - 3:39 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Who Knows?

Yes—Zardoz!

That movie is a must-watch treasure from the past.
January 29, 2013 - 6:55 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Tom T

“The gun is good. The penis is evil”
January 29, 2013 - 11:09 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Le Cracquere

Well, THAT doesn’t sound very Californian.
January 29, 2013 - 12:21 pm Link to this Comment
Gylippus

“…a ravening failure of hordes of failed dog-eat-dog generational veterans of Third World life…” A bleak vision indeed Fail. But it isn’t over until we give up the fight. Are you the type who will concede defeat, give up your birthright and that of your children before the battle is truly even joined?

“Liberals are naive morons…” Some liberals are quite clever. So much so that they have convinced many of us that they are liberals, when in fact they are criminal minded, life-hating, totalitarian thugs. For decades now they have been quietly infiltrating institutions of all kinds around the world. Banking, corporate, state, media, ngo, academic, artistic, scientific, you name it… Once they reached the controlling summits, they began to alter the purpose of that organization below the surface, while maintaining an respectable facade. Beneath the marxist-light platitudes you refer to are really two driving purposes: 1) to destroy the power (freedom) of the unfettered individual, and 2) to concentrate power absolutely.

“liberals” fear the free and powerful individual because they are terrified by the unbounded. They feel comfortable in narrowly defined boxes, which is why their arguments are always circular and emotional. They also fear the individual because he or she is a threat to no. 2, the concentration of power they so crave. The crave this power because it is the only thing that distracts them from the moral terror in which they live. Therefore the liberal elite who are directing the creation of the new global leviathan that we are witnessing, are the ultimate cowards.

California was one of their laboratories, and they have perfected many of their techniques there. But their script went awry in 2000. (After Reagan they had pledged to themselves that would never happen again). Gore was supposed to be up next, but Bush was elected instead, and the wave of patriotism that followed 9/11 terrified them to their core. That is why they have accelerated their program; and that is also why they are now visible to us. They hadn’t counted on that.

You see they fear us, and you can sense that fear behind everything they do. They know they are only one step away from a sudden and messy end. That is why they spend so much energy trying to lull us to sleep, or convince us we cannot win. This alone is proof that we are stronger than you think.

Is the road ahead a perilous one? Yes. There may be war. But to declare defeat at this stage is premature.
January 29, 2013 - 4:45 am Link to this Comment | Reply
cfbleachers

We make a grave error when we conflate and then confuse liberals with leftists of the small c communist ilk.

Workers Party thugs are not liberal in any sense of the word. California is now and has been for over a half century, a haven for haters of free market democracy.

A “liberal” is a raving hypocrite who espouses free speech on the inhale and makes excuses for its suppression on the exhale. The leftist doesn’t make the effort to inhale and doesn’t offer excuses for thuggery, he revels in it.

When you combine the “state party apparatus” with Workers Party thuggery, you are going to get open corruption, graft, and treason against the people. Bell, California is one that tolls for all of us.

(having moved from Chicagoland to California a decade ago, I traded a bad weather political cesspool for a nice weather one)

Owning the information stream gives us 24/7 leftist propaganda, sugar-coated with “liberal” pap and a steady stream of coverups, lies, slander and traitorism.

This state does not like this country. Leftists don’t like America. They “have not been proud” of their country in their adult lives. No matter how much they steal from her, it will never be enough until they kill her off.

Taking the Constitution and shredding it is only a debate between leftists…about speed, not degree.

Gut the military, take the gun rights, suppress the speech…this all has a familiar ring. But, the disguise…the masquerade…is hippie Bohemian, so that boiling this frog goes unnoticed as it heats up. It is not a Banana Republic, it’s a Bandana Republic.

And “liberals” are enablers for the thug leftists. Never again listen to a liberal drool on about “tolerance” or “free speech” or “freedom of religion” or “the sanctity of life” or “summary executions” or honor, integrity or loyalty. They have sacrificed all principles for the “get out of peer pressure jail” cards.

They have no longer even principles of convenience. They have none.

They have become cult followers of leftist thuggery. And, we ought to recognize who is pulling the sled and who is cracking the whip. We fail to do so at our continuing…and probably at this stage…permanent peril.
January 29, 2013 - 9:36 am Link to this Comment | Reply
lc

Well said.
January 29, 2013 - 4:56 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
lzzrdgrrl

The fight is over when it is over and your defiance of the fact and your desperate hope to reverse it won’t change it. Instead, that just piles the bodies even higher – you have heard that most of the casualties occur after the war is already lost and the outcome isn’t in doubt. What is, is to be. Perhaps this is the time the People of the Light look towards wandering in the wilderness………
January 29, 2013 - 11:10 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Fail Burton

No matter what wilderness we found the people who hate us the most would find a way to snuggle right up beside us. That’s called voting with your feet and why liberalism at its heart is an Orwellian lie. The Rainbow Coalition would drop dead of a heart attack if they suddenly found they had no conservatives to protect them even while they rail against them as the main enemy.
January 29, 2013 - 3:12 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
Charlie Griffith

Thank you. All very eloquently said.

Particularly, “If Latin America could do what old America could, they’d already have done so.”

Apply this terribly politically incorrect concept generally, broadly, to “affirmative action” thinking today. It’s all such a waste. Spinning wheels…..bust…busy…busy.
January 29, 2013 - 5:58 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
7. FeralCat

“California is a tired idea.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast.

Clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. – Mark Twain
January 29, 2013 - 1:50 am Link to this Comment | Reply
8. judge arrow

Of all the states California lends itself to impression, a collage of many scenes that form an inchoate pattern and I sense that VDH more than anyone has managed here to capture its strange asymmetry. No question something is in the air; he senses it, many of us do, something shifting around, as if everyone, save for the leftist, statist ideologues are holding their breath, waiting for the kaboom. Maybe it will take the national economy to finally hit the gong, some implosion of the cruel fantasy that now fogs Washington and most of the western world – perhaps the trip wire is in Europe. But I know of no one who does not sense we are in an economic minefield. From the mailman to the mechanic, to the workers in the citrus groves to the over 50% who take a state check – everyone senses we are in serious trouble, something in our direction is very wrong. There are simply too many out here who have no resources, no resilience, no self-reliance and will not take no and will push the political class for more and when more runs out…well, the asymmetry as described by VDH here is transitional. The physics of such instability defines chaos.
January 29, 2013 - 2:01 am Link to this Comment | Reply
fred-m

“Maybe it will take the national economy to finally hit the gong…” Keep in mind that vast emergency powers are already on the books, ready to be invoked by a Congressional declaration of emergency. This is an urban nation now and the bulk of the population is unable to hack out a living from the earth as so many could in the Great Depression. When the financial system is finally acknowledged to be dead (probably precipitated by a run on the dollar and inflation) it will only take a few weeks of chaos before people are clamoring for the government to take control.

That will only bring in a new phase of the decay, not a solution.
January 29, 2013 - 6:46 am Link to this Comment | Reply
judge arrow

Yes but likely not a lapse into genteel decay and too, government in crisis will fail to provide because of its incompetence and corruption. Consider instead desperation over a large population and what that has always brought through history – the difference being this time it will be done amidst plenty – and for that reason will be all the more desperate.
January 29, 2013 - 10:44 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Brinker

Yes, there is clearly something in the air. The zeitgeist a jittery nervous forced optimism trumpeted by an almost uniformly leftist commentariat reveling in their apparent victory while experiencing a creeping dread that this was not how it was supposed to be. When, as now, they finally elevated one of their own, a true son or daughter of the far collectivist left, things were supposed to be better, all the problems created by the capitalists swept away in a rush. Yet a decade of real wage declines continues apace even as inflation in food & energy further erodes the earnings of a middle class being slowly inexorably ground out of existence by the financial strain of supporting our new governmental aristocracy. The partisan divides grow, the friction increases exponentially and it feels as if the inflection point must be upon us.

But I think the surprise may be just how long this can continue. Consider: Europe is at least a couple of decades further into the depths of their socialist experiments than are we and Japan is, perhaps, a couple of decades ahead of us in growing their national debt and neither has collapsed. Yet. Further, every time the global economy hiccups the dollar skyrockets thus strongly implying that we can continue our national irresponsibility longer and to a much greater degree than either of the aforementioned. Still, there’s a reason hedge funds are buying tract homes in Phoenix and farm land in Kansas ….

Though the Lilliputians seem to have, at long last, succeeded in their decades-long quest to hamstring and shackle the American economy there are still green shoots … in places that can’t be seen from thirty thousand feet by the denizens of New York and California as they shuffle between SFO and JFK (the sole outposts of civilization on an otherwise barbaric continent). Here the governor has already given back to small businesses all the tax hikes imposed from DC. We’re still starting businesses, people looking for work knock on our doors daily and we hire as many as we can because we’re busy.

Looking around the nation things similarly appear far from hopeless. A vast swath of the middle has begun to compete on both tax policy and the size & scope of government. More states are refusing to voluntarily submit to Obamacare than are willingly participating fully and many will refuse to expand Medicaid thereby foregoing federal subsidy for their citizens, something I do not recall happening even once in my lifetime. Something like thirty (!) states boast both legislative and executive branches completely controlled by the party on the right to, I believe, seven on the left. And the Republican bench is not only deep but young, intelligent, articulate and possessed of ideas to gut the left. Consider, for example, Sen. Rubio’s economic appeal to reform immigration based on skills, a tactic that would likely quickly erode the economic standing of the blue state professional classes. Or Gov. Jindal’s dynamic appeal to federalism. Everywhere you look the likes of Cotton, Scott, Haley, Rubio, Jindal, et al. are advancing the ideal of liberty and, often as not, providing living embodiments of the American Dream as exemplars to groups allegedly lost forever to the political right.

And in its hubris the left is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. From a governor of Texas joking about secession, to very serious people advancing ideas as radical as Constitutional Conventions or Bills of Federalism, down to even the idea of the protean corporation that would create a nation of entrepreneurs unlikely to lay down for federal dictats while allowing businesses to evade Obamacare, radical ideas run rampant just below the national dialogue and, often as not, they’re being advanced by very serious people.

While the left celebrates in DC the right is busily rebuilding America from the ground up in those places leftists can’t be bothered to examine. I do tend to believe that the dark visions for California set forth here will likely come to pass. But rather than portents of an American decline, I tend to believe it more likely that, after a federalist restoration of our national government, California will exist as something like North Korea, a socialist Disneyland, a stark warning and vivid reminder of the consequences of failed ideas best left on the scrap heap of history.
January 29, 2013 - 9:17 am Link to this Comment | Reply
East Bay Mike

“Everywhere you look the likes of Cotton, Scott, Haley, Rubio, Jindal, et al. are advancing the ideal of liberty and, often as not, providing living embodiments of the American Dream as exemplars to groups allegedly lost forever to the political right.”

And in the case of Rubio, and probably a few of the others you listed, giving massive amnesty to illegals. Yeah, things look really bright.
January 29, 2013 - 9:28 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Brinker

Like it or not some sort of regularization of those here illegally is going to happen. Similarly, like it or not Republicans can get on board and have some slim chance of beginning to repair the damage done to their brand by the likes of Tom Tancredo and his ilk or they can adopt your view and watch, in the absolute best case, as Madame President Hillary Rodham Clinton is sworn in four year hence. Take your pick.

Besides, if you’d listen to Rubio, rather than bigoted caricatures of him, you’d realize that what he’s advocating and attempting to advance is probably about as good as it’s going to get on a bad issue for Republicans: control of the border signed off by border state governors & law enforcement as a precondition to any regularization, regularization via a path to a green card (but only after everyone already in the queue advances) rather than blanket amnesty & immediate citizenship as Obama prefers, and the option thereafter to join the queue for citizenship like everyone else. Estimates are that no one would become a voting citizen in less than fifteen years under this plan.

By then we’ll be well on the way to having solved our problems or will be so far gone that it won’t matter how these new citizens vote anyway. Given the makeup of the Senate & the present occupant of the White House the plan Rubio described yesterday would be nearly a home run.
January 29, 2013 - 10:04 am Link to this Comment | Reply
urbanleftbehind

I would add to Rubio’s bill reinterpretation of the 14th amendment and positive steps toward consumption taxes as a gradually phased-in replacement for much of the federal income tax. Thats two low-hanging fruit items that so-called GOP can ask for in return.

Wilson went off on his Prop 187 quest right as the Class of ’86 was finally swearing their citizenship oaths. Timing can be everything.
January 29, 2013 - 11:14 am Link to this Comment
9. johngetsos@gmail.com

The eventual loss of California to Narco-Mexico means the end of America as Pacific, and world, power. Unless dealt with now, I give it two to three more generations before we lose Texas as well..

Could a nineteenth century pioneer have thought this possible? Then again, it can happen. Could an ancient Greek possibly believe that his culture would no longer exist in Asia Minor?
January 29, 2013 - 3:13 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Mark

Losing California to Mexico is preferable to allowing the leftists who run this state continue on their present course. Maybe there is more hope for us from Mexico City than from Washington, DC.
January 29, 2013 - 3:37 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
10. Libertyship46

Somehow I think nobody will really notice California’s slide into abject poverty until Hollywood decides that it’s time to leave. Once that iconic industry goes, people will really notice that there is something wrong with California. And it’s already happening. More and more films and TV shows are filmed outside of California, especially in Canada. It will only be a matter of time before major studio heads decide to go someplace else, like nearby Nevada. Heck, a whole movie industry could sprout up in a place like Las Vegas. Think about it. Las Vegas already has the hotels, amenities, housing, and resources to accommodate the movie industry. I’ll bet it won’t be too soon before some smart person in Hollywood decides that California just isn’t worth the money anymore. And since Hollywood is all about dollars and cents, that day may be coming sooner rather than later. And when that day does come, California really will be finished, at lest in the eyes of the rest of the nation. And it looks like the majority of the people in that state are OK with that. Sad.
January 29, 2013 - 3:53 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Robert Haymond

What about my beloved San Francisco Giants? Where in Nevada could they play ball?
January 29, 2013 - 5:31 am Link to this Comment | Reply
urbanleftbehind

They could just add a deck to the AAA stadium or use the re-work the outdoor boxing arenas at Caesars or MGM. Looking forward to when they play the Oklahoma Dodgers, Boise Angels, Omaha A’s or Dakota Padres.
January 29, 2013 - 11:18 am Link to this Comment | Reply
askeptic

Battle Mountain!
January 29, 2013 - 11:51 am Link to this Comment | Reply
Andrew X

And then “Hollywood” will pack up and move… and set up shop in a more economically promising place, bringing all those “artists” and cultural mavens with them. They will so move because of the wreck that California became –

– And they will never, never, never, NEVER, NEVER acknowledge their own integral role in bringing that about. Never. NEH-VER!

They will not do it. Ever. Ever. They will see their own lives uprooted over it big time, and in the year 2017 they will undoubtedly blame George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and the NRA before they EVER start to question the Democratic shibboleths that have created today’s world. One can not and does not turn one’s back on one’s God, ancient… or New God on the Block… lightly. So they will not do it. CNN, and the New York Times, if they still exist, will fill them with reasons why they do not have to. Truth in such matters, of course, will be an antediluvian (literally) concept.

This post and its associated comments may be one of the most depressing reads I have ever seen on the Net. Because so many of us really believed that, no matter what, “the truth will win out in the end”. And now we start to, not wonder, but to actually see before us, the reality that that too may be a treasured shibboleth, with basis only in hope, and not reality. Huxley’s narco-populace is fantasy no longer…. it is our world.

God Help America.