California Dreamin'
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
—Hotel California
Maybe that old line from the Eagles doesn’t ring as true as it did in 1976. California has always been unique, but in the ‘70s people didn’t leave here to escape the politics and the taxes. Today, many people have written off my home state as irredeemable and they are leaving in droves.
My own children have left California with no intention of coming back. This is the greatest insult. Housing is unaffordable. The schools don’t teach anything useful. The COVID policies were ridiculous. The universities are full of Chinese kids that bought perfect SAT scores. Of course my kids left.
Still, I stay. My family has been here four generations on my father’s side. Twelve generations on my mother’s side. Unlike almost every other California resident, I feel tied to the land with history that really happened. My grandfather was one of the first guys at Muscle Beach in the ‘30s, when it was cool gymnastics and not boring steroid bodies. My distant ancestor discovered gold before Sutter’s Mill, but didn’t have enough water to mine it effectively. I worked in a lab for an aerospace company during the Cold War. This is my place.
Dave Greene wrote recently about California, with Disney standing as a metaphor for the state in general. Very apt. In the ‘50s, Disney was an inspiration, and Walt himself showed a genius for stories that reinforced old-fashioned virtues. Today, Disney has become a grotesque mix of nostalgia and wokeness. Virtue signaling without any true virtue.
Dave hit a nerve…and he got me thinking about how California might be saved. Here is my response.
California has always been a destination for dreamers. The Franciscan priests behind the original string of missions had an ambitious vision of teaching the native Chumash and other tribes about God, and saving their souls. They created a Californio culture that would remain intact for a hundred years, with ranchos raising beef and growing crops. The mayordomos (Spanish ex-soldiers that managed the mission properties) lived well on huge land grants from the King of Spain. By the time that Mexico broke away from Spain, the evangelical vision of the padres was gone.
The ‘Forty-Niners came in with the obvious dream of getting rich quickly. Some did. Most didn’t. In fact, the people that benefited most from the Gold Rush were geniuses like Levi Strauss that sold goods to the newbies on the dock at San Francisco. The Gold Rush came and went quickly, but the sudden influx of people transformed everything overnight. Nature became a thing to be harvested and exploited. The oil men of the late 1800s and early 1900s simply followed this thread.
Hollywood came along and pasted a plastic veneer over Los Angeles. Many of the storytellers in Hollywood carried inspiring messages about heroes and virtue. But there’s something corrosive about all the makeup and fake buildings and fake trees and fake heroism. The people in Hollywood lost touch with reality.
Sadly, Hollywood stars are respected in society. Maybe people trust their opinions because they play virtuous characters on the screen. “Hey, Tom Cruise saved the world from that nuclear bomb, so I’m going to vote the same way as him.” But showing virtue on the set doesn’t mean that they carry the same virtues in their pocket when they go home.
Silicon Valley is the latest dream that drives California. Like all previous incarnations, the Silicon Valley Dream started as an ambition to accomplish something grand. Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Gordon Moore, and Steve Jobs made a lot of money, but they were driven by a need to create something new. That is still happening with OpenAI and SpaceX. Many other California tech companies have turned from creativity to plunder…simply squeezing as much money from customers as possible. Other companies like Tesla and Oracle have moved their headquarters to Texas, and have started the long and painful process of moving employees out of California.
What am I getting at? For 250 years, California has been a cycle of vision-casting that turns to profit-seeking. The climate kept bringing people here. I’m talking about the weather, but the climate also included the availability of capital, the talent pool, light regulation and the strong ambition of many people here.
Climate change: Some of the most attractive aspects of California’s Wild West climate are gone. The days of light regulations are over…try running a business in California, and you’ll find that you have a bull’s eye painted on your wallet. The strong ambition of hardworking “Grapes of Wrath” immigrants has been replaced by a welfare mentality.
The latest ambition in California doesn’t come in the form of genius like Walt Disney or Steve Jobs. Today, the vision followed by many people in California is a political vision---trying to change the world by forcing environmental and social laws on peple, by forcing aberrant lifestyles into the mainstream, and by sexualizing children. They’re driving the state into bankruptcy, both moral and financial. I don’t think they’ll get very far.
When I was a kid in the ‘70s, “Hotel California” was the state mental hospital, located at the bottom of Potrero Canyon. I could see the patients, watching our family station wagon as we rolled by. The song perfectly captured their despair and confusion, twisted up in their fantasies and shackled by their own decisions. But the asylum was closed in 1997, and today the mentally ill populate the city streets in California. We no longer draw a line between the sane and the insane.
All of that brings me to the point: Can California be saved? Is it an endless cycle of ambition, followed by corruption? Will the cycle continue? Or will California simply die like Detroit?
Notice how quiet Hollywood and Silicon Valley have been, after their humiliation in the national vote on November 5th and after the abject failure of the LAFD? Some of the celebrities have actually switched sides like Mark Zuckerberg, speaking in support of the new conservative movement. I have a feeling that California’s drift to the left has stopped, and it will swing back to the right again.
In fact, I don’t believe that all of the celebrities and Silicon Valley tycoons actually have left-leaning politics. I think they all say what they think people want to hear, because above all things they want to be loved.
My hope for the Golden State is that the pendulum will swing back not just on political principles like free speech, but on more fundamental beliefs. The old padres didn’t think that they were gods. They acted on behalf of a God greater than themselves. One step at a time, the California culture has shifted, to the worship of gold, to oil money, to fame, and finally to each person worshipping himself by posting ‘selfies’ constantly. What comes next?
In the Bible, the Israelites cycled from following God to worshiping golden calves and other idols. Multiple times, their civilization was destroyed, but they came back into God’s favor by simply following Him again.
The solution is clear: We need to remember the one true God that created this beautiful place and all of the people in it. California may be beyond saving. But I will be here in the wreckage, ready to start again. God help me.