CALIFORNIA
117
The hippies take out enough dust to keep them in bread and beans,
which sounds like profit to me. At any rate, it's obscurely reassuring
to
imagine them all out there, in a landscape that can validate that cow–
boy style - from the mustachios and boots and faraway gaze down to
the homemade cigarette.
But it isn't the hard-line (soft-shell?) hippies but rather the demi–
hips, the crypto-hips, the hip-symps, that dominate the scene. And here
there are some fine specimens of cultural cross-pollination. Shaggy heads
and carefully raggy clothes in glistening Corvettes and Jaguars, in fancy
bars and restaurants and good seats at the Opera, on the well-groomed
campuses of rich suburban high schools and shopping centers. One
gathers that a certain amount of pot
is
puffed behind ranch-house doors,
though the traditionalists may still hold out for wife-swapping and
polaroid parties. The most touching case for me was the teen-age boy I
saw down the street, bearded and Jesus-coifed, throwing a tennis ball
against his garage door and fielding it expertly and intently (no put-on
here) with his very elaborate and professional first-baseman's mitt.
Remembering fondly my own interior triumphs as DiMaggio and Mize,
I wonder what fantasy was this? What crossing of dreams in that king–
dom? Does the House of David still field a team? Do they count the gate
inside the Gates of Eden?
Middle-aged, middle-class culture (how insistently those terms merge
when social distinctions lose monetary bases, as in white America)
centers here on politics, or rather on the scramble to
avoid
politics that
is so distinctive of California. The take-over by hams and buffoons–
George Murphy, Ronnie Reagan, Mrs. Shirley T. Black, the backstage
counter-scurryings of such as Steve Allen and Robert Vaughn, even poor
Bing Crosby, a somnolent campaigner for Mrs. Black who had to be
bundled up from Palm Springs to get him registered in San Mateo
County - all this expresses the urgent need to make politics fun to
watch like TV, and like TV something that's safely inside the screen
and so beyond one's own participation or responsibility. Reagan, looking
drawn and
ill
and scared to death, commits daily blunders that would
ruin him (or would they?) in Massachusetts or New Jersey or Ohio.
He has gutted the state "Medi-Cal" program, allowing the
Chronicle
to
run pictures of sick and bewildered old ladies being thrust bodily from
private nursing homes and carted off to county hospitals, and moving
even the medical associations to protest; he has proposed tuition for the
University and State Colleges on which prosperous middle-class Cali–
fornians have been free-loading for generations; he
has
cut support for
mental health facilities to the bone (one meal a day for inmates, says the
Chronicle), raised
taxes and brought in the biggest budget in history,
