72
PARTISAN REVIEW
but spiritual, the rest of America watches it disintegrate . A good deal of
sympathy exists for the ways in which God or fate has been sticking it to
California.
Even nursing its wounds, California earns no compassion from us. Its
troubles merely leave other Americans smirking.
Three decades ago, California replaced New York as the most pop–
ulous and powerful state in the nation. Now it has replaced it as the
place Americans love to hate . Where dislike of New York was limited
to the city, dislike of California runs from San Diego to Crescent City,
from Death Valley to Eureka. The one topic guaranteed to give retirees
from Akron or Butte even greater pleasure than the woes of New York
is California's demise. Maybe it shouldn't surprise me, but it does.
Orthodoxy is ugly - and California-bashing has become a true American
orthodoxy.
Trapped in discontent, Californians now look on in disbelief as their
suntanned golden children flee the golden land . Years ago, every
schoolchild knew that the rise of California was
th e
American success
story, to be recited with the same kind of worshipful familiarity as
Columbus's discovery of America (before that event was transformed
into imperialist demonism). The rise of California reflected American
ambition and optimism. The golden land's golden land, the future of
California glowed with assurance.
Inevitably, economic power turned into a struggle for cultural
hegemony. California, not New York, provided the beat to which
Americans marched in the 1960s and 1970s. Now a sense of bewilder–
ment as thick as the navel oranges hawked at roadside dominates the en–
tire state. California disaster stories are so common they threaten to be–
come a distinct genre.
The New York Til/les
runs a three-part series on
the state's problems; analysts on PBS discuss its future in the somber
voices one expects to hear at a convention of morticians . Mere para–
noia? Eastern jealousy? Or is the staid Gray Lady 's fix on California in
decline intended as relief from New York's own hard times, like the
Yiddish comedian's, "And you think
YOII
have troubles?"
That sun-spangled, fog-shrouded land has been a beacon of success
for so long that it is difficult to fix on it as victim . A rock-strewn coast
against which the rest of us allowed envy, aspiration, and ambition to
wash owed its appeal to the myths it served . California was where we
could begin again, our own ultimate America .
It
wasn't by accident that
as many of the friends I grew up with in a working-class Bronx neigh–
borhood in the 1950s ended up in L.A . and San Francisco as in Long
