George Miller’s 1981
post-apocalyptic film The Road Warrior [1] envisioned
an impoverished world of the future. Tribal groups fought over what remained of
a destroyed Western world of law, technology, and mass production. Survival
went to the fittest — or at least those who could best scrounge together the
artifacts of a long gone society somewhat resembling the present West.
In the case of the Australian
film, the culprit for the detribalization of the Outback was some sort of
global war or perhaps nuclear holocaust that had destroyed the social fabric.
Survivors were left with a memory of modern appetites but without the ability
to reproduce the means to satisfy them: in short, a sort of Procopius’s
description of Gothic Italy circa AD 540.
Our Version
Sometimes, and in some places,
in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision —
especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions
of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went
bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next [2].
Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven
out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke.
A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas,
40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work,
if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any
indication. And so on.
Our culprit out here was not
the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today [3] than
does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on
by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated
civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California
rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses
disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal
society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a
mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at
low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to
exist.
Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, [4] and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.
Terrible governance was also a
culprit, in the sense that the state worked like a lottery: those lucky enough
by hook or by crook to get a state job [5] thereby
landed a bonanza of high wages, good benefits, no accountability, and rich
pensions that eventually almost broke the larger and less well-compensated
general society. When I see hordes of Highway Patrolmen writing tickets in a
way they did not before 2008, I assume that these are revenue-based, not
safety-based, protocols — a little added fiscal insurance that pensions and
benefits [6] will not be cut.
A coarsening of popular
culture [7] — a nationwide phenomenon — was intensified, as
it always is, in California. The internet, video games, and modern pop culture
translated into a generation of youth that did not know the value of hard work
or a weekend hike in the Sierra. They didn’t learn how to open a good
history book or poem, much less acquire even basic skills such as mowing the
lawn or hammering a nail. But California’s Generation X did know that they were
“somebody” whom teachers and officials dared not reprimand, punish, prosecute,
or otherwise pass judgment on for their anti-social behavior. Add all that up
with a whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast that was more worried
about wind power, gay marriage, ending plastic bags in the grocery stores —
and, well, you get the present-day Road Warrior culture of California.
Pre- and Post-Modern
I am writing tonight in Palo
Alto after walking among nondescript 1,500 square-foot cottages of seventy-year
vintage that sell for about $1.5-2 million and would go in a similar
tree-shaded district in Fresno or Merced for about $100,000. Apparently, these
coastal Californians want to be near Stanford and big money in Silicon Valley.
They also must like the fact that they are safe to jog or ride bikes in skimpy
attire and the general notion that there is “culture” here amid mild weather.
I suppose when a car pulls out in front of you and hits your bumper on
University Avenue, the driver has a license, registration, and insurance — and
this is worth the extra million to live here. My young fellow apartment
residents like to jog in swimming suits; they would last one nanosecond doing
that on De Wolf Avenue outside Selma.
Survival?
Meanwhile, 200 miles and a
world away, here are some of the concerns recently in the Valley. There is now
an epidemic of theft from tarped homes undergoing fumigation. Apparently as
professionals tent over homes infested with termites, gangs move into the
temporarily abandoned houses to burrow under the tarps and loot the premises [8] —
convinced that the dangers of lingering poisonous gas are outweighed by the
chance of easy loot. Who sues whom when the gangbanger prying into the
closet is found gassed ? When I get termites, I spot treat myself with
drill and canisters; even the professional services warn that they can kill off
natural pests, but not keep out human ones.
No one in the Central Valley
believes that they can stop the epidemic of looting copper wire. I know the
local Masonic Hall is not the Parthenon, but you get the picture of our modern
Turks prying off the lead seals of the building clamps of classical temples.
Protection is found only in
self-help. To stop the Road Warriors from stripping the copper cable from your
pump or the community’s street lights, civilization is encouraged to put in a
video camera, more lighting, more encasement, a wire protective mesh — all
based on the premise that the authorities cannot stop the thieves and your
livelihood is predicated on the ingenuity of your own counter-terrorism
protocols. But the thief is always the wiser: he calculates the cost of
anti-theft measures, as well as the state’s bill in arresting, trying, and
rehabilitating him, and so wagers that it is cheaper for all of us to let him
be and just clean up his mess.
Reactionary Dreaming
In around 1960, rural
California embraced modern civilization. By that I mean both in the trivial and
fundamental sense. Rural dogs were usually vaccinated and licensed — and so
monitored. Homes were subject to building codes and zoning laws; gone were the
privies and lean-tos. Streets were not just paved, but well-paved. My own
avenue was in far better shape in 1965 than it is now. Mosquito abatement
districts regularly sprayed stagnant water ponds to ensure infectious disease
remained a thing of our early-20th-century past. Now they merely
warn us with West Nile Virus alerts. Ubiquitous “dumps” dotted the landscape,
some of them private, ensuring, along with the general code of shame, that
city-dwellers did not cast out their old mattresses or baby carriages along the
side of the road. It seems the more environmental regulations, the scarcer the
dumps and the more trash that litters roads and private property.
I walk each night around the
farm. What is the weirdest find? A nearby alleyway has become a dumping place
for the rotting corpses of fighting dogs. Each evening or so, a dead dog (pit
bulls, Queensland terriers) with a rope and plenty of wounds is thrown up on
the high bank. The coyotes make short work of the remains. Scattered about are
several skeletons with ropes still around their necks. I suppose that at about
2 a.m. the organizers of dog fights drive in and cast out the evenings’ losers.
I have never seen such a thing in 58 years (although finding plastic bags with
dead kittens in the trash outside my vineyard was a close second). Where is
PETA when you need them? Is not the epidemic of dog- and cock-fighting in
central California a concern of theirs? (Is berating in Berkeley a corporation
over meat-packing a bit more glamorous than running an education awareness
program about animal fights in Parlier?)
Education, Education,
Education…
The public schools were once
the key to California’s ascendance [9].
Universal education turned out well-prepared citizens who were responsible for
California’s rosy future — one based on an excellent tripartite higher
education system of junior colleges, state colleges, and universities;
sophisticated dams and irrigation systems; and a network of modern freeways and
roads. In the private sphere, the culture of shame still prevailed, at least in
the sense that no one wanted his 16-year-old son identified in the papers (with
his home address no less) as arrested for breaking and entering. And such crime
was rare. Rural California was a checkerboard of 40- and 80-acre farms, with
families that were viable economic units and with children who worked until
dark after school. It is hard to steal when you must disc ten acres after
baseball practice.
I think it is a fair
assessment to say that all of the above is long past. Since about 1992, on the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing, California ranks
between 41 and 48 in math and science, depending on the year and the particular
grade that is assessed. About half of the incoming freshmen at the California
State University system — the largest public university in the world — are not
qualified to take college courses, and must first complete “remediation” to attain
a level of competence that was assumed forty years ago in the senior year of
high school. The students I taught at CSU Fresno were far better prepared in
1984 than those in 2004 are; the more money, administrators, “learning
centers,” and counselors, the worse became the class work.
I finally threw out my old
syllabi last month: the 1985 Greek Literature in Translation course at CSU
Fresno seemed to read like a Harvard class in comparison to my 2003 version
with half the reading, half the writing, and all sorts of directions on how to
make up missed work and flunked exams. It wasn’t just that I lost my standards,
but that I lost my students who could read.
Life in the Whatever Lane
Does any of that matter? Well,
yes. Those who are not educated soon inherit the reins of public
responsibility. In practical terms, the symptoms are everywhere. I now expect
that my county property tax returns will have common errors, from the spelling
of my name or address to the particular acreage assessed.
When entering the bank, I
expect people not just to not speak English, but occasionally not to write any
language, and thus put a mark down, in Old West fashion, to cash their checks.
When I deal with a public
agency, I assume the person on the opposite end of the counter or phone will
not to be able to transact the requested service, or at least not be able to
transact any other service other than the narrow one trained for. Calling any
public agency is to receive a recording and then an incoherent order to press
numerous buttons that lead to more recordings. Woe to the poor fool who walks
into a Department of Motor Vehicles office on an average day, seeking to obtain
a copy of his pink slip or find a registration form. The response is “get a
number,” “make an appointment,” “get in line,” “wait,” or “see a supervisor.”
Cocooning
I quit not just riding a bike
on the rural avenues where I grew up, but walking upon them as well. Why? There
is a good chance (twice now) of being bitten not just by a loose dog without
vaccination, but by one whose owner is either unable to communicate or vanishes
when hunted down. And then there are the official agencies whose de
facto policy is that our ancestors did such a good job eradicating
rabies that we can more or less coast on their fumes.
Forty years ago I assumed
rightly that cars parked along the side of the road were out of gas or needed
repair. Now? I expect that the cars are much more reliable, but the owner of
any car parked outside my house is either stealing fruit, casing the joint,
using drugs, or inebriated. Last week I explained to a passer-by why he could
not steal the peaches from my trees; he honestly thought not only that he
could, but that he almost was obligated to.
What makes The Road
Warrior so chilling a metaphor is the combination of the premodern and
postmodern. While utter chaos reigns in rural California, utter absurdity
reigns inside the barricades, so to speak, on the coast. So, for example, San
Franciscans will vote on whether to
blow up [10] the brilliantly engineered Hetch Hetchy water
project (I bet they won’t vote yes), more or less the sole source of water for
the San Francisco Bay Area. The National Park Service debates blowing up
historic stone bridges over the Merced River in Yosemite Valley — as
hyper-environmentalists assume that they have so much readily available power
and water from prior generations at their fingertips that they have the luxury
of dreaming of returning to a preindustrial California [11]. Of
course, they have no clue that their romance is already reified outside Madera,
Fresno, or Bakersfield.
High-Speed Madness
Take the new high-speed rail
project, whose first link is designated to zoom not far from my house. An
empiricist would note there is already an Amtrak (money-losing) line from
Fresno to Corcoran (home of Charles Manson). There is now no demand to use
another lateral (getting nowhere more quickly?). There is no proof that
California public agencies — from universities to the DMV — can fulfill their
present responsibilities in such a way that we would have confidence that new
unionized state workers could run such a dangerous thing as high-speed rail (e.g.,
if we can’t keep sofas and washing machines out of the local irrigation ponds,
why do we think we could keep them off high-speed rail tracks? Do we think we
are French?).
If one were to drive on the
99, the main interior north-south “highway” from the Grapevine to Sacramento,
one would find places, like south of Kingsburg, where two poorly paved,
potholed, and crowded lanes ensure lots of weekly accidents. Can a state that
has not improved its ancestors’ highway in 50 years be entrusted to build high-speed
mass transit? Can a state presently $16 billion in arrears be expected to
finance a $100 billion new project? Can a state that ranks 48th in
math field the necessary personnel to build and operate such a postmodern link?
We Are Scary
One of the strangest things
about Road Warrior was the ubiquity of tattooed, skin-pierced tribal people
with shaved heads and strange clothes. At least the cast and sets seemed
shocking some thirty years ago. If I now sound like a reactionary then so be
it: but when I go to the store, I expect to see not just the clientele, but
often some of the workers, with “sleeves” — a sort of throwback to red-figure
Athenian vase painting where the ink provides the background and the few
patches of natural skin denote the silhouetted image. And stranger still is the aging Road Warrior [12]: these
are folks in their forties who years ago got pierced and tattooed and aged with
their sagging tribal insignia, some of them now denoting defunct gangs and
obsolete popular icons.
I am not naïve enough (as
Horace’s laudator temporis acti ) to wish to return to the
world of my grandfather (my aunt was crippled for life with polio, my
grandmother hobbled with the scars and adhesions from an unoperated-on,
ruptured appendix, my grandfather battled glaucoma each morning with vials of
eye drops), when around 1960, in tie and straw hat, he escorted me to the
barber. The latter trimmed my hair in his white smock and bowtie, calling me at
eight years old Mr. Hanson.
Like Road Warrior, again,
what frightens is this mish-mash of violence with foppish
culture [13], of official platitudes and real-life chaos: the
illiterate and supposedly impoverished nonetheless fishing through the
discounted video game barrel at Wal-Mart; the much-heralded free public transit
bus zooming around on electrical or natural gas power absolutely empty of
riders, as the impoverished prefer their Camrys and Civics; ads encouraging new
food stamp users as local fast-food franchises have lines of cars blocking
traffic on the days when government cards are electronically recharged; the
politician assuring us that California is preeminent as he hurries home to his
Bay Area cocoon.
On the Frontier
I find myself insidiously
adopting the Road Warrior survival code. Without any systematic design, I
notice that in the last two years I have put a hand pump on my grandfather’s
abandoned well in the yard and can pump fresh water without electricity. I put
in an outdoor kitchen, tied into a 300-gallon propane tank, that can fuel a
year of cooking. I am getting more dogs (all vaccinated and caged); for the
first time in my life I inventoried all my ancestors’ guns in all the closets
and found shotguns, deer rifles, .22s etc.
I have an extra used pickup I
chose not to sell always gassed in the garage. For all sorts of scrapes and
minor injuries, sprains, simple finger fractures, etc., I self-treat — anything
to avoid going into the local emergency room (reader, you will too, when Obamacare kicks in [14]). And
the more I talk to neighbors, the more I notice that those who stayed around
are sort of ready for our Road Warrior world. At night if I happen to hear
Barack Obama on the news or read the latest communiqué from Jerry Brown, the
world they pontificate about in no way resembles the world I see: not the
freeways, not the medical system, not the educational establishment, not law
enforcement, not the “diversity,” not anything.
Hope and Change
Yet I am confident of better
days to come. Sometimes I dream of the booming agricultural export market.
Sometimes hopes arise with reports of gargantuan new finds of gas and oil in
California. At other times, it is news of closing borders, and some progress in
the assimilation of our various tribes. Sometimes a lone brave teacher makes
the news for insisting that her students read Shakespeare. On occasion, I think
the people silently seethe and resent their kingdom of lies, and so may prove
their anger at the polls, perhaps this November.
One looks for hope where one
can find it.
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-the-road-warrior-is-here/
URLs in this post:
[1] The Road
Warrior: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000OCZD5G/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000OCZD5G
[2] is rumored to be next: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/07/28/is-fresno-californias-next-bankrupt-city/
[3] looks a lot better today: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/beck-tv-hiroshima-vs-detroit-which-city-really-embraced-the-american-dream/
[4] has given up on
assimilation, integration, the melting pot,: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004DUMW6I/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004DUMW6I
[5] to get a state job: http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6677.html
[6] that pensions and
benefits: http://brothersjuddblog.com/archives/2012/07/because_thats_where_the_money_.html
[7] coarsening of popular
culture: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/07/27/are-movies-to-blame-for-aurora/
[8] and loot the premises: http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=8671213
[9] California’s ascendance: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/california-there-it-went/
[10] will vote on whether to
blow up: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/07/09/the-return-of-the-dam-busters/
[11] a preindustrial
California: http://tinyurl.com/26sl63k
[12] the aging Road Warrior: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2005/10/08/quote-of-the-day-21/
[13] mish-mash of violence
with foppish culture: http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_oh_to_be.html
[14] Obamacare kicks in: http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/020886.html
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