COLUMN ONE : California’s Image: Fad to a Funk : In good times and bad, much of America has envied what it viewed as this state’s idyllic lifestyle. These days, outsiders perceive far less promise in the Promised Land.

So you say these are glum days in California. That is what you are saying, isn’t it, California? Woe is you?

Because that’s the baleful image now permeating the national consciousness. The great good life of sun and fun in California is fast becoming a matter discussed by other Americans--with a mix of fear and delight--in the past tense.

Consider the newspaper headlines that bombard America, week in and week out:

California: End of the Dream . . . Golden State Losing its Gleam . . . A Lofty Past; A Fragile Future . . . Surfin’ USA meets Urban Decay . . . California Dream turns into a Nightmare . . . State of Collapse . . . How Hate Can Undo a World . . . Fear and Hopelessness.

From this fertile yield of melancholy, Americans share with Californians an appetite to understand. What do we make of contemporary California, this place long regarded as America’s extravagant bridgehead to our national destiny?

“The sense of drive, creativity, originality and satisfaction that has characterized California has diminished. The light seems to be out, or if not out at least dim,” says Robert Ady, president of PHH Fantus of Chicago, an international management consulting firm. The company specializes in business relocation and advises governments on economic development.

Ady’s advice? In 50% of the cases nationwide when businesses yearn to move onto greener pastures, Ady tells them to stay put. But in 80% of the cases in California, he says: “We tell them to leave. The grass is greener elsewhere.”

How bad do Americans want to believe it is? This autumn, George M. Salem of Prudential Securities in New York issued his third consecutive bearish report on California banking with a prediction that bad times are only beginning.

“California appears to be in the early stages of a long economic slide,” he wrote in October. He predicts for the state what befell Texas during the oil bust of the 1980s--only worse.

“The quality of life in California is a pervasive negative. . . . Pollution of air and water, unbearable traffic tie-ups, rising crime, limited public transportation and the deterioration of public schools are only some of the facts that cause residents to leave and outsiders to choose to live elsewhere. This did not exist in Texas.”

But finding someone with a diagnosis of malaise is the easy part. The only thing as commonplace as a discontented Californian is an outsider happy to pile on.

This, however, may be momentary.

Some deep thinkers believe that California, far from relinquishing its position as a national leader, is actually blazing a trail at its usual furious pace, but in a new, uncertain direction.

“California is still on the cutting edge. The Angst of the future is California now,” says Jim Dator, a futurist at the University of Hawaii and president of the World Futures Studies Federation.

“California embodies first and most severely what is happening to the United States itself. And the awareness will be sinking in elsewhere soon. . . .

“The goals and beliefs that Americans had about themselves are no longer tenable. And as a society, we are no longer prepared intellectually or spiritually for the world we actually live in. Our reaction is to want to go somewhere where we can hunker down and pretend we will find peace--somewhere the way we imagine things were, or should be.”

That view is not necessarily gloomier than those of a great number of other Americans, judging from scores of people interviewed for this article, including citizens from one coast to the other, assorted social scientists, economists and other authorities in various disciplines.

Any subject as large as the image of America’s largest and most image-conscious state naturally produces a kaleidoscopic range of opinion. But many of those interviewed held one more or less common view.

Call it America’s revenge. Or a national-size serving of just deserts.

“Number one, over the years Americans have come to regard California as the most promised of the Promised Land. Number two, they have come to resent it,” says Ray Brown, former chairman of the Pop Culture Department of Bowling Green University in Ohio.

“They have looked forward to your troubles. You’ve had it too good. People here can say to themselves for the first time, we’re better off than you. You don’t have to go to California, or New York, to make it anymore.”

Some social scientists believe such feelings were intensified when Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush sought to diminish federal influence in national affairs. One result was increased economic and cultural competition among states and regions. That makes California’s difficulties not the nation’s troubling loss but some other state’s happy gain.

Another common view expressed around America is that today’s California seems to project a two-dimensional image. The state is a happening place, yes. But what is happening is bad. The economy has declined and social intolerance risen.

“I hear there is a six-month waiting list to get a moving van out of Los Angeles,” says Christopher Swift, a Baltimore business executive.

Of course that isn’t true. (Shortly after the riots The Times reported a shortage of moving vans and trailers. But now, called at random, Allied Van Lines says it can be at your house tomorrow, if necessary.)

Still, the image remains. Just as Californians can tell of friends who are oh-so-serious about strategies to “get out,” Americans elsewhere who hear those stories make them larger and more ominous in every telling. And the drumbeat of headlines tends to make almost any story believable.

No one needs to enumerate for Californians their legitimate troubles--the state’s weakened economy or the unsettling frictions among its diverse peoples, for example.

But Californians might be surprised to know how odd it seems to outsiders that--except for entertainment television--so few important voices challenge the spreading image of distress.

Many say that the state lacks only some luck and a credible champion, someone with the capacity to make Californians feel invigorated about their state. Mayor Edward I. Koch, for instance, helped with that kind of psychological lift in New York City during its 1980s revival; Reagan spread his feel-good message across the middle classes of America during his presidency.

“Part of it is a major (public relations) problem,” says Robert Erb, a relocation consultant with Runzheimer International in Rochester, Wis. “The mystique of California is still there. A lot of people are still interested in California. . . . And it certainly wouldn’t do any harm if someone would speak out on its behalf.”

Americans outside the state, for instance, hear few good words or productive thoughts about the virtues and opportunity of cultural and ethnic diversity. Those few images of shoulder-to-shoulder community cooperation after the Los Angeles riots are remembered with vivid intensity just because they ran so strongly counter to all the other disquieting portrayals.

But often, even time-honored advantages like California’s mild weather (no small matter to the family shoveling snow in Duluth for weeks on end) have been overshadowed by endless portrayals of smog, congestion and drought. Instead the very ability of California’s control of its own destiny is called to doubt.

“Take Los Angeles, there is a major problem of governance and leadership. Who is there to pull this whole urban sprawl together and make sense of it?” says Ed Mariciniak, president of Chicago’s Institute of Urban Life.

For all this, however, some experts believe America is making too much of the tarnish on the Golden State.

“It all sounds to me like whistling in the dark. People like to think things are worse somewhere else. The conditions in California aren’t unique. The economy is tattered around the edges, but misery loves company. We could have a riot in Chicago at any moment. . . . You put somebody in the center of the Westside of Chicago or in (South-Central) Los Angeles and they’d be hard pressed to tell the difference,” says Phil Nyden, chairman of the sociology department at Chicago’s Loyola University.

Likewise, he continues, it is simple enough to see--for those who want to see--where California remains a progressive national trendsetter.

“Just look at the election of two women U.S. senators. We elected only one in Illinois, and that was something in itself.”

Even more bullish are people like Steven Rosenstein, who is president of Fitigues, a Chicago-based casual wear company. He has doubled his sales in California this year by avoiding trendy surf-look styles and appealing to a more mature, stable buyer.

Where better, he asks, to sell casual clothes than California? “Here in Chicago right now, it’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon, it’s dark and gloomy. We’re not going to be able to go to some restaurant at the beach.”

Dorothy Fuller, director of the Apparel Center, a complex of clothing stores in the huge Merchandise Mart in Chicago, says: “California is still considered a spot where cutting edge fashion begins. They’ve had a free-wheeling, creative kind of society. There’s still a fashion direction coming from California.”

Another view of the situation is that California finds itself nationally in the same changing position as America does globally. It remains in the forefront, but no longer by so great a distance.

“We still turn to California for venture capital. We still turn to California for cutting-edge ways to commercialize new inventions. It remains one of the best laboratories for new ways in doing things,” says Tom Fitzpatrick, general counsel for ARCH Development Corp., the venture capital arm of the University of Chicago and its Argonne Laboratories. The difference now, he continues, “is that Illinois and other states are coming up fast on the outside track. California used to have a lock on ways of taking genius and turning it into business. But it seems California is having difficulties in accomplishing what it wants to do, and that increases opportunities for us.”

Californians have always indulged in fads. And fad cannot be discounted as a factor in California’s troubled national image.

Just the shared feeling of living in a winning place has long nourished Californians and fueled the state’s boom. One of the best things about California life over the years has been its self-sustaining faith that it was California and something special. Everyone knew it.

But fads change. One need only look to a place like Washington state, which today is faddishly desirable. In urban areas of Washington, housing prices are high, development pressures great, congestion difficult, crime high and weather inhospitable. Mention this to most residents, however, and they will tell you their state remains almost mythically appealing to other Americans.

Californians, by contrast, transmit the shades of a fad into a funk--and this attitude about the state has spread nationwide. Thus, a 40-minute commute in Los Angeles is known everywhere in America as nightmarish, but a similar commute in Seattle is hardly discussed in conversations about quality of life.

Part of this gloom may be generational, some of America’s thinkers say.

Baby boomers, the large, restive post-World War II generation born between 1945 and 1965, have set the trends in California for many years. They dropped out, drove Volkswagen vans, wore peace symbols, called themselves hippies and fought about Vietnam; they dropped back in, switched to BMWs and Rolexes, were called yuppies and fought for real estate. Now in the middle-age of Aquarius, the thinking goes, California’s boomers are restless again. And that may not be entirely bad.

“I look very positively on California right now. What I see is a very active and energetic spiritual search, even a frantic search, for meaning beyond materialism,” says William Lesher, president of the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago.

Younger Americans may find California more appealing. Perhaps this is because youth are less influenced by the depressed investment potential of real estate and the mainstream news accounts but more by entertainment television.

“To young people, California still means excitement. It retains its image as an exciting, wonderful place--exciting and a little out of control,” says Richard Morrill, a geographer at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Chance encounters with Americans tend to substantiate this theory of generational difference.

A middle-aged Salt Lake City man cancels his annual golfing vacation to Oceanside. “Not this year, you know--California,” he explains. But a young Seattle woman, swathed in muffler and Gore-Tex against the Northwest rain, is rhapsodic about her visit to Southern California: “It was wonderful, people were running around in tank tops, eating lunch outside.”

In the alternative Seattle Weekly newspaper, Bruce Barcott, a writer in his 20s, shows no regard at all for the gloomy skies over California. He recently noted the emergence of entertainment profiles in the once staid and now remade New Yorker magazine.

He writes, “The new New Yorker signals a more serious shift in the cultural life of America. It marks the final capitulation of New York to Los Angeles.”

Times researcher Doug Conner in Seattle assisted with this story.