CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Handicapped by Our Attitude : Railroads, expensive highways, military bases, water projects--the feds don’t owe us, the feds created us.

When I lived in New York in the 1970s and the appallingly run city government finally tottered into bankruptcy, Mayor Abraham Beame went to Washington to request a loan from President Ford and got a reply that the New York Daily News conjured into the most memorable headline of the decade: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

It was a wonderful banner, capturing the arrogance, self-absorption and acute denial that prompted most Americans to resent, if not detest, New York. So what if it was the financial and cultural capital of the modern universe? Why should American taxpayers rescue a city with 362,849 full-time employees on the public payroll in 1974 that considered itself too broke to replace its Depression-era subway cars or fix an elevated highway that once swallowed a Mercedes?

Recently, I came across a remark from a Los Angeles politician that may be destined for the same immortality as that New York headline. Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills) was explaining her tireless opposition to even a modest and temporary state sales-tax surcharge earmarked for earthquake relief. “Californians are taxed to death,” she said. “The feds are going to have to come through for us. The President owes us. . . . They’ve taken our military bases and all those jobs. They’re going to have to start giving something back to California.”

Stop that assemblywoman! The rest of the country resents us enough already. Don’t they look out here and see a paradise: our heart-stopping coastline, the Sierra Nevada and the redwoods, the fabulous food, the movie stars, the sex- and drug-suffused lives that people lead in places like Fullerton?

Actually, during a couple of recent trips to the heartland where many of us originated, I detected, for the first time, some genuine pity for California, which Boland threatens to zap in the bud. Some Americans have finally recognized California for what it is--a phony paradise whose habitation involves substantial risk and, when disaster inevitably strikes, tremendous upheaval and cost. Four of the 10 most expensive “natural” disasters in U.S. history--the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes, the Oakland fire and last autumn’s Southland wildfire siege--have occurred here within the past five years. But how long can you pity a place where misfortunes never cease and are the result, in large part, of others’ generosity and a peculiar, nativist willfulness?

The feds owe us? California is in many ways an invention of federal largess. The first paradise seekers who arrived here came mainly by rail, on transcontinental track whose construction was subsidized by the frontier government’s principal currency, land.

Once here, the seekers saw what paradise lacked--water--and so, with the secret connivance of the federal government, Los Angeles managed to snaffle lots of it from the Owens Valley.

When that source was soon over-tapped, the federal government erected Hoover Dam, then the largest on Earth, mainly for California’s benefit. Later, it built part of the State Water Project so Southern California could grow more crowded and rich. In case agriculture felt slighted, the despised feds built the Central Valley Project, which is still the planet’s grandest webwork of dams and aqueducts, and much of a levee system along the Sacramento River that rivals the Mississippi’s. CVP irrigation water is ludicrously subsidized, at the expense of many struggling farmers in the South and Midwest; the levees and flood control were essentially free.

Taxpayers elsewhere paid for most of California’s interstate highway system, which was even more expensive that it is extensive. A single mile of the Century Freeway--a multilane, elevated, earthquake-proof monstrosity that was reamed through expensive, if decrepit, real estate--cost almost as much as interstates laid across some small states, even if you factor inflation. Washington “took” so many of our military bases because it gave us so many, even before the defense spending of the Reagan and Bush years, which laid out a smorgasbord worth probably $200 billion to Southern California alone.

So what do we want now? Many of our politicians, including the governor, subscribe to the interesting notion that the rest of the country should pay whenever California burns up or dries up or drowns or falls apart. After Northridge (and despite much grumbling by members from geologically boring states), Congress voted us $8.6 billion in emergency relief, and now the Federal Emergency Management Agency is sitting down to the 360,000 applications for assistance it has received to date (an all-time record, despite two horrendous recent hurricanes). The wildfires prompted further aid from Washington, as did the drought, the floods and the $850-million crop freeze in 1990 that no one remembers any more.

What will happen when--as many seismologists predict sometime in the next 30 years--the Hayward Fault under Oakland and Berkeley slips, causing as much as $240 billion worth of destruction? Will Boland’s counterparts say that American taxpayers should rebuild everything? What happens when the Big One jostles several trillion dollars’ worth of real estate down here?

If Californians wish to preserve whatever national goodwill they still own, they should force their candidates (who are also asking for more legitimate aid to deal with such burdens as illegal immigration) to address these questions. They might also ask who is subsidizing whom within the state. Why, for example, should homeowners at low fire risk subsidize others--which they do, through assigned-risk insurance pools--who insist on building in the worst wildfire habitat on Earth?

There is, of course, much to be said for the government’s huge investments in California. We dominate some of the economy’s strongest sectors--aerospace, agriculture, entertainment. We may soon represent a fifth of the gross national product; all of that productivity and wealth keep most of us here.

But Californians, like New Yorkers in the 1970s, have developed not so much a bad attitude as a blind attitude, which is worse. In the wake of the wildfire siege, I listened to a radio talk-show host congratulate a caller who was determined to rebuild a Malibu home that he had already rebuilt after the wildfire of 1970. Now that, said the host, is rugged individualism. It’s a good thing they don’t broadcast such nonsense to Iowa, where they see it as sending taxes to Sean Penn.