Let Us Count the Ways

You like me. You like me!

--Actress Sally Field, accepting an Oscar in 1985

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No, Gidget. They hate us. They laugh at us in the comic strips, rip us on radio talk shows, bellyache about us at truck stop counters from Allentown, Pa., to Winnemucca, Nev. They hate us all across the Bible Belt, where preachers proclaim that God has undertaken to punish us for, among other sins, giving the world Carol Doda and U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono, R-Cher.

They hate us in the East Coast media centers. They hate us in the gun-rack states such as Texas and Idaho, where transplanted Californians have been scorned, taunted, run off the road even. “Don’t Cali-fornicate Oregon,” goes the bumper sticker. They really hate us in Oregon.

It’s interesting, this ubiquitous hatred of Californians. Certainly there’s little point in worrying about it. They hate us in too many ways. They hate us when it rains. They hate us when it’s dry. In deluge, they wonder what sort of idiots would build their cities on a flood plain. In drought, they wonder what sort of idiots would plant their farms in an alkali desert. The answer is simple: the same people who would stack homes up coastal canyons, risking wildfire to gain a view of the sea.

They hate us for those canyon homes. And don’t get them started on shake roofs.

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They hate us for our “culture.” It reaches boiling point on Academy Awards night. All those lapel ribbons. So many colors. So many causes. They hate us for palm trees and freeways, for cell phones and swimming pools filled with Colorado River water. McDonald’s, they’ll concede, was one California invention that amounted to something. And Disneyland had its day, until finally someone got smart and built a duplicate in Florida. But surfer lingo, shopping malls, square tomatoes and the rest--hated.

They hate us for our criminals. The common view now is that until Los Angeles introduced Crips and Bloods and graffiti, the American city was simply wonderful. Now it’s a wreck. Californians also are blamed for destroying the American family. All those bare bodies in the movies. They hate us for our lawyers, our juries and Rose Bird. Judge Wapner and Jack Webb were OK; beyond them, though, there’s nothing about California justice they like.

They hate us for smog. They also hate us for the environmental movement, fighting for deserts and mountain lions and all those, as they’re called on Rush Limbaugh, “Santa Monica issues.” On the right, they hate us for Jerry Brown. On the left, they hate us for Ronald Reagan. Where else, they say, would anyone elect a Gipper and a Moonbeam back-to-back? Idiots.

This has been a good week for hating Californians, what with mudslides in Malibu and O.J. on trial in Downtown Los Angeles. The town is overrun with representatives of the national reading and viewing public, and they come wearing smirks on their sleeves. The Simpson case, these outside experts attest, provides a capsule affirmation of all that is crazy about vacuous, vile California. In the legal lulls, they can leave court and cover the flood.

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Now about O.J. Understand, this never was simply a murder case. It’s a television show, a breakthrough melding of four popular genres: “Young and the Restless” meets “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” meets “Cops” meets “This Week in the NFL.” It is television at its best, which is to say television that people will watch even when they can’t stand it. They hate us for television.

They hate us for our good times. The perfect weather that always blesses the Rose Bowl makes snowbound Midwesterners go crazy. Same with the agricultural bounty produced in the desert valleys. Same with all those too pretty Hollywood faces all over the tube.

They hate us more, interestingly enough, during natural disasters or economic downturn. Californians know--or, at least, should know--the notion of a golden Eden always has been booster bunk, a public relations fable. It’s just a nice place to live, right? And yet, outside California, our periodic misfortunes inevitably are played as some cosmic horror. Paradise Lost. And no wonder this makes them mad. Stripped of their dreams of a perfect retirement in Palm Desert, they are left to ponder . . . what? Boise? Ft. Lauderdale?

And so take solace, ye battered and bashed Californians. This hatred, like all hatred, is as much about them as it is about us. Revisit the wisdom of Sun Tzu: “Know the enemy, know thyself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total.” They hate it when we quote ancient Chinese warriors.