A LOS ANGELES TIMES - FINANCIAL TIMES SPECIAL REPORT : The Next California--The State’s Economy in the Year 2000 : The Next California / THE STATE’S ROLE IN THE WORLD ECONOMY : ESSAY : California’s New Image: Reality
A State of Mind California, the land where the mouse is king and where swiping a pizza can spell life in jail for a three-time offender, is embedded in the world’s imagination. It is the land where dreams are born, lived and occasionally translated into nightmares.
If you are unfortunate enough to be an inhabitant of Someplace Else, the chances are you nurture in your subconscious at least one of the conflicting images of West Coast life.
First, picture Siliwood, a sunbaked patio peopled by stars and their agents sipping daiquiris and sharing scripts beneath the envious gaze of computer geeks burning to join the grown-ups. We read of Silicon Valley’s flirtation with Hollywood, spasmodically consummated this summer in San Jose, Los Angeles and The Biz’s third capital, New York. The most glittering marriage of them all, Walt Disney Co. to Capital Cities/ABC Inc., brought the most potent entertainment conglomerate in the universe home to Dopey Drive, in not-so-beautiful downtown Burbank.
The main mouse, Mickey, touches the thoughts, and, perhaps, the pockets of nearly everyone on the planet. Another mouse, attached at one end to a PC keyboard and at the other to one-and-a-half generations of global village kids, is advancing. Together, the all-conquering industries they represent will win the world for mice, and bring new gold to California. No wonder the state’s motto is “Eureka.”
The second image, Silly State, has bosomy “Baywatch” youngsters swirling along San Vicente Boulevard on roller-blades. They are refugees from, or potential recruits to, weird cults and desert temples. Their parents are sun-bronzed sporty men and women trapped in eternal middle-aged youth. Everyone drives a 4x4 cross-country vehicle, but never too far from the hot tub.
Specimens of such curiosities can be found in most parts of California, as elsewhere. They are the froth, bubbling on the upside vision of the land of opportunity. But visible through the froth runs a steady stream of pioneers, sturdy individuals, inventive, resilient, hard-working American, or new-American, men and women, determined to succeed.
The question is whether the inherent optimism of this breed has been damaged by what all agree was the state’s worst recession on record--that of 1990-93. Some even describe events as the first real slump ever to interrupt a sequence of booms that started with gold and moved on through oil, Hollywood and defense to Silicon Valley.
You could answer this by referral to a third image: that of the Cursed State, the land of doom. This is the territory of Darth Vader. It contains decaying cities, eye-stinging air, nightmarish traffic, thuggish, racist cops, race riots, the grotesqueries of the O.J. Simpson trial, earthquakes, bush fires, scarce water.
It is ungovernable, untaxable, reactionary. If the fumes do not kill you, a gang or a mugger will. The schools are deteriorating, university budgets have fallen in real terms for seven years in succession. The days of economic growth are over. The Mexican peso has collapsed. Recession, or something very like it, is here to stay. Business is relocating; the best Californians are moving to Utah and New Mexico.
This is the picture savored by outsiders. It enables them to satisfy themselves that they are, after all, no less blessed than Californians. But it cannot stand up as a faithful representation of the state. None of the dream stereotypes--Siliwood, Silly State, Darth Vader Land--quite fits. These are media-generated images, suited to the world of Believe It or Not.
To most Californians, as to most of us from Someplace Else, the reality is rather more mundane.
We should start close to the earth. The San Joaquin Valley is the market garden and the vineyard of the United States. But farming is only part of the picture. If California were a country its gross domestic product would be the world’s seventh largest. There are good jobs to be had in tourism now that the aftershocks of the 1994 Northridge earthquake have faded away. Even though the local recovery from recession is sluggish, exports of goods from other states are pouring through the ports. High technology--diverted from rocketry to more peaceable products--professional services, and the entertainment and multimultiples of the media business hold the keys to future growth.
The state is favored by geography, which has placed it midway between two trading nations, Mexico and Canada. Its ports face west, toward Japan, China, Korea, Hong Kong--indeed all the Asian tigers and cubs. The state’s ethnic diversity contributes to this potential source of measureless wealth.
Californians are right to worry about the growth of their state’s population, the potential for ethnic conflict, the unwillingness of the middle classes to pay taxes, the perils of direct democracy as expressed through ballot initiatives and the relative decline in government expenditure on education, not to mention the unrelenting pressure on highway construction, public transport and other elements of the infrastructure.
It may be that the high growth rates and good wages of the 1950s and 1960s will not return. Anxious Americans everywhere certainly fear as much. That could explain why the intellectual and political climate has changed, perhaps irreversibly. The suspicion of government runs deep. California has patents on the taxpayers’ revolt. Privately funded toll roads, as in Orange County, may join private schools, security services and prisons. But by the very nature of things, private roads and schools are commonly built to link and serve already affluent areas where the returns are likely to be best.
The danger is presented in Blade Runner-speak by local futurologist J. Ian Morrison as the evolution of “a high-tech executive city where the well-off live in a fortress environment, and beneath them . . . is a multiethnic gong show which is both unsafe and unpleasant.”
The likely shape of multicultural California is still an unknown. We can see Asians doing well academically, Hispanics working hard to improve their quality of life, African Americans dispersing in despair. So far the melting pot is not melting, not the way it did when European immigrants stormed the East Coast at Ellis Island the beginning of the 20th Century. To the visitor, it seems as if Californians have perfected apartheid without the use of force. Koreans live among themselves; Mexicans in their areas; whites in theirs. There is some mixing in schools, and at the universities, but exclusivity is still apparent.
Meanwhile, strong political undercurrents threaten future ethnic harmony. The mainly white voters of California have turned against illegal immigration and affirmative action. This is not the view of the growing non-white population of Californians, but most of them don’t vote.
There are viable arguments on both sides of both issues, but taken together the two movements can be summed up in two ominous words: white backlash.
These are the realities of California. If it has a uniform state of mind as it approaches the end of the second millennium, it is a troubled one. Troubled about race, the environment, the fiscal crisis, employment, and, among those who care about these matters, troubled about governability.
Those of us who have long wrestled with similar worries in other countries can only say to Californians: “Hi. Glad you’ve stopped dreaming. Welcome to the real world.”
