Who Is Conspiring Against Paradise?

After weeks of Stage 3 power alerts and rolling blackouts, a majority of Californians are gloomy about the future. According to a Field poll released last week, Californians, by a margin of 49% to 43%, admit to being pessimistic about the direction of the state, even while they are not similarly pessimistic about the direction of the country.

It’s worth noting that today’s pessimism follows several years of high-technology-generated optimism--a period of extraordinary inventiveness and wealth, when California saw itself at the center of the world. It’s worth noting, too, that the optimism of those technology-rich years followed several years of xenophobia and recession-fed pessimism.

No other state fluctuates so wildly and so often between buoyancy and despair. During one decade, a California governor named Pat Brown builds freeways and creates the state’s system of higher education. A generation later, his son Jerry announces from Sacramento that “small is beautiful.”

During optimistic years, California celebrates itself as one of the largest economies in the world. During pessimism, California is inclined to blame everyone and everything outside its borders for its difficulties.

Ten years ago, native Californians were leaving behind gridlock on the San Diego Freeway for the pristine Pacific Northwest. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson was quick to blame illegal immigrants for California’s recession.

Today, Silicon Valley executives threaten to find sockets for their ideas elsewhere. Gov. Gray Davis, in his State of the State address, called out-of-state power companies “pirates.” And he vowed: “Never again can we allow out-of-state profiteers to hold Californians hostage.”

Despite the clarity of California’s light, this state is famous for a literature that is ambiguous. Noir mystery novels juxtapose light with moral guilt. The question is always the same: Who conspires against paradise?

Recent polls suggest that a majority of Californians believe the current energy crisis is being manipulated by the power companies. I am Californian enough to share the general suspicion. But more interesting than any conspiracy theory is the fact that our current energy crisis is the result of optimism.

Four years ago, the state’s Republican governor and Democratic Legislature deregulated the price of energy (at the wholesale level). Their assumption was that out-of-state sources of energy would remain plentiful and cheap, even while they assured Californians that the price of energy (at the retail level) would remain stable, even drop.

Here was optimism, indeed! Our fabulous economy could continue to grow. We could have computers and lighted swimming pools, and California could crow that ours was the seventh-largest economy in the world. None of us would need to give a thought to the price of natural gas in Kazakhstan.

Now, the premier 21st-century state is humiliated by a flickering light bulb. And we find ourselves on a cold January morning with the piper’s bill to pay. Sixty percent higher than last month’s! A friend of mine who works in the Silicon Valley says the worst of it is the oddity of it. He sits at his desk and tries to focus on the far future. But his future and the computer screen depend on a quaint 19th-century invention. And to conserve Thomas Edison’s lightbulbs, the high-technology company has turned off the lights in the hallways.

Even while Davis has conjured out-of-state conspiracies, one has noticed an out-of-state hostility toward California. In the Oval Office, President George W. Bush narrows his eyes and tells us that California created its problem; California will have to come up with a solution.

And lawmakers in other Western states resent California’s presumption that we can tap into their energy sources--the blight on their landscape--without bothering to build new plants or repair old ones within our own borders.

Arrogant California! We presume too much. An editorial writer in The Wall Street Journal last week called California “the free-lunch state.” The state that invented the idea of free higher education is now under the impression that cheap energy is a right.

It’s more useful to remember, however, that extravagant expectation has always been the theme of California. In its first American years, men rushed here from every corner, expecting to pick wealth off the ground.

Most of the young men who came to California during the Gold Rush did not become fabulously rich. But this state would retain golden allure for later generations looking for a second chance. California’s optimism was reinforced by Midwestern grandmothers and by retired Vietnamese generals. Optimism was planted by Okies in one generation and harvested by Mexican braceros in another.

But lush optimism always met up with pessimism in California. Especially, because California enjoyed, from the point of view of East Coast America, the glamour of being at the edge of the country, this place where the future resided was also the end of the road.

Early in the 20th century, California became notorious for suicide and depression. The future, for many, ran out to sea.

Who can say? The source of our arrogance today in wanting to exempt California from disfiguring or environmentally dangerous power plants may result from our embarrassment at the harm we have already done to this beautiful place. Generations turned fresh, open spaces into chemically saturated farmlands; generations turned farmlands into tract houses.

For all the compliance of this land to our gaudy ambitions, the suspicion has long haunted Californians that the land is unreliable and will cast us off. The earth shakes in California; the hillside turns to angry mud after a gentle rain; the canyon sends flames to devour our hidden houses. No other state of America has entertained itself with the spectacle of its own undoing. Novelists and painters have imagined apocalypse in various forms. Hollywood has made movies about San Francisco crumbling and Los Angeles burning or falling into the sea.

Against such imaginations, the current energy crisis, as it is called in the media and by politicians, seems unworthy of California. It strikes us less as an apocalypse than the result of bureaucratic bungling or conspiracy. And to find oneself “in the dark” is embarrassing, in a state famous for prophesy.

But it is worth remembering that some of the most extraordinary ideas California has invented resulted from the knowledge of finitude.

Davis is urging all Californians to reduce energy use by 7%. I prefer to remember that bearded prophet, John Muir, who invented the idea of conservation in cowboy California.

As he gazed upon the shoreline, Muir realized that America is a finite idea. His astonishing idea of conservation in the young nation traveled west to east, and came as a surprise to the crowded brick cities of the East where Americans dreamt of traveling west.