Just Blame It on California

I remember one TV ad in the Northwest. A plastic-looking couple was shown prancing down the sidewalk with an overly-primped poodle. “That’s their dog,” the announcer sniffed. Cut to: A syrupy family cuddling its, aw, golden retriever. “That’s our dog.”

The aim was to remind people to do business locally, not with those phonies in California. It’s the kind of message you get all the time if you live elsewhere in the Western U.S.

My friends, we are being set up.

You’ve read, as I have, that some Republicans are getting the jitters as blackouts loom over California. Oh dear, there’s going to be a voter backlash if the flint-hearted Dick Cheney doesn’t look like he’s doing something. Quick!

Don’t hold your breath.

When Cheney shakes his head and offers only a paternal scold, California’s congressional Republicans might indeed worry. Although, on second thought, Republicans in this state are a particularly suicidal breed, so it’s hard telling. But elsewhere? Not likely. California’s pain is their gain.

As any first-year Vegas bookie can tell you, you cannot rack up points without an opponent on the field.

Well, we are the designated opponent.

Everything unpleasant that is about to happen in the U.S. will be California’s fault, you watch. As energy prices soar throughout the West, it’s California’s doing. A shaky economy turns sour, California brought it on. And don’t be surprised to find the blame placed here for $3 gas, the demise of the Pacific salmon, avocados that get black before they soften or whatever else comes along that needs a fall guy.

Never mind that other states did not build any power plants either. Doesn’t matter that per capita electricity use is lower here.

As my friend Marie in Seattle put it, “I’m really mad at you.”

She meant me personally. My business card reads, “Los Angeles,” so I must shoulder my share of the blame. For what? For her electric bills. For traffic congestion from all those who fled the California apocalypse. For her unease about . . . well, just about everything.

It so happens that Marie is a life-long liberal activist. If she feels this way, imagine the gold mine of resentment just waiting to be exploited among conservative and middle-of-the-road voters.

California-bashing is a simplistic cliche. But not necessarily a simple-minded one. In America’s collective mythology, California bears a burden for the future. Joan Didion expressed it this way 33 years ago: “California is a place . . . in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

When things don’t work here, these troubled thoughts break the surface with indignation. How could they do this to our future?

We live in an age, after all, when we fix blame ahead of fixing problems.

So I don’t expect much from Republicans in Washington in the months ahead. We’ll see the back of the hand before one is extended to help.

Electricity in 2001 is a lesson in free markets and free-market politics. Liberal, whacko, poodle-headed California was fainthearted in its embrace of deregulation, and must now go to detention with the third-graders. We must write on the blackboard for the next 150 days: We need to drill more oil, we need to build more power plants, conservation isn’t enough.

Republicans have more to gain by driving this lesson home all summer long than they do in going soft and trying to ameliorate matters. Why assist one state when the rest of the West, and much of the country beyond, is anxious to see corrective discipline administered?

Let me borrow from two colleagues on opposite ends of the continent who make my point. In Tacoma, Wash., a commentator had this to say: “I don’t know about you, but I can certainly work myself into a lather over some overly tanned, cosmetically enhanced Golden Stater sitting in a hot tub heated with our electricity.” And this from New York: “There is, after all, an irrepressible delight about imagining hot tubs turning cold in the Hollywood Hills, or reading stories about wealthy shoppers in high-toned Beverly Hills boutiques being led to their purchases by flashlight.”

Hey, you forgot to mention that we’re squandering electricity blow-drying our fancy poodles too.