The Uncertain State of the State

Gov. Gray Davis performed an awkward rhetorical dance the other night. He wrapped his annual State of the State address in repeated references to Sept. 11, straining to make the case that California has been in the thick of things on the terror front.

“All four hijacked planes were bound for California,” Davis told the assembled lawmakers at the outset of his lengthy address. “More than 100 fellow Californians paid the ultimate price for our freedom.”

Dressed for patriotism in a red tie and royal blue shirt, with an American flag pin shining from his lapel, the governor described how he’d dispatched the National Guard to protect airports, bridges and dams. With thinly veiled humility, he declared that “no state has done more than California to protect its citizens and vital assets since the terrorist attacks.”

Eventually the governor did get around to other topics--the now all but forgotten (yet still unresolved) energy crisis, education reform, the impending state budget deficit, those sorts of things. Still, the state of the state, as Davis painted it Tuesday night, was that of a California on wartime footing.

And here--despite a powerful urge to lampoon a state politician trying to promote himself to commander in chief--the point must be made: Davis was not wrong. There is, obviously enough, a war going on, and California is as much a part of it as any of the other 49 states. And while the governor might have overreached a bit in his martial rhetoric, he conversely would have been accused of gross disrespect had he not mentioned the conflict at all, cutting instead straight to his thoughts on drug discounts for seniors.

The trick is one of balance--just how much “normalcy” is appropriate for these abnormal times? And I suspect it will not be mastered by Davis--or California as a whole, for that matter--for a long time. It’s by now a cliche to suggest the world changed on Sept. 11. So let me put it this way: On that day, the United States, and California, discovered it was part of a world that has been changing, and changing fast.

In “The Coming Anarchy,” a collection of Atlantic Monthly articles published in 1994, Robert D. Kaplan described early and well how the old world map of nation-states appears to be in the process of being “replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms.”

With these geopolitical shifts will come changes in the definition and execution of war. As the influential military historian Martin van Creveld predicted more than a decade ago: “Once the legal monopoly of armed force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands, existing distinctions between war and crime will break down. . . . Often, crime will be disguised as war, whereas in other cases war itself will be treated as if waging it is a crime.”

In the last few years, there had been numerous policy papers published--and quickly shelved--that described with clarity what this new world disorder might mean for America, the last superpower and the engine of the global economy.

“American influence will increasingly be both embraced and resented abroad as U.S. cultural, economic and political power persists and perhaps spreads,” went a typical passage from one such report. “States, terrorists and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction and mass disruption, and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”

The above was lifted from a study--much quoted after Sept. 11--by a national commission on security that completed its work early last year. Former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart served as co-chairman of the commission and, not long ago, I asked him what he thought Sept. 11 would mean in terms of how the country protects itself. He said the question was premature by about a quarter-century.

“If one believes the events of Sept. 11 stand alone,” he said, “then we can begin to think about what it means. Unfortunately, I think it is just the beginning.”

A sobering thought, and one that suggests a few points Gov. Davis might have added the other night while he was on the subject of terror. He might have said that California is a crossroads point in a world that is rapidly rearranging itself, and that the goods and people of this world pass through its ports and across its borders daily, in numbers too great to monitor.

He might have said that, within the state, the list of possible targets is as endless as the imagination, and that there never will be enough National Guard troops to protect everything, all the time. And so, going forward, there will be risks to weigh, hard choices to make.

Is public money better spent fortifying buildings and infrastructure against suicide bombers, or in retrofitting them for earthquakes? Who, in the long run, provides more public protection for the dollar--a National Guard soldier patrolling for terrorists on the Golden Gate, or one more street cop on the prowl for gangbangers?

Such are the questions that will face California governors and policymakers for a long time to come. Such is the uncertain state of the state in this, the new normalcy.