If Everyone Knows It, Are We Still Hip?

The first column I wrote for this paper involved a 15-year-old Orange County girl whose face was badly cut in what she and her family said was a racially motivated street fight. As events played out over the ensuing months, that proved untrue. In addition, a teenage boy who gave medical help to the girl and identified himself to police as “Lewis” turned out to be a woman in drag, a fact not known even to the woman’s attorney.

The point is, I should have learned way back that things in Orange County are not always as they seem. But stereotypes played well here -- just as they did in liberal bastions elsewhere -- because of the county’s consistently conservative voting record and its emergence as the “anti-Los Angeles.”

And when you’re the home of Disneyland and you name your airport after John Wayne ...

But a strange thing happened on the way to the 21st century.

The county has undergone an extreme makeover, just like the people in the TV series with hook noses and bad teeth. In the same way that Miami and L.A. and New York and Dallas all had their day in the pop cultural sun, this is the “Age of O.C.”

I’ve always considered myself the last to find out about anything, but I must cede the honor to the New York Times. Sunday the newspaper headlined an article: “The County Formerly Known as Squaresville.”

Guess who they were talking about?

Acknowledging the buzz about Orange County, the newspaper dispatched a former Mission Viejo resident to check things out. Given the preeminence usually accorded the New York Times, their belated notice of the new O.C. probably means the phenomenon has peaked and that we’ll now begin a slow slide back to suburban conformity.

The Times was reacting to the county’s latest starring role on television, this time on MTV. Its new series “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County” is a response to the seminal Fox TV series, “The O.C.,” which premiered in 2003 to much acclaim.

That series followed the 2002 big-screen release of “Orange County.” That film prompted a 2003 article in USA Today proclaiming the county the “new capital of cool.” That, in turn, prompted this newspaper to study the reasons that Orange County suddenly had burst from the shadows and to offer an “Old O.C./New O.C.” comparison. Our story then prompted other newspapers to direct their gazes westward.

That’s how it works in the media trend-spotting business. Politics, sports, entertainment, you name it: We like nothing more than creating images or impressions or stars and then writing about them when they go against type.

If media people were forced into the confessional booth about why we stereotype people and places, the answer probably would be because in so doing we raise the possibility of doing other stories down the road when the stereotype is turned upside down.

So, if Orange County was once John Birch territory, 90% white and spawned Richard Nixon, how can you not love it that we’ve elected a Latina Democrat to Congress, that ethnically we resemble a mini-United Nations and that our “hip” teens are getting us national publicity?

The only unknown is how long that hipness will last. These things do have a shelf life.

Perhaps to hedge its bet, the New York Times article asked this question: “Is the O.C. really a center of youthful cool, or does it just play one on TV?”

A provocative question, indeed.

I don’t pretend to know the answer.

But don’t be surprised if the New York Times returns to Orange County in, oh, four or five years and headlines an article: “Orange County: Back to Squaresville.”