TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111891/1118640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11KB | 213 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 109

CALIFORNIA

Is It Really That Wacky?


A flaky image hides a deeper truth: bright sunshine casts dark
shadows

BY PICO IYER


    Yes, yes, we've heard all the jokes: we know that "spacy"
and "flaky" seem almost to have been invented for California
and that in the dictionary California is a virtual synonym for
"far out." Ever since gold was first found flowing in its
rivers, the Shangri-La La of the West has been the object of as
many gibes as fantasies: just over a century ago, Rudyard
Kipling was already pronouncing that "San Francisco is a mad
city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people"
(others might say "insanely perfect"); and more than 40 years
ago, S.J. Perelman was barreling down the yellow brick road to
L.A., the "mighty citadel which had given the world the double
feature, the duplexburger, the motel, the hamfurter, and the
shirt worn outside the pants." Yes, we know, all too well, that
"going to California" is tantamount, for many people, to going
to seed.

    And yes, much of the image does fit. Returning to
California recently, I picked up a copy of the San Francisco
Chronicle and read about people attending a funeral in pinks and
turquoises and singing along to Bette Midler ("Dress for a
Brazilian party!" the invitation -- from the deceased -- read);
about a missing cat identifiable by "a rhinestone collar w/name
and electronic cat door opener"; about women from Los Angeles
hiring migrant workers to wait in line for them to buy watches
shaped like cucumbers or bacon and eggs. On Hollywood Boulevard
I saw a HISTORIC LANDMARK sign outside the site of "The First
Custom T-Shirt Shop in California," flyers on the wall promoting
a group called Venal Opulence and, in a store across the
street, "Confucius X-Rated Mini-Condom Fortune Cookies." No
wonder, I thought, that when I tell people I live in California
-- worse, that I choose to live in California -- they look at
me as if I had decided not to get serious or grow up; as if I
had seceded from reality.

    Part of the reason for all this, no doubt, is circumstance.
For one thing, California wears its contradictions, its clashing
hearts, on its sleeve: even its deepest passions are advertised
on bumper sticker, T-shirt and vanity plate. California is
America without apologies or inhibitions, pleased to have found
itself here and unembarrassed about its pleasure. So too, society
in California is less a society than a congregation of
subcultures, many of them with a membership of one: every man's
home is his castle in the air here.

    In addition, California's image has been fashioned largely
by interlopers from the East, who tend to look on it as a kind
of recumbent dumb blond, so beautiful that it cannot possibly
have any other virtues. Thus the California of the imagination
is an unlikely compound of Evelyn Waugh's Forest Lawn, Orson
Welles' Hearst Castle, every screenwriter's Locustland and
Johnny Carson's "beautiful downtown Burbank." Nice house, as
they say, but nobody's at home.

    By now the notion of California as a wigged-out
free-for-all has become a legend, and as self-sustaining as
every other myth. If I had read about vegetable-shaped watches
in the Des Moines Register, I would have taken it as a
reflection not on Iowa but humanity; but California has been
associated with flakiness for so long that it is only the flaky
things we see as Californian. There are five pet cemeteries in
California registered with the International Association of Pet
Cemeteries (vs. eight in New York State), but it is the canine
mortuaries in L.A. that everybody mentions.

    When California is ahead of the world, it seems
outlandish; yet when its trends become commonplace, no one
thinks of them as Californian. Large-scale recycling, health
clubs, postmodern enchiladas all were essentially Californian
fads until they became essential to half the countries in the
world. And many people do not recall that such everyday,
down-to-earth innovations as the bank credit card, the 30-year
mortgage and the car loan were all, as David Rieff, in a new
book about Los Angeles, points out, more or less developed by
that great California institution the Bank of America.

    And as the California myth gains circulation, it attracts
precisely the kind of people who come here to sustain it: many
of the newcomers to the "end of America" are Flat Earthers, Free
Speechers or latter-day sinners drawn by the lure of a place
where unorthodoxy is said to be the norm. Frank Lloyd Wright
once said that all the loose nuts in America end up in Los
Angeles because of the continental tilt. Aldous Huxley suggested
that the world resembled a head on its side, with the
superrational Old World occupying a different sphere from the
vacant, dreamy spaces of the collective subconscious of the
West. California, he was implying, is the name we give our hopes
and highest fantasies: an antiworld of sorts, governed by an
antireality principle and driven by an antigravitational push.
That is why he, like Thomas Pynchon and Ursula Le Guin and a
hundred others, set his Utopia in California: with its deserts
and rich farmland and a valley (if not a sea) named after death,
California has impressed many as a kind of modern Holy Land.

    California, in short, doesn't stand to reason (it doesn't
even lie down to reason). "The drive-in restaurant has valet
parking," notes P.J. O'Rourke, and "practically everyone runs
and jogs. Then he gets in the car to go next door." There's no
beach at North Beach, he might have added, and Sunset Boulevard
was shot on Wilshire. William Faulkner was arrested for walking
here, and teenagers look older than their parents. "The tolerant
Pacific air," in Auden's words, "makes logic seem so silly." And
that air of unreality is only quickened by the fact that
California is the illusion maker of the world: "Everyman's Eden"
has made a living almost out of living up to other people's
expectations.

    What tends to get forgotten in all this is that the
aerospace industry is centered in Southern California. The
source of the state's wealth is that least dreamy and most
realpolitik-bound of industries, defense. Yes, the late Gene
Roddenberry may have dreamed up Star Trek here, but he drew upon
his experience in the Los Angeles police department. For every
quaint, picture-book San Francisco floating in the air there is
an Oakland across the bay, gritty, industrial and real; for
every Zen-minded "Governor Moonbeam" there is a hardheaded
Richard Nixon; for every real estate office in the shape of a
Sphinx there is a man behind the desk counting dollars.

    The town in which I live, the pretty, sunlit, red-roofed
Mediterranean-style resort of Santa Barbara, is typical. The
town prides itself on being the birthplace of hot tubs and the
site of the first Egg McMuffin. There is little or no industry
here, and everyone seems to be working, full time, on his
life-style. Thus people from Melbourne to Marseilles tune into
the Santa Barbara soap opera, and in the Kansai region of Japan,
women in SANTA BARBARA sweatshirts crowd into the Santa Barbara
ice-cream parlor. Yet there is a theoretical-physics institute
here, and there used to be a think tank peopled by refugees from
the University of Chicago.

    Besides, it is in the nature of bright sunlight to cast
long shadows: when Santa Barbara has hit the headlines
recently, it has been because of an eight-year drought so severe
that even showers were limited; a fire that destroyed 600
houses (including mine); and one of the country's most poisonous
homeless battles. AIDS to the north, gang wars to the south;
droughts interrupted by floods; mudslides down the coast that
left 91 dead in 1969; earthquakes that bring in their wake
bubonic plague (contracted by 160 people as a result of San
Francisco's 1906 earthquake): California, as Christopher
Isherwood saw, "is a tragic country -- like Palestine, like
every Promised Land."

    Not long ago in Garden Grove, just two miles south of
Disneyland, where Vietnamese dentistas (SE HABLA ESPANOL, say
their windows) bump against halal (Islam's equivalent to kosher)
grocery stores in Spanish-style malls, I paid a visit to the
Crystal Cathedral. On first encounter the area seems a vision
of the cacophonous dystopia of the future in which a hundred
California dreams collide and each one drowns the others out.
Yet beneath the surface there is a kind of commonness, a shared
belief in all of them that the future can be custom-made. This
faith is implicit in the immigrants' assumptions -- they have
voted with their feet in coming here -- and it is made explicit,
for longtime residents, by the Rev. Robert Schuller, who fills
his sprawling Crystal Cathedral with hymns to "Possibility
Thinking."

    Schuller's great distinction, perhaps, is not just that he
was a pioneer of the drive-in church (and his sermons are still
broadcast, via a wide-screen TV, to overflow parishioners in the
parking lot outside), nor that he has managed to erect a
glittering monument to his "Be-Happy Attitudes," but rather that
he has gathered a huge nationwide following out of preaching
what is in effect Californianism. For if you look at his books
(Your Future Is Your Friend, Success Is Never Ending, Failure Is
Never Final), and if you walk around his church, as airy and
futuristic and free of Christian iconography, almost, as a Hyatt
Regency hotel, you can see that the heart of his scripture is
simple optimism, on the surface scarcely different from that
espoused by New Age gurus across the state (in the Bodhi Tree
bookstore, Create Your Own Future tapes are on sale, made by a
Stanford professor).

    Faced by such unlikelihoods, one begins to see that
California is still, in a sense, what America used to be: a
spiritual refuge, a utopian experiment, a place plastic enough,
in every sense, to shape itself to every group of newcomers. It
is a state set in the future tense (and the optative mood), a
place in a perpetual state of becoming. Of course it's strange:
it is precisely the shape of things to come, as unexpected as
tomorrow. Of course it's unsettled: it's making itself up as it
goes along.