TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111891/1118unk.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8KB | 178 lines

                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE, Page 32

CALIFORNIA


It is still America's Promised Land -- a place of heartstopping
beauty, spectacular energy and stunning diversity. But faced
with drought, mindless growth and a sputtering economy, can it
preserve the dream?


     America is the land where the world goes in earch of
miracles and redemption, California is the land where Americans
go. It is America's America, the symbol of raw hope and brave
(even foolish) invention, where ancient traditions and
inhibitions are abandoned at the border. Its peculiar culture
squirts out -- on film and menus and pages and television beams
-- the trends and tastes that sweep the rest of the country, and
then the rest of the world. If California broke off and
dissolved in salt water, America would lose its seasoning.

    And so the rough awakening is more painful as California
confronts the crumbling of its cities, the clashing of its
citizens, the glaring challenge to its assumption of uniqueness
and special promise -- in short, the possible implosion of its
dream. California's woes suit the scale of its mythology; when
things go wrong there, they go deeply, harshly, frighteningly
wrong. The crimes seem more vicious, the smog more choking, the
poor more sorrowful in the light of fluorescent disillusionment.
The mad, fit joggers must run at night if they hope to breathe
freely, and in some areas a television glowing dimly through a
window can become a target for a drive-by shooter. In Northern
California's ancient forests, loggers fell trees that sprouted
10 centuries ago, and elsewhere in the state, some rural
neighborhoods are raising their taxes to buy the surrounding
hills before they too are buried beneath the tract houses of yet
another tacky instant city. California's myriad of problems are
measured in superlatives: the state has more convicts than
Tallahassee has residents; the $14 billion budget deficit
California wrestled with this year was by far the largest ever
faced by any state. Ethnicity comes in mind-boggling variety:
Los Angeles has more Mexicans than any other city but Mexico
City, more Koreans than any other city outside Seoul, more
Filipinos than any other city outside the Philippines, and, some
experts claim, more Druze than any other place but Lebanon.

    The classic formula says California, the richest and most
populous state, is the future. California is America's bright,
strange cultural outrider: whatever happens now in California,
or to California, will be happening to America before long, and
to the entire world a little while after that. If you want to
know whether America still works, then ask whether California
still works. Does the reckless American hospitality to
immigrants still accomplish its transformations and synergies?
Can America still absorb so many disparate values and traditions
and form them into a successful society? Or will the nation
vanish into an incoherent future? Consult California.

    In Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, David Rieff
says the U.S. has "stopped being an extension of Europe, and
has, for better or worse, struck out on its own, an
increasingly nonwhite country adrift, however majestically and
powerfully, in an increasingly nonwhite world." Perhaps. Native
Americans inhabited California before the European-Americans
arrived, and the white civilization could prove evanescent.
Maybe white Americans are simply redrawing their absolute
perspectives. What the TV weather forecasters in Los Angeles
call the "southland" is El Norte to Latin Americans. America's
Far West is Japan's Far East.

    California has always functioned in the American
imagination as a sort of floating state of mind, a golden land
unanchored in tradition or guilt. A fresh start: no corpse of
the past, no tragedy. Gravity feels different in California --
life there sometimes has the weightlessness of a dream. What
feels morally heavy Back East may dissolve into inconsequence
in the delicious sunshine off Monterey. A State Department
analyst may move to Huntington Beach and with intense focus take
up competitive Frisbee. Recreation has the significance in
California of a big idea.

    Other states have identities. California has a metaphysic.
Americans do not refer to the Pennsylvania Dream or the Missouri
Dream. California has always been an immaterial, shimmering
thing in the imagination, the golden exception, the California
Dream. California is where the Europeans' westward trajectory
ended. Americans become metaphysical about the place because
when they run out of continent, they start to review the entire
national experience and try to add up its meaning.

    The world may come to California thinking it is a
magnificent playground, which it is. "Eureka," says the state's
motto: "I have found it." Gold is the color of the Forty-Niners'
wealth and of white skin set to glowing in the California sun.
But nature may object to the uses to which it is put. The hills
may go off like a fire bomb, as they did in Oakland a few weeks
ago. Or the solid earth may abruptly rumble and break in
devastating earthquakes.

    A few weeks ago, the environmental artist Christo, wrapper
of seacoasts, had 1,760 giant umbrellas implanted and opened in
the bald, dun landscape of the Tejon Pass in the Tehachapi
Mountains north of Los Angeles (1,340 more were simultaneously
opened in Japan). The art seemed very California, surreal,
whimsical, harmlessly airheaded, vaguely haunting -- the
umbrellas disconnected from practical function and somehow
mocking the grand scenery: a conceptual joke. But then high
winds rose. By a kind of sinister telekinesis, one of the giant
umbrellas lifted out of the earth, flew across the landscape and
crushed a woman to death.

    There are many Californias. Northern and Southern
California, split from each other by the mountains east of Santa
Barbara, are the notorious yin and yang, Hatfields and McCoys,
of California geography and culture. But the state is dividing
and subdividing now along a thousand new fault lines of language
and identity. Perhaps anticipating a pattern elsewhere in the
world (the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, possibly
fracturing Canada?), the cultures of California seem to fragment
into their constituent parts.

    Los Angeles, for example, is one of the most segregated
cities in the world -- a horizontal automobile culture sectioned
off into a patchwork of ethnic and racial enclaves, all almost
self-sufficient, inward turning and immiscible. The middle- and
upper-middle-class whites of West Los Angeles, of Hollywood and
Beverly Hills and Westwood and Brentwood and Bel-Air, drift
dreamily along in the illusion that the society still belongs
to them. In important ways, it does, of course. But out across
the city grids lie Koreatown and Chinatown; and Watts, for so
long a black enclave, is changing into a barrio. Up north on the
Berkeley campus, Sproul plaza has a line of desks arrayed for
the recruitment of Armenian students, South Asian students,
Japanese-American students, Vietnamese students, Thai students,
multicultural gay and lesbian students, Korean-American
students, Native American students. And so on.

    O. Henry once observed that Californians are not merely
inhabitants of a state; they are a race of people. But at this
moment of blinding change, Californians are defined by their
differences, and their uncertainties. The Japanese quarrel with
the Koreans, the blacks and Anglos with each other, and with the
Mexicans, and with all the other new immigrants flocking in from
everywhere. How can all these quarrels be sorted out when the
economy is faltering, wildfires rage, water is scarce and the
very ground beneath your feet trembles and threatens to fall
away? The whole world would be wise to pay close attention to
the drama of incipient decline and resistance now unfolding in
California, for the future that begins there tends to spread
across the world.