Getting Over California
What is it about California? I remember when I first moved here decades ago, Californians I knew seemed almost offended that I had no particular mental image whatever of California beyond (maybe) Disneyland and smog until I actually got here. For True Californians, of course, California must be the center of everyone’s mental universe, at least.
And now here’s Gavin Newsom, currently running for our state governorship, quoted in today’s NYT:
“In so many ways, the world is looking to us. This is California. I wouldn’t want to be anyplace else. Eat your heart out, Texas. California is a special place: a majority-minority state; 27 percent of this state foreign born. The state has brought in 112,000 refugees in the last 15 years: 1,454 Syrian refugees. No other state has taken more Syrian refugees, Mr. Trump. It’s a point of pride.”
Well, OK — that point of pride kind of pales in the light of what a bunch of other places have done (or had to do) in the last few years in taking refugees, but never mind. It’s that “In so many ways, the world is looking to us” that’s diagnostic. It’s another form of California Dreaming — the delusion that California somehow leads the world in social and political progress, and that the rest of the world looks to us for leadership.
But why would the progressive world out there beyond the US look at California as anything other than a rather socially and politically backward place, riven with the sort of problems — rampant inequality, homelessness, urban squalor, poverty, broken infrastructure, medical and education systems deliberately weighted against the poor, etc., that are dealt with in more, um, progressive ways than in California? California — that self-proclaimed Most Innovative Place On Earth — might want to get over itself and look at (and learn from) those other places first, before taking the centre stage in its own mind.
