You may not be able to tell because I wrote my posts ahead of time, but I am in California. I have been here for several days and I will be here for several more days. What I have to say on this location is: 1. It is its own country, entirely different from anywhere else. 2. It is prosperous. Very. I say this with full awareness of Californian non-prosperity. No matter how you cut it this place is prosperous.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Have you seen enough SUVs, Hummers, and Escalades yet? The standard uniform of the blond —fake tan, hair pull back and through a ball cap, dripping in diamonds, rail thin, and walking around acting 20 when she is over the better side of 50. Has the litter been a shock? Whenever I leave California and return the litter shocks me. There is so much litter. Life has been so different for me out here and on the surface, it will appear better by others but in morality (ain’t talking of a religious nature either), it has been horrific. The people here are shell people, locust people, veneer, no, I know, Dandyism to borrow from Dickens, Deportment stemming from Dandyism. Perhaps it is different up north, but not so here in the southern region.
But I never tired or looking at palm trees even though I miss oaks and pecans dearly and long for England’s greenbelt.
I’m from San Francisco, and both my parents were born in California. The person who sees California the way I do is Joan Didion in her book *Where I was From.*
Here’s what I wrote about that:
In 1937, The year Joan Didion was born, the population of California was 3,000,000. Now it’s (at least) 35, 000,000. Like me, another Californian born a couple of years after her, she feels the resentment of the displaced. Neither of us live in California any more. She’s gone to New York, where culture is real, and I live in Hawaii, where nature still rules.
Didion shows that California was from the very start a creation of big money, both government and private, from the East. The stories of old California that she and I grew up on became real-estate PR after the war. Capitalists gave their developments names that suggested Mexico or Sylvan landscapes.
Their customers bought spurious myths of rugged independence and notions of solid, worthy upward mobile working class values and wedded these to a lack of social awareness and a deep cultural stupidity. In light of this, I’m not surprised at Schwarzenegger’s theft of the governorship of the state and Bush’s popularity among those who depend for their living on federal government subsidies.
In particular, Didion’s prescient analysis of the fake “ownership” class in Orange County, in reality laid-off aerospace workers, strikes me ultimately as chilling. She does not think matters will improve.
Love that Didion book – I am going back to teaching it next semester after a break of a year or so.
Welcome to Cali! Yes, it’s always been its own country.
wow hattie your comment was a great read. As someone who is not Californian but just endured a long and pointed speech about the recruitment of Californians recently (still to my shock and dismay) and who has also watched the degradation of my way of life because of a particular racialized and monied exodes of Californians in two different states I call home, it is odd and fascinating to me to read that certain Californians have a similar longing for a similar past. thanks for reminding me the world is weird and complex and so are the people in it.
I’m in SF. There are mountains and an ocean, and there are cultural institutions. People do not litter here as they do in Louisiana and your average white person is less quick than those in Louisiana to do things like join lynch mobs. Also, people know how to drive here which they do not in Louisiana, and there are comparatively few drunk drivers.
The Didion book is smart and it contains true historical information, but the view that culture in New York is the only “real” one is shallow.
Since people here are dealing in stereotypes, so will I. Here are some:
1. The denizens of OC Kitty describes are recently arrived, uncultured New Yorkers and Iowans who, in their colonizing manner, feel that having come to the land of Mexicans, Chinese, Native Americans and additional non-WASPs they are free to act like the absolute jerks they really are.
2. Californians, compared to other Americans, are people who do not put whiteness or Americanness first, who see that other parts of nature existed before humans did, and who can set themselves aside and see the otherness in the world and in things.
3. Having come in from the East and bought land does not make you Californian. In my experience the average New Yorker is materialistic, unspiritual, paranoid, insecure, selfish, grabby, uncultured, and loud … New Englanders and DC people cannot relax and are very judgmental, from their narrow little cocoons … Iowans dye their hair blond, have fake tans, chew gum and populate the boardwalks in SoCal … et cetera.
So anyone can stereotype, you see. I am just glad to be on hiatus from the Old Dominion. If you have ever lived in a slave state or a country with a history of slavery, or in that kind of plantation country generally, you will know why and I say this despite knowing what I know about California agriculture and so on.
ah, S.F.
Enjoy.
me, I am off to Baja California norte come Saturday…the best part of California is still in Mexico.
I don’t quite grasp your last comment Z, did I catch a whuppin for talking about these folks? LOL!
I expected (wanted, opened for, ready to embrace it) #2
but got #3.
But as I said, perhaps it is because we are below the middle of California. The good must be up north.
It’s Christmas season, and I’m reminded of the Tom Lehrer song:
Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don’t say when.
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.
On Christmas Day you can’t get sore,
Your fellow man you must adore.
There’s time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four.
Relations, sparing no expense, ‘ll
Send some useless old utensil,
Or a matching pen and pencil.
(“Just the thing I need, how nice!”)
It doesn’t matter how sincere it is,
Nor how heart felt the spirit,
Sentiment will not endear it,
What’s important is the price.
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.
God rest ye merry merchants,
May ye make the Yuletide pay.
Angels we have heard on high,
Tell us to go out and buy!
So, let the raucous sleigh bells jingle,
Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
Driving his reindeer across the sky.
Don’t stand underneath when they fly by.
Let’s all join hands and koombaya, Californians, New Yorkers and Southerners!
Heh heh.
ROFL! 🙂
I love CA! It’s geographic enormity never ceases to awe this New Englander!! And how agricultural it is. And how far away from home I feel when I’m there (though I also felt that way in Seattle…”wow, the West Coast is far…”)
I don’t like SF though. It reminds me of Cambridge. Ick.
PS: Hope you’re there for fun and relaxation!! Enjoy yourself!
Hattie, love the song! My mother says it has been raining in SF. If it clears, and you get a chance, take a walk down by the bay at Crissy Field.
I went to the Legion of Honor, San Rafael, and the Marin Headlands. Now I am going to Berkeley, Vacaville, Angel Island, and Montara.
My father says Joan Didion comes from the N.Y.-L.A. nexus which has much to do with Hollywood and nothing to do with California.
Tom Lehrer has another song that begins: I’m spending Hannukah in Santa Monica…
I thought I had heard all Tom Lehrer songs, but I had not, this is new.
I’m spending Hanukkah, in Santa Monica,
Wearing sandals lighting candles by the sea.
I spent Shavuos, in East St. Louis,
A charming spot but clearly not the spot for me.
Those eastern winters, I can’t endure ’em,
So every year I pack my gear
And come out here to Purim.
Rosh Hashona, I spend in Arizona,
And Yom Kippa, way down in Mississippa.
But in Decemba, there’s just one place for me.
‘Mid the California flora,
I’ll be lighting my menorah.
Every California maid’ll
Find me playing with a dreidl.
Santa Monica, spending Hanukkah by the sea
Didn’t Lehrer teach math for years at UC Santa Cruz?
One of us! One of us!
Yes. He didn’t finish his PhD though and taught math as an instructor and also taught courses in musical comedy. This is what I heard, I did not verify it. I think his retirement was fairly recent. It’s hilarious…
Math AND musical comedy – brilliant!