Victor Davis Hanson: The Remains of a California Day
Yesterday I think I understood why California is in deep trouble. Let me walk you through another day out here.
At 7AM I put a few letters in my armored, heavy-duty steel rural mailbox. Four thefts of mail in the last five years have meant my grandfather’s old light gauge unlocked box gave way to a quite impressive, smart-looking sort of locked safe — the armor is a tasteful forest green....
At noon, I drove into the local warehouse supermarket. When I checked out (and I had written about such incidents like this a near decade ago in Mexifornia), the checker and the woman behind me were trying to communicate in Spanish to instruct a young man and his wife (with four small children) about how to use his food stamp card (an anachronism since they look more like ATM plastic).
But he spoke some sort of Nahuatl indigenous dialect. It did not sound that much differently in its pitched accentuation from modern Greek. No Spanish-speakers could really make out much of what he was saying — and believe me they tried....
By 2:00 p.m., the air was loud with sonic booms. Local tree managers were trying to break up hail (I lost two crops in the 1980s to a sudden hail storm) — the current theory being that sonic waves will either smash apart, or at least divert for a few minutes, hail storms that can so scar the appearance of tree fruit to render it unsalable (but with absolutely no effect on its quality or tastiness — go figure)....
By 3:00 p.m., I drove up to the CSU Fresno Henry Madden Library to get a Greek edition of Procopius’s History of the Wars. (Procopius is the ancient sort of the DC insider blogger/pundit: he praised Justinian, sort of, in the History of the Wars, damned him as demonic in the Secret History, and eulogized him in the Buildings — all predicated on the degree to which Procopius felt that the emperor was well/sick, dead/alive, popular/unpopular and the degree to which he was in/out with the court.
In the same manner, Procopius was the secretary to Belisarius, his apologist, his primary critic, and perhaps (this is disputed) the same Procopius who, as magistrate, put him on trial for his life. In other words, he was a sort of New York Times or Newsweek columnist.
It is touchy to use the library, since its hours are now vastly abbreviated due to furloughs (You, reader, will come to know that word soon enough in the increasingly bankrupt America: it means that we must not tamper with union contracted employees, so we simply ask them not to come to work a day or so a month. The resulting pay cuts are not pay cuts.)...
By dusk, I closed the medieval gates to my driveway and prepared to get ready to drive to work for the week at Palo Alto, as postmodern a world as mine out here is premodern. (In response to all this, I am trying to restore this 1870 two-story house to its original appearance, in and out, as much as I can ascertain in photographs from my great-great-grandmother’s era, though I confess it is a questionable expenditure of scarce funds: I’m 56 and spend most of my time at Stanford these days. I am not sure any of my three children wish to live here. I grant that it is now to be in the city-limits and accept that it is no longer a homsestead farm and that its vineyards, barn, shed, and barnyard are virtual. I realize that the environs in general, in terms of dog licensing, policing, crime, and community, are pre-civilizational. I am foolishly spending what I can on the idea of it. I am trying to ensure the memory of the 19th century survives the chaos of the 21st in one tiny place for a decade more or so. I am, in reactionary fashion, protesting against the world of 2010. I am aiding the memory of all those now dead I remember so well in the 1950s and 1960s in these rooms.)
All of which raises the question: how would we return to sanity in California, a state as naturally beautiful and endowed and developed by our ancestors as it has been sucked dry by our parasitic generation? The medicine would be harder than the malady, and I just cannot see it happening, as much as I love the state, admire many of its citizens, and see glimmers of hope in the most unlikely places every day.
After all, in no particular order, we would have to close the borders; adopt English immersion in our schools; give up on the salad bowl and return to the melting pot; assimilate, intermarry, and integrate legal immigrants; curb entitlements and use the money to fix infrastructure like roads, bridges, airports, trains, etc.; build 4-5 new damns to store water in wet years; update the canal system; return to old policies barring public employee unions; redo pension contracts; cut about 50,000 from the public employee roles; lower income taxes from 10% to 5% to attract businesses back; cut sales taxes to 7%; curb regulations to allow firms to stay; override court orders now curbing cost-saving options in our prisons by systematic legislation; start creating material wealth from our forests; tap more oil, timber, natural gas, and minerals that we have in abundance; deliver water to the farmland we have; build 3-4 nuclear power plants on the coast; adopt a traditional curriculum in our schools; insist on merit pay for teachers; abolish tenure; encourage not oppose more charter schools, vouchers, and home schooling; give tax breaks to private trade and business schools; reinstitute admission requirements and selectivity at the state university system; take unregistered cars off the road; make UC professors teach a class or two more each year; abolish all racial quotas and preferences in reality rather than in name; build a new all weather east-west state freeway over the Sierra; and on and on....