LOS ANGELES - Cruising
the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible, top down, a
warm breeze blowing, listening to the Beach Boys on 95.5
KLOS ("the legendary"), one may have waves of reasons to
believe that the California Dream will never die.
Los Angeles is still the key node of the
sixth-largest economy in the world - California is only
behind the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain and
France. If LA county (with a population of 10 million)
were a country, it would still be the 16th-largest
economy in the world, ahead of Russia.
It's not
only the exuberance of the intellectual capital
available that is overwhelming - constantly creating
software extravaganzas or the latest from biotech to
nanotech. It's the explosive, ostentatious wealth.
Malibu beach houses, hordes of Aston Martin
convertibles, galaxies of boutique hotels and
restaurants, dazzling Laurel Canyon glitzy parties, the
serpent of red and white lights on the freeways,
caravans of deluxe customized Hummers (the wet dream of
US Marines deployed in the Muslim world), millions of
perfectly toned bodies, which can afford to go holistic
instead of ballistic. Compared to Gaza, Fallujah and
Kandahar, this is outer space.
Still, the grid
is not so remote from the succession of "cops and cars,
topless bars" immortalized by The Doors. The epitome of
cool and the epitome of trash, junk and gore coexist in
California. In the world's most unequal industrialized
economy, California is one of its most unequal states.
Driving from ultra-affluent Santa Monica, via the
quintessential Sunset Boulevard, toward downtown LA,
especially at night, one swings from the California
Dream to post-Terminator no-man's-land, with side
excursions to mini-Asias (China town, Japan town, Korea
town and Thai town).
California does not have a
race problem - even though some WASPS (white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants) may fear Mexifornia (in 2040 the population
is expected to be 48% Latino and 31% WASP). But it
definitely has an education problem (not to mention an
energy problem and a transportation problem). Just under
45% of students in California's public schools are
Latino (a staggering 70% in Los Angeles). They may be
learning English, but are they learning enough skills to
get something better from life than mere day-labor jobs?
WASP students go to private schools or schools
in safe, small suburban districts. There are not enough
public schools in California to educate a majority of
Latino kids - although LA, for instance, always finds
torrents of dollars when it comes to building the
spectacular Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall or
the Staples Center. California ranks as the 30th
American state in terms of per capita spending on
education.
California's comparative economic
advantage has everything to do with networks, crucial
nodes and enterprising spirit. LA business is not only
Hollywood and aerospace, it's also jewelry, furniture,
carpets, toys and, of course, pornography (in San
Fernando Valley). All Japanese car multinationals have
their creative headquarters in southern California.
Suburbia rules If southern California
is the empire of suburbia, the inland empire - the
suburban sprawl in Riverside and San Bernardino counties
- is its new key hub. About 660,000 of these 3.6 million
inlanders (and counting) arrived in the 1990s - and
550,000 are Latino (talk about integration). Here, the
California dream is ubiquitous - manifested by the
detached suburban home with attached flotilla of sport
utility vehicles (SUVs). Nine out of 10 Californians
reportedly want to live in a single-family detached
home. In Victorville - sort of the heart of the inland
empire - these houses are affordable. In Orange County
they're not. According to Steve Pon Tell, an inland
empire specialist, the first imperial rule of attraction
is its multimodality. We're talking about an integrated
circuit, where if you're willing to spend most of your
life on the freeway you're able to move anywhere. This
is supposedly what freedom is all about.
It may
never rain in California, as the pop cliche goes, but
chic movie-star hangout Palm Springs is sprinkled with
mini-nozzles. Roman Polanski's Chinatown, written
by Angeleno Robert Towne, was a fabulous movie about who
controls LA water. Today, 80% of California's water is
used for agriculture - but agriculture represents only
2% of California's economy. Talk about government
inefficiency.
Recently, Californians were
bombarded with the public relations campaign for the new
Disney attraction - the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.
No irony intended, of course. It's a national sport to
dismiss Californians as apolitical - or as a wacky bunch
of voters. But attitudes are changing. Surfers in
Topanga Canyon may now mock "CNN bubbleheads". Or take
this Jewish-American family in Beverly Hills, who
impeccably voted Republican all their lives. They may
not be exactly familiar with the fine print of the
Patriot Act. But now they say "it looks like we're
living in the former Soviet Union. There's total
infringement on our civil liberties." They'll vote
Democrat in November.
Ah-nuld And then
there's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger - or Ah-nuld,
Arnold Inc, Conan The Governor, The Deregulator, the
Gubernator, the Ubermensch or The Terminator, as he is
variously known from LA to the Bay Area and from San
Diego to the inland empire. From an anthropological
point of view, Ah-nuld is the ultimate model to
understand what makes post-everything America tick.
Ah-nuld shot to the heights of political power
as in a movie plot, on a mission maybe not from god -
like the Blues Brothers or George W Bush and John
Ashcroft - but a sacred mission nonetheless: to rescue
California's economy from the evil forces of corruption
and to restore the California Dream to its righteous
citizens. He set out to prove that the sixth-largest
economy in the world - where the most advanced
technology coexists with appalling infrastructure - is
actually manageable.
Ah-nuld used one of
California's famed propositions - number 57 in this case
- to borrow US$15 billion to cover some of its budget
deficit, currently running at $1 billion a month. He
coupled the move with another proposition requiring the
California legislature to come up every year with
balanced budgets.
He must be doing something
right. Last May, Moody's raised California's debt rating
from BBB to A3. It's still the worst among the 50 states
- but at least this is the first time California gets a
decent grade in four years. The economy is expected to
grow by 4% in 2004.
Trojan lessons Brad Pitt
didn't learn Ah-nuld is a tautological universe:
he always elicits a horde of clones of Ah-nuld (much
more than Bush breeds Bush clones). When he goes on
blitz mode, he blurs all borders between Hollywood,
business, special effects, the me ethos, self-help,
super-fitness, perfect health and politics. Michael
Blitz and Louise Krasniewicz, authors of the delightful
Why Arnold Matters (Basic Books, 2004), go as far
as saying that "Arnold Schwarzenegger defines the
essence of the American Dream in a time when Americans
have had to recognize the vulnerability and near
impossibility of that dream."
In this true
revolution in cultural politics, Ah-nulds's target is to
make the world over in Ah-nuld's image. Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi tries the same thing in Italy, but he
only travels with subtitles. The essence of Ah-nuld the
politician is always a monstrous public relations
exercise to the benefit of Ah-nuld. But the process has
been so effective that he has managed to morph Ah-nuld
into California itself.
Ah-nuld is a program
that can be run anywhere, but he may be the ultimate
Trojan Horse: a program disguised as a harmless
application which is able to infiltrate and destroy a
computer's hardware, software or both. He may already be
doing so to the American political-cultural grid - and
soon no one will be complaining about it.
No
wonder Ah-nuld conducted his whole campaign in 2003 in
malls. Malls and theme parks are so successful because
they represent an extremely regulated vision of
happiness and well-being. They are the perfect image for
democratic participation in a not-too-politicized
republic. Ah-nuld's "Disneylandization" of American
politics is a complex process involving carefully
controlled maximum simplification, scaling down,
cleansing, elimination of any kind of disorder, creation
of an atmosphere of harmony, guided behavior and total
mass control. Karl Rove Machiavellians and brutal
neo-cons in the Bush administration would have
everything to learn from Ah-nuld's tactics.
But what does it mean for Republicans?
California Republicans (Richard Nixon, Ronald
Reagan) usually have the ability to morph into
Terminators for the party nationally: after all, they
carry a state of 35 million people with 54 electoral
votes.
Ah-nuld is a classic, not hardcore,
conservative. His priorities are paying the bills,
balancing the budget and cutting off costs mercilessly
to achieve it (the poor and the needy be damned). But he
is also pro-choice; he worries about the environment
(even promising to convert one of his Hummers to natural
gas and hydrogen); and he's deeply influenced by wife
Maria Shriver of the Kennedy clan.
Kerry the
Yankee should not take California for granted next
November. Iraq has made Bush lose an avalanche of votes
in California, according to the latest polls. Nixon won
over John F Kennedy in California in 1960. Bill Clinton
and AL Gore won by landslides in the 1990s. In the 2003
Ah-nuld gubernatorial triumph, he was shattered in the
Bay Area and lost in Central LA, but he won by huge
margins in the southern California suburbs and in the
Central Valley.
This does not mean that an
Ah-nuld victory in 2003 will translate into a Bush win
in 2004. But southern California may still yield a huge
surprise. The last northerner to win California was
Franklin Roosevelt. The other Democrats who won
afterwards came from Missouri (Harry S Truman), Texas
(Lyndon Johnson), Arkansas (Clinton) and Tennessee
(Gore).
Vast sections of America seem to be
redefining democracy in essentially militaristic terms.
In a society that is increasingly shallow and extremely
materialistic ("a tawdry cheapness/ shall outlast our
days", wrote the great Ezra Pound, a native from Idaho),
the polls say that at least half of the American
population now see the military as the last refuge of
democratic values (Abu Ghraib notwithstanding). But
Ah-nuld, as usual, has gone one step ahead: he's the
only one who knows how to seduce conservative voters
with shopping mall democracy.
The future of
the republic Enter the closest California has in
terms of a resident sage: Chalmers Johnson, 72, former
navy officer and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
consultant, for years the head of University of
California Berkeley's political science department and
the Center for Chinese Studies. In 2000, Johnson
published the best-selling Blowback, warning that
retribution against American imperial policies would be
inevitable. His new book, The Sorrows of Empire,
is even more devastating, detailing the entrails of the
global garrison managed by the Pentagon and the CIA.
In this must-read book, Johnson shows how what
could be called a military-petroleum complex turned
America into the new Rome - with all the hubris,
nepotism, corruption and savagery this implies.
Professor Paul Kennedy of Yale had warned in the 1980s
about the dangers of imperial overstretch. Johnson
enumerates the four greatest dangers: perpetual war
(George W Bush, on the record, has called for regime
change in 60 countries); the end of the democratic
republic; institutionalized disinformation (disseminated
by corporate media); and bankruptcy.
Johnson, a
lover of Goethe, lives with his wife in beautiful La
Jolla, north of San Diego, in a home with a view of the
Pacific. He's still astonished at how most students
nowadays are "passive and apolitical" and "indifferent
to the world": he's talking about young Californians.
He's in favor of dismantling the CIA: "Their
intelligence on Iraq should have been awarded the 2002
Nobel Prize for literature."
Johnson's view of
America's future is gloomy. He does not believe that
"the political system is capable of saving the
republic": "It is hard to imagine that any president of
either party could stand up to the powerful vested
interests surrounding the Pentagon and the secret
intelligence agencies. Given that 40% of the defense
budget is secret and that all of the intelligence
agencies' budgets are secret, it is impossible for
Congress to do effective oversight of them even if it
wanted to." He believes that "if the republic is to be
saved it will be as a result of an upsurge of direct
democracy".
This is the progressive view. In the
real world, California political experts usually joke
that in America the political candidate whose life makes
the best Hollywood movie always wins. Who could possibly
beat Ah-nuld in the future if he and his followers
successfully lobby to get a constitutional amendment to
allow him to run? Don't underestimate the Trojan Horse.
Kahl-eee-fohr-nya may be just a test tube experiment.
Direct democracy - of the shopping mall kind - may be
next. And then, to crown the ultimate California Dream,
he'll be back - as the Presidator.
Cops
and cars,
