CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARIN’

CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARIN’
By Robert McElvaine

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
— William Faulkner
Requiem for a Nun (1951)


“. . . for time past is not believed to have any bearing on time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.”
— Joan Didion
“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (1966)

Let’s talk about California and what it may be saying to us in Mississippi and the rest of the nation about the journey we have been on over the past three decades and where we may be headed now.

It may seem that California has little to say to us in Mississippi. The two states have long been at the opposite poles of America. As the quotations above from leading writers of the two states indicate, so much in our state is tied to the past, while in California it often seems that there is no past.

Here are the contrasting ways in which the states tend to be seen around the country and the world:

Mississippi has been haunted by the Ghost of America Past.
California is haunted by the Ghosts of America Present and
America Yet to Come.

If the states were theme parks, California is Tomorrowland.
Mississippi is Yesterdayland.

Mississippi is about never forgetting the past;
California is about completely forgetting the past.

California has long been seen as being on the cutting edge of progress and change. By the 1960s, the nation's westward movement had been replaced by new trends emanating from California and moving eastward.

“All that is constant about the California of my childhood,” Joan Didion wrote of her home state in 1965, “is the rate at which it disappears.”

Mississippi, on the other hand, has been a place wholly rooted in the past and the most resistant to change.

The rate of change in the two states is even reflected in nature. California is famous for the sudden upheavals of its massive earthquakes. In Mississippi, we have what amount to slow-motion earthquakes in the form of the expansions and contractions of Yazoo Clay.

The geographic extremes in California are vastly greater than in Mississippi. California has, in close proximity, the lowest place in the United States, Death Valley, and the highest in the contiguous 48 states, Mt. Whitney, from 282 feet below sea level to 14,505 feet above—a range of 14,787 feet. Mississippi is all within the narrow range of 806 feet from sea level to the top of the generously named Woodall “Mountain.” (Recall that when Martin Luther King looked forward at the 1963 March on Washington to the day when freedom would ring from various mountains in the South, he referred only to “every hill and molehill of Mississippi”).

In weather, the differences are in some respects not as great. Mississippi has its long, hot summers, in which the weather stays almost exactly the same for weeks on end. Southern California’s weather often seems similarly unchanging. But both locales are subject to “weather of catastrophe”— flash floods with houses sliding down eroded embankments and the warm Santa Ana winds bringing onrushing fire and madness in people in California, and tornadoes and hurricanes in Mississippi.

Yet even in weather, there is much of an omnipresent feeling that the apocalypse may be right around the corner in California. Again, it is Didion who says it best: “The violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

Mississippi is all about permanence, but the very nature of California is that nothing is intended to be permanent. Movie sets are removed after the picture is finished. Houses slide down cliffs. The ultimate fear is that much of the state will be destroyed by “The Big One”—a gigantic earthquake.

It is very easy to depict California and Mississippi as polar opposites:

“Going south” has a very different meaning than “going west.”

Mississippi was about tradition;
California was about innovation

Mississippi is wet and humid;
California is dry.

Mississippi is all about old;
California is all about new.

Mississippi was the Old South;
California is the New West.

California is change.
Mississippi is anti-change.

♦ ♦ ♦

What, then, can California have to say to us that is worth listening to?

Actually a majority of Mississippians have been listening to and following what has come out of the Golden State for a fairly long time. California was, more than a quarter century ago, the source of a political movement embraced by many Mississippians and of a leader who came to be revered in Mississippi.

In the 1970s, both the conservative anti-tax movement and Ronald Reagan came to us out of California. (We won’t talk now about the other two presidential gifts California presented to the nation, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon.)

The nation’s sharp turn to the right took off in 1978. One of the leading indicators of this turn was the passage that year of California Proposition 13, the Jarvis-Gann Initiative, which severely limited property taxes and made future increases in all types of taxes very difficult. It was the beginning of a disaster caused by unchecked direct democracy. Voters in California have increasingly bypassed the legislative process by making key decisions through referenda. That may sound good, but what has happened, unsurprisingly, is that the voters keep voting to tax themselves less and spend more.

The result has been disaster. Before the passage of Pop 13, California had perhaps the best public school system in the nation. In recent years, California schools have ranked last, below Mississippi’s. Today, California is teetering on the edge of one of those cliffs, with a mudslide on the way.

It may not always be true that “you get what you pay for.” But it is usually true that “you don’t get what you don’t pay for.”

Three years after Prop 13, Mr. Reagan brought that California state of mind to Washington.A recent letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times got it right:

“Ronald Reagan’s dream is finally realized. California will now be a model for a Republican utopia. No taxes. No services. I’m from the private sector, and I’m here to help you.”

California nightmarin’ has become a reality.

Mr. Reagan told us in his first inaugural, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He set out to lessen that problem, cut top tax rates, and reduce the regulatory powers of the government.

Most Mississippians cheered. The majority view here has long been that big government is dangerous. It is. What is dangerous about it, though, is not the noun, government, but the adjective, big. If big government is dangerous, does not the same apply to big business? Not according to those who joined in the Reagan Revolution. Their attitude was: Don’t worry about how big financial institutions become; they can’t harm us.

We now ought to know better.

Indeed, the need for big government lies very largely in the existence of big business, from which we need powerful government to protect us.

It should be clear now that, under current circumstances, President Reagan’s statement needs modification to: “Big business is not the solution to our problem; business that is too big is the problem.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Democracy is clearly the best political system, but our nation’s Founding Fathers had the good sense to realize that democracy carries with it inherent dangers and so provided a system of checks and balances to rein in its potentially detrimental excesses.

Capitalism is clearly the best economic system, but what we need now are some Fathers and Mothers with the good sense to realize that capitalism carries with it inherent dangers and so to provide a system of checks and balances to rein in its potentially detrimental excesses.

Some of those checks and balances were provided in the New Deal, but they were broken down by the Reaganites, especially during the eight years of the second President Bush.

In California, a large part of the problem is democracy without checks and balances. In the nation as a whole, a large part of the problem is capitalism without checks and balances.

California’s task now is to try to find a way to restore political checks and balances. The nation’s task now is to restore and improve upon those economic checks and balances.

California has always been the cutting edge of the “Reagan Revolution” and that edge has now cut it to the point of the state bleeding out. We need to apply a national tourniquet to stop the bleeding before the nation succumbs to this Golden Bear Flu.
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Robert McElvaine is the Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters and Chair, Department of History, at Millsaps College in Jackson. He is also the author of several books, most recently Grand Theft Jesus and is a regular contributor to huffingtonpost.com. McElvaine lives in Clinton and is currently at work on a book about the Sixties.

Interview with author, cultural critic Diana West

Diana West, the author of The Death of The Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, writes weekly column for The Washington Times. A CNN contributor, she appears regularly on “Lou Dobbs This Week.” He work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The New Criterion and The Atlantic Monthly. She lives with her family in Washington, D.C. West was interviewed recently by Profiles Mississippi publisher and “Ready, Aim, Right!” author Jack Criss.


Criss: Why The Death of the Grown-Up? Was that your working title or did the publisher suggest it?

West: Yes, it was my idea and was the original working title. The subtitle we worked on together.

Criss: How does your book differ from so many other conservative social critics out there? One can think of Mark Steyn, Roger Kimball, Robert Bork among many others.

West: Well, I am a conservative and not a neo-conservative, which is an important distinction, although I used to work for Irving Kristol, the “godfather” of the neo-cons.

Your question is a broad one. I’d like to think my book is for a more general audience. As a columnist by profession, I try to disseminate ideas as widely as I can, not for an academic audience necessarily. In this book, I tried to broaden my readers’ perspective on the kind of people we have become and hit the notion home that we have changed culturally, during a short time in a way that is not positive; hence the “death of the grown-up”. In addition, I think I brought a more personal perspective on these changes in the book; other social critics don’t really do that. Also, instead of solely focusing on the culture, I go into detail about the threat of Islam to our way of life.

TNI: You focus on culture in your book. Usually, when a self-described conservative brings up cultural issues as it relates to the political realm, censorship is advocated or, at least, alluded to in some form. You don’t do that in your book. Why?

Criss: There are a couple of ways to look at that issue: I don’t have a problem with, for instance, the idea of the old Boston censor---which I write about in my book---a gentleman who oversaw a locality determining what could go on its public stages. That really doesn’t offend me. I don’t mind when pornography is not available at the 7-Eleven. I like that kind of society. A lot of those restrictions I believe come about by what the public desires. We used to live in a society where there was a mainstream and there were fringes. Today, thanks to the efforts of (Penthouse publisher) Bob Guccione and Hugh Hefner, everything is all one big, great, messy mainstream.

(Conservative critic and author) Roger Kimball made a good point on this issue when he was discussing the “Dung Virgin” art exhibit in New York some years back that Rudy Giuliani tried to cut off public funding for: Kimball noted that, by the time you have to go to the courts to enforce decency, you’ve really lost because it’s no longer a natural expression of the population.

Recognizing the validity of that view, the question then becomes, well, what do we do? For those of us who have moral and aesthetic objections to trash and smut, how do we fight back? To me, it comes to having, or getting back, a grown-up sense of confidence to tell a museum you don’t want to see such and such, you won’t bring your school class to it, you don’t appreciate objectionable art or music being displayed. An activist population is required and, unfortunately, I think today many of us too often feel overwhelmed and defeated by the ubiquity of media culture.

Criss: But the genie is out of the bottle, really. For those who prefer the finer things, the higher and more sublime things, don’t you see such people insulating themselves? They can find the art they admire in so many more mediums today and, because of that, have just given up and exited the public debate concerning decency and values. Many are also embarrassed to even point out the crassness all around them, wouldn’t you agree?

Criss: Yes, exactly. Part of what you say is what motivated me to write the book and use the metaphor of the death of the grown up. The authority figure, the Babbitt, has been eroded and made to feel “uncool” and out-moded. You can look at the last half century of culture as one big assault on traditional hierarchy and authority, one big reeducation camp. Now, I don’t argue in my book so much for squeaky clean, G-rated everything as some conservatives do; I bemoan the lack of an adult sensibility in so much of our cultural product.

But why are we so cowed? Why are we so embarrassed? I think it has to do with the general message being pushed today by the media culture, the stars of the world, Brittney Spears and so forth. The irony is that they themselves are so isolated in the very culture they helped create. There is in the world today a demise of manhood, of manliness, and a concomitant rise of feminism, an erosion of the lack of traditional authority figures, which has led to a lack of confidence so that people who generally have fairly decent and regular types of instincts do feel cowed. In school situations, for instance, if you say, “I really don’t feel my child should be reading X in class,” people will give you a strange look and then later come up and agree with what you said. I’ve had that happen to me.

Criss: You mentioned feminism: one of the sad ironies of women’s lib to me is that it has succeeded in liberating women to act as boorish as men were always accused of having acted. Feminism is brought up in the book as is the counterculture and the Sixties as the usual bete noires; but, unlike most social critics, you point the biggest finger at the idyllic 1950s. Why?

West: I’m glad you asked because obviously a lot of readers and critics have missed that point. I honestly think sometimes that there’s not much book reading in the book reviewing business (laughs). I wonder quite a lot about what we call the “Greatest Generation” and the culture of the Fifties. We saw such an explosion in births and affluence and the whole country was transformed radically. It was almost like a cultural perfect storm: Higher education became widely available for the masses for the first time; parental lore and authority was replaced by expert advice, such as with Dr. Spock; women entered the workplace in big numbers for the first time; wealth and the ability to spend more freely was much more common---all of this combined with the Depression and World War II parents spoiling their children, giving them much more than they had ever dreamed of having. What interested me when I was researching the book was how all of these trends were really solidified in the Fifties and that it was around this time the term “teenager” first appeared in our national lexicon. Suddenly, whole industries appeared catering to this newly “discovered” and pampered demographic. There was a whole reorganization of life to make room for the teenager.

Criss: You write about the role of the newfound “experts” taking over parenting for the parents. Ayn Rand put a lot of the blame on the immaturity, or irrationality as she called it, of the Sixties radicals on the influence of philosophers such as Dewey and his progressive education theories. You don’t touch on that in your book.

West: I do mention some changes made in education such as the advent of the middle and high school in mid-century America. I’ve never read Ayn Rand, believe it or not, and I’m not sure really how I missed doing so. My teenage daughter just brought home Atlas Shrugged so maybe I’ll get it around to it.

Criss: Well, Rand and others also note that government will always take on the role of authority figure or of Santa Claus by force or other means when responsibility is abdicated. If you give up your autonomy or maturity, as you say, by default you turn it over to the government.

West: Yes. De Toqueville spoke to that, incidentally. He wrote in Democracy in America that if authoritarianism ever came to this country it would do so by default, by the citizenry becoming infantile.

Criss: Many conservatives tend to blame the market and capitalism for the types of ills you describe in your book. Do you share these criticisms of consumerism? Is it the fault of the record company executives, for example, that so much garbage is out there in the music world?

West: I consider myself a capitalist. However, I do think a lot of our problems rest with the record company executives of your example and I try to get at that in my book. I discuss the sense of responsibility of movie executives in this country in the 1920s and the record executives in the 1950s and it’s one of my favorite parts of the book, actually. Some executive and critics in the Fifties thought that their industry should be self-policing in reaction to the new rock and roll that was being promoted. The same thing happened in the Twenties in reaction to talkies just coming into being. The film executives cleaned up their own industry in reaction to all of these censorship bills that were popping up all across the nation at the time.

The people who run the markets today don’t have that sense of responsibility or even the economic inclination. Many movies today are losing money but that doesn’t seem to faze the modern executives. Louie B. Mayer, the head of MGM in its heyday, did not like to make movies in which a mother was badly portrayed. This was important to him. We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? But I don’t blame the market; I look more at the individuals running the market.

Criss: Interestingly, you also didn’t fall back on the religious argument made by the typical conservative in cultural criticism. Why not?

West: I’m not a religious observant person and my theory in the book doesn’t stand or fall on religion. The churches have changed along with the culture. A recent article in the New York Times told how many churches, in order to keep up membership, are using the worst products of the culture, like these awful video games, so-called Christian rap, etc., just to get kids to show up. It’s extremely objectionable and represents the same lack of sensibility and maturity I decry. The cultural problems I try to address in the book have little to do with the role of private worship in people’s personal lives.

My whole point in writing The Death of the Grown-Up was this: why have we become a nation of perpetual adolescents? I had been toying with the idea for some time but almost gave up on it after 9/11. However, I found an extra urgency upon reflecting on my whole theory when I began thinking about the politically incorrect facts about Islam. It is an immediate crisis facing all of us and yet few of us will look. We have a presidential campaign going on and nobody is talking about Islalmization, Western values vs. Islam, the threats to us…no one wants to talk about these things. The silence, I believe, is a product of what we’ve become in this nation: fearful adolescents.

Criss: We are so apologetic for our values and success in this country that we may end up capitulating in the face of politically correct pressure.

West: I write a weekly column and this issue is constantly on my mind. Is it too late? I don’t know. I mean, I wrote something negative about Led Zeppelin recently and I get droves of hate mail and indignant responses yet I don’t receive the same type of fervor or interest about the threat of Islam. This proves my book’s point: take away people’s toys and they get really upset. I wrestle with this every week. There’s a surreal aspect to it, honestly. The president talks about the progress being made in Iraq and Afghanistan and yet people are still being sentenced to die for blasphemy in those countries! Islam is not being challenged and that is a major danger.

Criss: You say you don’t know if it’s too late. Can a maturation process take place in our culture? Can we defend ourselves against militant Islam?

West: The cultural decay seems harder to reverse than the Islamic threat, in my opinion. The decay is so advanced and the problems are related as my book demonstrates, yet no defense is being mounted in either situation. It can be done but it will require quite an intellectual overhaul. I wonder if we have it in us. For example, I’m shocked that so many conservatives, some of whom I know, have completely ignored the sections on Islam in my book. The silence is deafening and appalling. There are things we can do, and I write about them in my book. But will we do them? That’s the major question.

Criss: Will there be a follow-up to your book?

West: Well, The Death of the Grown-Up is going into its second printing and has done moderately well. I’m talking to the publishers about another book; there are some plans, but nothing on the board right now.


Criss: Thank you for your time and a fascinating book, Diana.