Truth In News
Good Bye California
Good Bye California - How the Progressives Ruined My State by:
Victor Davis Hansen
The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more
forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if
superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales
and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public
schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal
aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a
stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental
ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.
During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike
on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County.
I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through
towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have
been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and
impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier,
and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and
almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater,
two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well
below federal testing norms in math and English.
Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that
the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly
maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the
rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero,
so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general
depression in farming - to such an extent that the 20-to-100-acre tree
and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for
all practical purposes has ceased to exist.
On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary
cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of
acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed.
Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas - which used to make
harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment - have
largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or
south of the border. Agriculture itself - from almonds to raisins - has
increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the
number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between
15 and 20 percent.
Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye
no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean
look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various
outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles,
lean-to’s cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and
geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about
all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business - rigid
zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections - but apparently
none of that applies out here.
It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not
regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the
upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring
the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond
the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the
regulators' defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer
park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?
Many of the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on former
small farms - the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground
lying fallow. I pass on the cultural consequences to communities from the
loss of thousands of small farming families. I don't think I can remember
another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley have gone
out of production, even though farm prices have recently rebounded. Apparently
it is simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a
new orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly - with suddenly soaring farm prices,
still we have thousands of acres in the world's richest agricultural belt, with
available water on the east side of the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle
or in disuse. Is credit frozen? Are there simply no more farmers? Are the schools
so bad as to scare away potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all
terrified by the national debt and uncertain future?
California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available
to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem
to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic
substances throughout California 's rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example,
I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags
of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said
in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were
three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in
passing that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over
and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.
In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here - composed of everything from
half-empty paint cans and children's plastic toys to diapers and moldy food.
I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers
cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists
that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California
than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the
west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the
unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our
rural communities.
We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out
of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific
observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in
California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a "counter
business." I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side
of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto,
become mini-restaurants. There are no "facilities" such as toilets or washrooms.
But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks
apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of
cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from
a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.
At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here
is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes,
hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The
merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or
income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.
In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with
a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when "food stamps" were embarrassing
bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use of the card and
poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned by the user and the
car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the
upper middle class.
By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses,
had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with
public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just
ridden by the day before. I don't editorialize here on the logic or morality of
any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who apparently
are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer
of the middle class. California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent
source of income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits
from Washington explain some of this?
Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile
stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through
Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma,
my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic - there were no Asians, no blacks, no other
whites. We may speak of the richness of "diversity," but those who cherish that ideal
simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become
near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not
at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers
or at least the chief sources of income - whether through emergency rooms, rural health
clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude
that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation,
perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.
Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20 years
that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico, a vast
expansion of California's entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class
out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in
manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from
many of these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California.
Fresno's California State University campus is embroiled in controversy over the
student body president's announcing that he is an illegal alien, with all the requisite
protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won't comment on the legislation per se, but
again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think it fair to say that
the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American Studies program's sizable
curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I mean that students in those
classes heard of the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town,
Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American counterparts.
I note this because hundreds of students here illegally are now terrified of being
deported to Mexico. I can understand that, given the chaos in Mexico and their own
long residency in the United States. But here is what still confuses me: If one were
to consider the classes that deal with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays
of national chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is a far more attractive and
moral place than the United States.
So there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, "Please do not send me
back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me stay in the culture that I
ignore or deprecate." I think the DREAM Act protestors might have been far more successful
in winning public opinion had they stopped blaming the U.S. for suggesting that they might
have to leave at some point, and instead explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What
it is about America that makes a youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or demonstrate to be
allowed to remain in this country rather than return to the place of his birth?
I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is
the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed "indifferent."
California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it
by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant - no proficiency in English, no
acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education
or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it
borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California 's burdensome
regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to
the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and
have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those
who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow
in their footsteps. How odd - to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient
Sparta - that California is at once both the nation's most unfree and most free state,
the most repressed and the wildest.
Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both into and
out of California - and the result is a sort of social, cultural, economic, and political
time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers
of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The
Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.