FLUX RULES | PAGE 2 OF 2
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"But what I don't understand," another Easterner recently told me, "is why, if California is so cutting edge, all these arch-conservatives come from there." At times it does seem like the Californians with the most impact on contemporary America aren't the counterculture rebels who spend a few youthful years flouting various social and sexual conventions before settling down into steady jobs and suburban family life. Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, Howard Jarvis (who helped launch the tax revolt movement with 1979's notorious statewide property tax rollback initiative, Proposition 13) and anti-affirmative action crusader Ward Connerly have left more obvious imprints on today's America than any child of the Summer of Love. Yet the West Coast is still saddled with the old "fruits and nuts" epithet, particularly by Midwesterners. They crankily dismiss California as a place where people flee to escape from "reality." (San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll once retorted that, yes, maps in California classrooms show the state and, well outside its borders, a little circle labeled "Reality.")

It's true, California is burdened by fantasies -- but I don't mean the old dreams of sunshine, sand and stardom, which are real enough, if only for a tiny part of a state that contains suburbanites, farmers, rednecks, desert rats, forest rangers, apartment dwellers and trailer park denizens and others in even greater numbers. I also don't mean the gay activists, New Agers, computer geeks, vegans, no-nukers and all the other supposed "kooks" -- those people are far more realistic than the average American who still thinks that mandatory heterosexuality, agribusiness, monocultural Christianity, rampant industrial growth and 1950s family structures are sustainable or even desirable. What the state really suffers from is the Main Street, USA, fantasy of American life championed, packaged and sold by Disney and Reagan, the pipe dream of a nation where every family is white, Christian, middle class, home-owning and lives in a nice little town of people just like them who all speak the same language.

Peter Schrag, editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, in his wonkish but persuasive new book, "Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future," doggedly documents the danger in this infectious strain of California dreaming. The white ethnic Americans who fled the East and the Midwest for the booming new Californian suburbs built after World War II, eager to make new middle-class lives for themselves, have in their old age fought to scrap the government that gave them their Good Life -- now that the benefits go to immigrants and non-whites. Schrag traces the dire consequences of the California polity's infatuation with the voter initiative process, a form of government that seems to offer self-determination but actually institutionalizes chaos and gridlock.

The same voters captivated by Howard Jarvis' crusty-old-coot populism (a political style riffed on by everyone from Newt Gingrich to Ross Perot) have passed bellwether legislation establishing term limits and dismantling affirmative action and social services for immigrants. In its own way, this voter revolt is part of the California tradition of restlessly casting off restraints, first the social mores jettisoned by the '60s counterculture, and now the civic responsibilities rejected by the aging white electorate and tax base. The same impulse feeds into the libertarianism running through the culture of high technology. But whatever roots Californian conservatism shares with the state's blossoming ethos of pure flux, it's still about freezing the nation in a Neverneverland of white picket fences, when the reality of California is that there are parts of Los Angeles almost indistinguishable from Guatemala City or Hanoi, where not a single sign on the street is in English.

Eventually, the delusions of Main Street, USA, are destined to collide with the proliferating economy of flux, two forces grinding against each other like the tectonic plates of the state's famous faults. It's hard, though, to root cleanly for either side. The fermenting, idea-driven flux economy is probably the only place where a project like Salon could have been born and encouraged to thrive; on the other hand, flux can be as pitiless, blinkered and historically ignorant as the chirpy prognostications of Wired magazine with its blissed-out talk of "The Long Boom." California's new industries capitalize on a work force educated and supported by an infrastructure no one wants to pay for anymore. And the state leads the nation in this shortsightedness, the know-nothing belief that you can run a big, complicated country with next to no money and a staff of amateurs.

When Judgment Day comes -- and it should hit California first -- the spectacle won't be pretty, but it'll be the best show around. What makes California now feel like the center isn't that it's the most pleasant place to live in America. It's not the obsolete notion of California as paradise, the place where things have to work out right because there's nowhere else to run to. None of that is true any longer. But California, racked as it is by the childish impulses of its citizens and unthinkable changes unfolding in its social and economic future, is the most interesting place I know. It's impossible to imagine staying away forever, even though it's a bit of a relief to escape the omnipresent whiff of the apocalypse. The view, at least, is great from here.
SALON | March 30, 1998

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ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC WHITE