An old saying, cliche by now, suggests,"As California goes so goes the rest of the nation." I can't swear to it, but I suspect Rodeo Drive influences our national character more deeply than Madison Avenue. Sadly California, with all its beauty and mysticism, possesses a dark side. Sacrificial pioneers have morphed into self serving squatters. Paradise discovered has now given way to paradise lost. Stanford University man of letters Victor Davis Hanson offers a solution for a restoration of this once celebrated land:
...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.
In other words, we would have to seance someone born around 1900 and just ask them to float back for a day, walk around, and give us some advice.
Thinking in a theological context, those familiar with history and in particular, theological history, ought not be too shocked at such an observation. Who ever promised Americans a pass when it came to moral decay? Even the most sophisticated, developed civilizations such as ancient Babylon, eventually met with the inconceivable. The prophet Moses once opined to a young upstart nation:
25 After you have had children and grandchildren and have lived in the land a long time—if you then become corrupt and make any kind of idol, doing evil in the eyes of the LORD your God and provoking him to anger, 26 I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you this day that you will quickly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess. You will not live there long but will certainly be destroyed. 27 The LORD will scatter you among the peoples, and only a few of you will survive among the nations to which the LORD will drive you. 28 There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell. 29 But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul. 30 When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you, then in later days you will return to the LORD your God and obey him. 31 For the LORD your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your forefathers, which he confirmed to them by oath. (Duet.4:25-31)
Two salient implications spring forth from these verses and their context. First of all, Moses offers a theology of history. Prior to this stern warning he reminds the Hebrew people of God's great provisions while they wandered in the desert. He exhorts them to teach these historical lessons to their children. Not bad advice in anyone's book. We would do well to give an ear to Moses' warning. Yet, today's fashionable progressive mindset permeates our most noble institutions including free thinking Universities. This mindset, which disparages our exceptional historical narrative has now taken hold as the new national ethos. The contemporary narrative reads, Americans pillaged and plundered their way into empire status. Now we must level the international playing field.
We forget, however, that our unique Christian character with its emphasis upon self sacrifice, raised the ante. We became great because we were good. America derived its ethos from Moses' ethical commands to his people. Amidst this glorious success story the human condition remains Dicksonian. Intellectually it is the best of times. Morally, it will always be the most suspect of times. Notice I say suspect, because temporary solutions exist in moral decay. Victor Davis Hanson inferentially offers in his solution to California's disaster a sort of coming to one's self.
A second implication emerges from the first. We currently live with historical amnesia. Because we disparage our history based on past sins such as slavery, we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Now we see history through dark glasses if indeed we see it all. I suggest the latter is the norm. Surveys suggest our children know nothing about George Washington or Winston Churchill. The only thing they know about Thomas Jefferson is his supposed liaisons with slaves and his inability to keep his finances in check.
I like Dr. Hanson's fantasy solution. (judging by the tone of his article he writes with tongue-in cheek) And, I must admit, the upward way looks a bit steep right now. I think not only must we kick the scoundrels out of office, but we must also take Moses' advice and make the family our primary educational institute. My children posses a working knowledge of our great history because I often celebrated America's kingly past during family get togethers. In today's family hostile environment such advice might be a "tall order" as we say in Texas.
Oh, and I like this concluding piece of wisdom from VDH as well:
PS. I don’t vote Democratic any more much, if at all, but haven’t gotten around to changing my registration to Independent. But this June I will at least once more vote in the Democratic primary, largely for Mickey Kaus, whose online campaign seems to be reminding us just how absurd Barbara Boxer has become. He has good sense about unions and amnesty and state spending (my late mother, an appellate judge, used to speak highly of state Supreme Court Justice Kaus, a Democratic moderate, who, I think, was his father). In general, I have listened to all three senatorial Republican candidates and they are all good. Note — Barbara Boxer is a particularly unfortunate sort of politician, combining arrogance (remember her much publicized slapdown of a general and African-American businessman) with a loud sort of ignorance. (A diversity note: Three of the most powerful women in the world that have a lot to do with running the U.S. are multimillionaire, doctrinaire liberals, who at one time lived within about 50 miles of each other in San Francisco — Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer.)