The U.S. Is No Good at Being Nuts. Best to Leave That to the Golden State
This column is co-published with Zócalo Public Square. Photo by Derek Giovanni via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0
You crazy, America.
Too crazy. Even for Californians.
Which should make you realize how crazy you are.
Except, of course, you too crazy to realize it.
Let me put it another way: It makes me crazy just how crazy it is that Americans are crazier than us Californians.
Because crazy is what California does. Crazy is our jam, our talent, our core competency.
Our state was founded through one of the greatest crazes in history, the Gold Rush, which populated this land with crazies from all over the world.
Our story since that gold-crazy launch is just a series of crazes: for fruit orchards, for oil, for cars, for weapons and airplanes, for Hollywood, for software and for the Internet. All those crazes were fueled by innovation, which requires a bit of craziness. The term “California Crazy” started as the name for the roadside architectural form we created in the 1920s—eccentric roadside buildings shaped like donuts or hats. It was quickly adopted to apply to all Californians. D.H. Lawrence, who visited in that decade, wrote to a friend: “California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific.”
Our leadership in craziness has long gone unchallenged. We produced the Manson Family, the People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, and Scientology. Californians green-lit 12 Fast-and-Furious films, 15 Kenny G albums, and four Jerry Brown gubernatorial terms.
Indeed, the whole point of California is that it doesn’t make any sense. As the author and environmentalist Edward Abbey observed:
There is science, logic, reason;
there is thought verified by experience.
And then there is California.
Still, California’s singular craziness constituted a national service—by setting a clear and helpful limit for the country. America, please feel free to go around the bend, but be sure not to cross the Sierra, that wall against the madness.
Now, though, America, you’ve torn down the wall, and gone far beyond anything California ever managed.
To be sure, we Californians drive too fast and have our self-destructive tendencies, but never would we jump off the cliff into national suicide, as you’re doing now.
For all our craziness, we’ve always been committed to the project of American greatness and global leadership. But America, you’re a world hegemon that has decided to abandon that role and all the economic benefits that come with it. Nuclear treaties, foreign aid, and trade agreements made us safe and rich, but you’ve killed off these policies and programs. Our planet is burning up, and you’ve decided to abandon smart climate investments to burn it up faster.
Our Golden State is no model of effective government, but you’ve turned the federal government into a combination of criminal enterprise and oligarchic concierge service, staffed by incompetents, con men, and neo-Confederates. In California, we’ve elected our share of crooks and madmen, but you put a convicted criminal back into office after he sought to steal an election.
Then you allowed him to become a dictator—stripping us of our rights, grabbing money that Congress appropriated for the people, dismantling the scientific and medical agencies that keep us alive. California has a habit of pursuing “perilous remedies for present evils,” as the British jurist and historian Lord James Bryce put it. But you’ve gone along with sending secret police to abduct Americans and dispatching the military to occupy our cities. California can be too exclusive, but you tolerate a president and vice president who say citizenship should be based not on ideas and values, but on blood and racial heritage.
To be fair, America, you are not entirely to blame for your crazy turn. We Californians have had a hand in your crack-up. Millions of us have emigrated to your various states, packing their craziness with them, and probably making you crazy in response. We also recognize that many of the people making the U.S. government so tyrannically nuts are Californians—Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, Harmeet Dhillon, and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Our tech companies have soldt billions of smartphones, addictive machines whose apps (also California products) reliably turn Americans crazy. Many of the violent and apocalyptic visuals that our government is creating in American cities were clearly inspired by Hollywood entertainment. And decades of eating billions of burgers from McDonald’s, originally from San Bernardino, may have made you all sick in heart and head.
Whatever the reasons, you’ve turned the country upside down , by surpassing California in your craziness,. It’s unsettlingly strange to hear Silicon Valley entrepreneurs declare they are leaving the Bay Area because it’s too limiting and close-minded, and moving to Texas instead.
It’s even weirder to see a former mayor of a famously insane city, San Francisco, emerge as our national voice of reason. When Gov. Gavin Newsom—a man who spins out crazy ideas at the pace of a maître d reciting a menu—is mocking you for going overboard, it should feel like a splash of ice water in the face.
To all Newsom’s pleas for Americans to “wake up,” let me add this: You Americans just aren’t very good at being crazy.
I, your crazy columnist, do not want to live in a California that is an island of sanity in a country gone mad. So, America, please get help. And please return to what you were best at. Let’s make New Englanders stoic, Southerners courtly, and Midwesterners nice.
And let’s make us Californians the crazy ones again.
