You crazy, America.
Too crazy. Even for Californians.
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. Crazy is our core competency.
Our state was founded one of history’s greatest crazes, the Gold Rush, which populated this land with crazies from all over the world.
Since then, California has been shaped by a series of crazes: for fruit, nuts, oil, cars, weapons, aerospace, entertainment, software, and the Internet. All those crazes were fueled by innovation, which requires some craziness.
Our leadership in craziness has long gone unchallenged. We produced the Manson Family, the People’s Temple, and Heaven’s Gate. Californians green-lit 12 “Fast and Furious” films and four Jerry Brown gubernatorial terms. The whole point of California is that it doesn’t make sense. As the author-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 clear limits. America, feel free to go around the bend, but don’t cross the Sierra, that wall against true madness.
Now, though, America, you’ve run through that wall and gone beyond anything California ever managed.
We Californians have our self-destructive tendencies, but never would we jump off the cliff into national suicide.
Like you’re doing now.
America, you’re a world hegemon that is abandoning that leadership role and all the economic benefits that come with it. 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. In California, we’ve elected our share of crooks, but you put a convicted criminal in the Oval Office after he sought to steal an election and promised to rule as a dictator.
And you’ve gone along with his sending secret police to abduct Americans and dispatching the military to occupy our cities. You also tolerate a president and vice president who say citizenship should be based not on ideas 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. We also recognize that many of those 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 sold billions of smartphones, addictive machines whose apps (also California products) reliably turn Americans crazy. Many of the violent 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 the 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 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 — 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, don’t want to live in a California that is an island of sanity in a country gone mad. So, America, please get help — and return to what the fundamentals. Let New Englanders be stoic, Southerners courtly, and Midwesterners nice.
And let’s make California crazy again.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Mathews | America has become too crazy for California
Reporting by Joe Mathews, Zócalo Public Square / Ventura County Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
