WEEKEND READ: California, State of madness

Here in California, we are living in a state of madness. Ours is a land of perpetual derangement and hysteria, where lunatics careen through the streets with flailing limbs and bulging eyeballs, screaming at demons only they can see. We’ve long since lost the plot, slipped our last tenuous grip on the reality that lurks just above. Like submerged flies we cannot penetrate the surface tension above us, even as the membrane malforms our perception of that reality. Meanwhile, below are monsters the likes of which no person has ever before encountered, rough beasts, their hour come at last, slouching toward Sacramento to be born. They reach scaly limbs toward us, creeping closer all the time. Even the wrought iron gates of Bel Air and Atherton will not hold much longer. One suspects all of us will one day soon remark those selfsame monsters, for if things continue apace this place will consume us.

It’s a particular form of insanity too often devolves into mere anarchy. Should Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts ever visit she would realize very quickly that she has a lot of learning to do. The likes of state senator Scott Weiner make the Mad Hatter look like a rank amateur, while Gavin Newsom perches upon his seat at the French Laundry quaffing Chardonnay the way the caterpillar puffed his hookah, dispensing the sort of nonsense that passes for sagacity in this place. Madmen and madwomen are everywhere in our halls of power and justice, speaking in woke tongues like penitents before their chosen deities, all mimsy were the borogroves. They promise us they will slay the vicious Jabberwock, dispatch the Jubjub bird and the Bandersnatch. Huzzah! and fear not. And like the Queen of Hearts’ army, faceless and indistinguishable legions of bureaucrats smother even the slightest deviation from the reverie. No wonder they legalized pot: It dulls the agony of cognitive dissonance.

The cognitive dissonance of Gavin Newsom standing before the camera pitching Proposition 1 promising, “only one measure on the March can address our humanitarian crisis,” the one he himself did more than any other single individual to create (one harkens back to “Care Not Cash,” and shudders). The cognitive dissonance of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass spending $17,000 a month to house a single vagrant from Minneapolis, claiming progress. The cognitive dissonance of Adam Schiff running for the United States Senate because “California’s economy isn’t working for everyone.” If you believe the people who created this apocalypse are the ones to solve it, you are among the new California insane.

We’re all mad here. We are mad because we continue casting precious ballots, fundaments of our democracy, for demoniacs. 

We have to be mad. We must be mad. Because if we are not, the alternative explanations are unthinkable.

We listen, nodding like elementary schoolchildren, when they tell us that allowing addicts and junkies to shoot up, smoke, and ingest life destroying, fatal drugs in broad daylight in public spaces is “harm reduction.” When they tell us that allowing mentally ill homeless people and vagrants to languish in the streets in their own filth, literally being eaten alive by parasites and flesh eating bacteria, is “compassion.” When they tell us that releasing violent criminals and sex predators without bail and often without charges is “criminal justice reform.” When they tell us that when they sell out our neighborhoods and communities to the highest bidders on Wall Street, it is “housing justice.” When they tell us that transforming roads and highways into dangerous and confusing obstacle courses that increase accidents and prevent first responders from reaching expiring victims is a matter of “safer streets.” When they tell us that allowing unchecked millions of illegal immigrants to flood across the border into a state that cannot even care for the people already here is a matter of “human rights.” When they tell us that taxing the middle and working classes to the brink of ruin is a matter of “paying their fair share.”

We listen, we nod, and we vote for them again. Then we go back outside and walk down sidewalks and through parks and public places stepping over human excrement, piles of garbage the size of African termite mounds, hypodermic needles, and decaying rodents, while drinking $9 cups of coffee and continuing about our day as if it’s all normal. From time to time we step over an inert body that may or may not be yet alive. Somehow, we often fail to notice. Body meeting a body in the rye and sich. Just another day in Paradise.

To be sure, occasionally we tut-tut, but then we move on, hoping to be gone. Hoping it will all somehow resolve itself. But, of course, it will not. Not when we keep putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum.

See? We are mad, inside this living corpse of a state.

Or perhaps another analogue: We are feasting, drinking, and dancing like dervishes in the great hall of Prince Prospero, making jest of matters for which no jest can be made, realizing not that our grand haberdashery is the habiliment of the grave. For so long we looked askance at the rest of the country from the heights of our very own Shangri-la, that we can no longer discern the reality around us, so that we miss the arrival of the gaunt figure that anticipates our slow, horrific demise. 

Make no mistake: The Red Death has been lurking in the Golden State for a long time now. If you look closely enough at the pictures, if you can shed the gauze from before your eyes, you’ll see him in silhouette behind Governor Ronald Reagan and the assayed Democrats and Republicans surrounding him, all united in sanguine smiles, as he signed the bill into law that closed the state’s mental hospitals and disgorged the first legions of derangements onto the streets. Had you looked you’d have discerned the hem of his gown in the corner of your voting booth when you placed your mark, yes, next to Proposition 47. You most assuredly would see him just on the other side of the window in the infamous picture of Prospero Newsom and his entourage at the French Laundry, where inside it was folly to grieve, or to think.

To return to our original analogy, 40 million of us are like Alice through the looking glass, desperately seeking some foothold in reality as we attempt to divine how we got here, and how we can possibly make it back home. Because this isn’t home anymore.

It cannot be home. Home is not this place of crumbling streets and cracked dams, of once great cities brought to the brink of ruin. To journey through the Central Valley is a journey back a century in time, tens of thousands of cars loaded with everything families can load into them, like the Joads of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Instead of Model T’s they ride in Chrysler minivans; their points of embarkation are south of the California border rather than the midwest. All else is the same. You see the children peaking out from beneath blue tarpaulins at passing traffic, at people on their way home, and you can see the wonder on their faces: What must it be like? You see men and women alike urinating on highway shoulders, and this is normal. Yes, there is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.

What rough beast, then, slouches toward us to be born? It remains as yet indistinct but is hoving more clearly into view all the time, and it is terrifying. For if these last 25 years have been mere prelude, if this has been merely the orchestra of oblivion tuning up their instruments, the coming Wagnerian bombast will be gobsmacking.

We, the mad, often say with rueful irony, how could it possibly get any worse?

California, I fear, has an answer waiting. And God help us all.