I found myself enjoying an open-air art show at Santa Barbara back in 2004. My experience was, well, let’s just say modified, by the presence of hundreds of crosses placed in the sand by a left-wing organization to protest the Iraq war. Listening to people speaking about politics, I was hit with a thunderbolt: that this was the most beautiful place I had ever seen and it was inhabited by the most ignorant people in the world.
Now that’s a provocative statement so let me back that up.
First of all, I didn’t say these California progressives were stupid, I said they were ignorant. And it’s an enforced ignorance too because clearly these were very smart people doing complex jobs in an information age economy.
Second, I said “in the world,” because no matter how primitive or remote you may be, up to and including the fact that you may not know how to read, I have yet to hear of people who understood less about the world they actually live in than this particular breed of Californians. And I also said I was “struck by a thunderbolt” because the cause hit me just a flash after seeing the effect.
I think that the beauty and the ignorance are tied together. Living in such astonishing beauty and comfort has allowed them to be as ignorant as they were, and remain. And I think this is really the source of all of California’s problems. You see, the problem with California is Californians. Well, the pretty ones anyway. The farmers that somehow manage to stay on their feet despite crumbling infrastructure, astronomical tax rates, and being choked of water to protect a sardine-like fish called the Delta Smelt. Well those Californians get to meet actual reality on a daily basis. That’s why when it comes to actual area California’s in fact a very red state.
People become this ignorant because they can afford to be this ignorant. I don’t know of a single location where the wolf is further from the door than at an art show on the beach in Santa Barbara. See, hardship simply does not exist for these coastal elites, which prompts two responses that have given Californians the unpleasant reputation that we so richly deserve. First, the absence of hardship among these progressives has made them assume that the rest of the world is more or less like Santa Barbara, and that the people that live there are more or less like them–in temperament anyway. These people in Santa Barbara, for the most part, kind and gentle, which are excellent qualities by the way, but they’re kind and gentle because Santa Barbara is kind and gentle. So kindness and gentleness are qualities they can afford. The rest of the world is not necessarily this way, not at all. And nothing, not even collapsing skyscrapers, are gonna make these California progressives think any differently.
And because these coastal elites really have no serious hardship in their lives, progressive Californians–you know the limousine liberals like Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Brown and virtually every celebrity face that you’ve ever seen–oh they know that living on the coast of California in the 21st century is simply the very apex of all of human history. They know that others are not as well off as they are and this makes them feel guilty. And that guilt drives the kind of political policy that is not only utopian and unattainable, it enormously and consistently makes things worse, much worse, here in California, throughout the United States, and around the world.
We Californians have been cursed with a plague of unimaginable comfort and that has made us weak. Morally, intellectually, and especially spiritually. The very best way that I’ve heard to describe this phenomenon was by an internet comment written by a guy named Ken M. and he wrote: “Bad times make strong men. Strongmen make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make bad times.” Right now, here in California, we’re on line four and we better prepare ourselves to go back to line one.
This is exactly how I felt just visiting California. Some the most gorgeous scenery full of some of the most insufferable, ignorant human beings.
