What the Hell Is Wrong With California? Part 2

So It Turns Out That Suicide Is Not Really Painless...

“Suicide is painless” is the unofficial title of the theme song for both M.A.S.H the blockbuster movie, and the ridiculously successful long-running TV series of the same name. The music was composed by Johnny Mandel, but the lyrics were penned by 15 year old Mike Altman, director Robert Altman’s son.

Director Robert Altman had two stipulations about the song for composer Johnny Mandel: it had to be called "Suicide Is Painless" and it had to be the "stupidest song ever written".[2] Altman attempted to write the lyric himself, but, upon finding it too difficult for his "45-year-old brain" to write something "stupid" enough,[3] he gave the task to his 15-year-old-son Michael, who reportedly wrote the lyrics in five minutes.[4][5]*

*And is probably still earning money from them, given how often the series is syndicated, even today. Bob Altman said he was only paid $70 thousand for directing, but his son had earned at least a $1 million for his five minute effort. Although Altman did eventually inveigle his son to transfer all rights to, and royalties from, the song.

Hey. it’s just California doing that voodoo it does so well. Fifteen year old kid makes a million writing “the stupidest song ever” in five minutes? Welcome to Holywood (sic), baby.

And is it a cultural artifact? Oh, hell yes. Rather than being dismissed as stupid, it is taken with almost unbearable seriousness by many. Here’s a sample of recent comments about the lyrics from a YouTube video:

I've decided to take life seriously now so I'm not running away anymore, but I still really want to give up. I have to move mountains and climb valleys just to please people that hate me. This song makes me feel better in a fucked up sort of way

It's strange that a song about suicide can be so relaxing...or isn't it?

I love that song, suicide indeed may be fun and so mysterious ahah

Yes AND the dude was FOURTEEN years old. Completely insane to have such insight at 14.

These comments are all from the last few years, and those making them are definitely not taking the song as the “stupidest song ever written.” Instead, they are taking it as a tasty chunk of deep philosophy. Witness this analysis:

My interpretation of this song:

“Through early morning fog I see,

Visions of the things to be...”

(A man in his early youth dreaming of all the possibilities that await...)

It goes on at considerable length, and finishes with:

**I know this was written by a young man of 14 years of age but from the mouth of babes can come wisdom.

And here is a differing opinion, more or less from horse’s mouth (or at least a horse in the same stall), Johnny Mandel himself:

Bob also said the song had to be called Suicide Is Painless. "Since [Capt.] Painless commits suicide with a pill, that would be a good title," he said. Then he said, "It’s got to be the stupidest song ever written."

JW: What went through your mind?
JM: I said to myself, "Well I can do stupid." Bob was going to take a shot at the lyrics. But he came back two days later and said, "I’m sorry but there’s just too much stuff in this 45-year-old brain. I can’t write anything nearly as stupid as what we need."

JW: So who wrote the lyrics?
JM: Bob said, "All is not lost. I’ve got a 15-year-old kid who’s a total idiot." So Michael Altman, at age 15, wrote the lyrics, and then I wrote the music to them.

This bit of Hollywood legend is typical of the genre: polished for popular consumption. Did young Altman write these final lyrics in five minutes? Probably not, given that he took at least one preliminary shot at the song prior to writing them.

The archive has legal documents from 1994 showing Altman buying the rights from his son, after months of correspondence and draft agreements.

An early idea for the lyrics, originally typed and signed, with a handwritten note, perhaps to Robert Altman, from his son Mike. These early thoughts were changed significantly in the final version, which became immediately recognizable in American culture.

Of course they did. Created by a classic California example of the Holy Fool, then injected directly into the national bloodstream by the Hollywood Dream Machine, what else could have happened? Oh, sure, they could have simply failed, sunk without a trace, Altman’s movie a flop, and no resulting decade-plus tv hit show, but it didn’t work out that way.

I contend that the reason it didn’t happen is that as a cultural artifact of significant importance, it appealed precisely to those who have made California what it is today, both the good and the bad. So who are these people, the sort who both apotheosized what was originally intended as a corrosive joke into a cornerstone commentary on modern American angst, and also flock in their millions to the fifty mile wide strip of coastline that is the actual location of the phenomenon that is the California Dream?

The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) was a gold rush that began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California.[1] The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad.[2]

Prior to 1848, San Francisco was a muddy huddle of structures barely above the level of hovels, with a population of 500 to 1000 souls, depending on who you asked.

When the amateur artist William R. Hutton visited San Francisco in September 1847, it was a rough-and-tumble community of adobes, shanties, and frame buildings scattered along Yerba Buena Cove. But following the discovery of gold at Coloma in January, the village was transformed into a vigorous cosmopolitan city. By late 1851 it had a population of some thirty thousand, streets lined with solid brick edifices, and one of the busiest ports in the nation.

Courtesy Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif .

California's pre-gold-rush economy was certainly rudimentary. Some historians have gone further, arguing that it was stagnant. In their pioneering economic history, Robert Cleland and Osgood Hardy described California from 1769 to 1848 as "sparsely populated by an unambitious, pastoral people who were seemingly . . . indifferent to all material progress and . . . unmindful of the vast economic opportunities that surrounded them on every hand."[3] Although this stereotypical criticism is unwarranted, there is no doubt that the California economy was small and largely undeveloped.

And then California did something it has done repeatedly ever since: Took something small and even mean, and transformed it with its customary golden alchemy, (in this case literally) into something of global wonder, influence, and importance. It also established an important precedent: California would be a nation of immigrants primarily consisting of wild-eyed dreamers, slightly leavened by cold-eyed capitalists who would amass immense profits from them and their dreams. Thus it began, and thus it has been ever since.

The Golden Dream From Then to Now

California Dreaming, then and now. (Courtesy Dall-E)

Sam Brannan, who owned a general store near Sutter’s Mill, upon hearing of the discovery of gold on the American River, bought every pick, shovel, and gravel pan in the area, and then proceeded to San Francisco with a small bottle of gold flakes and ran through the streets shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold!” thus reputedly making himself California’s first millionaire. However, it was George Hearst, who arrived in 1850, who probably became the richest beneficiary of the Gold Rush - although, oddly enough, he started out by mining quartz, not gold.

He was worth $19 million when he died in 1891, (approximately $638 million adjusted for inflation), and initiated a family fortune worth about $21 billion today. In other words, just another typical California Dreamer success story - on the grand scale that such things tend to be.

Not everybody has a dream, and of those who do, only a minority cast everything to the winds, pull up stakes, and emigrate to the Golden Hotbed of Wishing and Hoping, or, as one commenter delightfully notes, “Kali Forno, the Ovens of Sin?”

Whether such people are dreaming of California sun, or California sin, they tend to be a little bit crazy, especially in the risk department. America is said to be a nation of immigrants, which means it is also a nation of emigrants. Every immigrant (someone who enters a country to live there) is also an emigrant (someone who leaves their country to live in another one). There are also internal versions within nations that occur between states or equivalent districts. In America, for decades California received more internal and external immigrants than any other state.

Study after study has demonstrated that people with a propensity toward risk-taking are much more likely to emigrate than those who are risk-averse. Here’s a recent study from Bulgaria.

The findings suggest that risk propensity, mostly in the social risk domain, is a powerful predictor of emigration attitudes among young Bulgarians, even more powerful for Millennials than Zoomers. The higher risk propensity is associated with more positive attitudes toward emigration.

And from Taiwan:

Using the national survey data collected in December 2018, this study provides empirical evidence that two personality traits – emotional stability and openness to experience are significantly associated with individual migrate intention.

Specifically, people high on openness to experience are more willing to migrate, whereas those high on emotional stability are less willing to move out of Taiwan.

Let’s add another factor to the emigrant mix: Age. Emigrants tend to be young, relatively speaking.

Accordingly, the lifetime value of the returns to this investment is larger the younger an individual is and the larger the time horizon is over which to collect these returns. Thus, older individuals tend to migrate less, not only because the costs of migrating are higher at older ages (including the psychological costs of separating with family and friends, larger social capital, and more origin- or firm-specific human capital, etc.), but also because the gain in terms of the expected earnings is smaller.

In the U.S., the sweet spot, age-wise, for emigrants is their mid-twenties to mid-thirties.

And finally, intelligence:

Records of interviews with a psychologist at age 18 allow us to construct an index of `sociability' and `adaptability' for each individual, as well as an index of cognitive ability, the intelligence quotient. We find that adaptability and cognitive ability have significant and positive impacts on the probability of an individual migrating out of his area, whether this involves rural{urban, long distance, or international migration.

On the other hand, the following also helps to explain the nature of California’s long term immigration flows, and their impact on the nature of the state as a whole.

Adaptability has a particularly strong impact on migration for individuals with low cognitive skills, implying a strong positive selection of less educated migrants with respect to the (previously unobserved) adaptability skill.

We also show that cognitive skills have a strong positive effect on the pre- and post-migration wage differential, whereas adaptability has no significant effect.

Moreover, individuals with high cognitive ability migrate to areas with large wage returns to cognitive abilities, whereas this is not true for individuals with high adaptability. This evidence suggests that adaptability reduces the psychological cost of migrating, whereas cognitive skills increase the monetary returns associated with migration.

So we end up with two likely cohorts - the young smarties (think: highly educated emigrants flooding San Francisco and Silicon Valley from dozens of tech acadamies), and those less intelligent but highly adaptable (don’t worry, be happy, go with the flow) coming in much larger numbers from south of the border, primarily. Both share a taste for risk, and the belief in the immortality of youth, a heady combination when it comes to culture, politics, and ideology.

Also…

... Our results are consistent with the idea that noncognitive skill production is higher in low-skill immigrant families than in low-skill native families. Indeed, Bütikofer and Peri (2017) find that migrants, and particularly low-skill migrants, are positively selected on adaptability, though not sociability. ...

Put this whole package together, and it is reasonable to assert that, on average, those who emigrated to California were (and continue to be) younger, either smarter or more adaptable, and with a greater propensity for risk-taking than non-emigrants. And indeed, California does appear to be a state built by young, smart, adaptable risk takers. And therein perhaps lies the answer to our question, “What the hell is wrong with California?”

Being young and smart is no guarantee you won’t screw up, because youth, even smart youth, are by definition less experienced than “wiser heads,” and a propensity for risk-taking only offers larger chances of big-time screwups.

“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”

Regardless of who originally made this assertion, (No, it wasn’t Winston Churchill), there is more than a modicum of truth to it.

Keep in mind this represents a contemporary snapshot, when the Boomer generation has become “the olds.”

But here’s what they looked like when they were ripping it up in their signature decade, the 1960s:

Baby boomers who came of age during the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s tended to call themselves Democrats, and as time passed, that identification strengthened. In 1969, far more in the 18- to 29-year-old age cohort — the front end of the baby boom — called themselves Democrats (35%) than Republicans (21%). A decade later, when they were 28 to 39 years old, their identification with the Democratic Party over the GOP was even stronger (45% to 19% in Gallup’s surveys).

And that period was, of course, when it seemed half of the Boomers had either moved to California, were planning to move there, or at the very least thinking about it. And in absolute terms, young Boomers were likely more liberal than the Millennials of today:

Millennials: Dem/Leaning: 54% GOP/Leaning: 39%

Young Boomers: Dem: 35%-45% GOP: 21%-19%.

Everything given, it would be a miracle if California hadn’t grown much more liberal as it grew much larger, thanks in great part to the successive waves of those “Going west, young man!” (No, Horace Greeley never said that, either), but when I arrived in San Francisco in 1983, it was generally a much more conservative state politically than it is today, although culturally it continued to be more liberal than most of the United States of the time.

Here’s a Wikipedia potted history of California politics over the years:

The first presidential election the state participated in was 1852. For the next few decades after the Civil War, California was a Republican-leaning but a very competitive state in presidential elections, as in voted for the nationwide winner all but thrice between statehood and 1912, with the exceptions of 1880, 1884, and 1912. Beginning with the 1916 election, the state shifted into a bellwether. Between 1916 and 1948, it voted for the nationwide winner every time, and was critical to Democratic victories in 1916 and 1948, as well.

Franklin Roosevelt carried all but one county in the state in 1932, and in 1936 all counties. Roosevelt's third and fourth presidential elections saw him win by smaller margins. In 1948, the state narrowly voted for Truman. Beginning with the 1952 presidential election California became a Republican-leaning battleground state, as it only voted Democratic once (in 1964) over the next 36 years. Beginning with the 1992 presidential election, California has become increasingly Democratic. The state has voted Democratic in every presidential election since then, usually by lopsided margins, and starting in 2008, Democrats have consistently gotten at least 60% of the vote. Voting patterns since 1992 have remained consistent by and large, with Democratic presidential candidates carrying the coastal counties and Republicans the inland counties, though Democrats have gained in many Southern counties as well.

At the state level, California has had more mixed voting tendencies until more recently. Six of the state's first seven governors were Democrats; during subsequent decades, control of the governorship frequently shifted between the two parties. From 1899 to 1939, almost all governors were Republican, but since that time the governorship has switched parties regularly. The 2018 election marked the first time Democrats won more than two consecutive gubernatorial elections in the state's history.

I moved from Denver to San Francisco in 1983, right at the tail end of Jerry Brown’s first eight-year stint as governor. He was replaced by George Deukmejian, a Republican, who was succeeded by Pete Wilson, also a Republican, so for my first sixteen years in The City, essentially right up to the new millennium, California could at least appear to be a GOP stronghold. However, while California did vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George H.W. Bush in 1988, it has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since then.

In the 21st century, of course, California has simply moved more and more to the left. With the exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who ran as a Republican but governed like a moderate Democrat, all of California’s governors and presidential choices have been Democrats. Further, and more immediately important for the once-Golden State, Democrats have established a stranglehold on state governance below the gubernatorial level.

And it is in these years of the New Millennium that California has not just become a one-party Democrat state, but that the Democrats have become a hard-left party. Moderation has become a vice, not a virtue, among Golden State Democrats, certainly during the past twenty years. I left for good in 2016, when I finally understood how bad things had gotten, and how unlikely they were to improve, at least in San Francisco, which is now more or less ground zero for “What the hell is wrong with California?” examples.

Immigrants pushed California ever more to the left culturally, and since politics - and everything else - is downstream from culture, the politics eventually followed in the same direction. And at some critical point - call it a tipping point if you will - leftists moved themselves into the realms of lunacy. My own observations of the phenomena in San Francisco gave me a crude possible explanation for this. It seemed to me that they just egged each other on.

In San Francisco, if you supported gay rights, people would start to say, “Well, we should support transgender rights.” And if you supported transgender rights, people would start to say, “Well, we should support letting kids make life (and body) changing decisions about their “gender.” And if you supported that, the somebody would ask if it wasn’t a good idea to make it illegal to impede any of this in any way. And so on, for every issue that seemed of any import on the left.

As I say, “they egged each other on,” is a fairly crude explanation, but I recently happened on a considerably more sophisticated analysis of the matter from the invariably useful Contemplations on the Tree of Woe:

Perhaps the most important thing my definition of Leftism explains is the susceptibility of Leftism to “holiness spirals.”

A holiness spiral is a cycle of ever-accelerating ideological activism that arises when ideologues begin to compete for the social status gained by ever-stronger ideological commitment. As far as have I been able to determine, the originator of the term is Jim of Jim’s Blog, who has been using it since at least 2010 (and possibly before then.)

Woe elaborates:

Holiness spiraling can be understand as the ideological equivalent of the conspicuous consumption that arises from competition to own and display status goods such as luxury cars and luxury watches.

Holiness spiraling results in competition to espouse “luxury beliefs” via increasingly extreme virtue signaling. A luxury belief is a so-called “costly signal” that demonstrates commitment by virtue of the fact that it has no payoff other than the reward for holding the belief itself. When a 20-year old Swedish woman sterilizes herself “to stop herself from adding more whiteness to the world,” she is engaging in a very costly signal of her commitment to her ideology; there is no other gain to her except the gain in status, just the suffering and loss of natural capacity.

While almost any ideology is somewhat susceptible to holiness spiraling, Leftism’s is especially susceptible. The reason, of course, is that Leftism rejects any other social hierarchy except the social hierarchy of ideological commitment. Thus it creates a society in which the only means by which status-seeking individuals (which includes most journalists, lawyers, politicians, professors, professionals, and other elites) can gain status is by shifting ever-further Leftward. The phrase “no enemies to the Left, no friends to the Right” is at once the cause and explanation of the Leftist holiness spiral.

In other words, the catastrophe that has afflicted San Francisco, for instance, is almost entirely a matter of powerful leftists saying “I will happily destroy my own city to demonstrate my dedication to leftist principles. Worship me!”

This mechanism can be applied to just about every other noxious occurrence in the “What the hell is wrong with California?” diary. To sum it all up, “What’s wrong with California?” is that over a fairly long period of time, thanks to the nature of the vast waves of emigrants it welcomed, its culture shifted ever more leftwards, and dragged everything else along with it. At which point leftists began to compete with each other to be “more leftist than thou.”

It’s become an internal holy civil war. Generally, you have to burn such things out with fire.