What the Hell Is Wrong With California? Part 1

They Say Everything Good Starts There. But So Does Everything Bad.

credit: DALL-E

A hundred years ago, in 1923, California wasn’t such a big deal. The area today known as Silicon Valley looked like this, back when it was just Santa Clara country, and grew a lot of prunes:

The Los Angeles Basin was famed for its huge oil production, not its gigantic port facilities and Hollywood extravaganzas. During the Roaring Twenties, California vied with Oklahoma for the title of America’s biggest oil producer, while Hollywood did not release a “talking picture” until 1927.

San Francisco was not famed for rock music, hippies, or the cutting edge of leftist student movements back then. Rebuilt almost from the ground up in the wake of the 1906 earthquake, it was the staid and conservative home of Big Business - a host of banks, insurance companies, mining, oil, and other natural resource companies built their headquarters there.

And in the Central Valley, agriculture of all kinds reigned supreme.

California’s total population, just before the massive migration from the Dust Bowl, was a bit over three million souls, about three percent of the US total of 100 million. Significant, but not the overwhelming 38.9 million and 12% it would become just a hundred years later, when cars would be designed, and textbooks written to suit the preferences of California politicians and not the nation at large.

If taken as the nation-state it is in reality, California’s nominal GDP would rank it fourth, or fifth, or sixth, (depending on who you ask) of all the nations on the planet. Its GDP amounts to 14% of the total US economy. By any measure, California is a large enough tail to wag the national dog in many different scenarios, but probably the most graphic demonstration of its throw-weight is in the cultural arena - and, as this site asserts, everything is downstream from culture.

California’s single biggest export is culture, and it does so first on a national basis, and then on a global basis. Let me count the ways. First, the music of the generations that set the feet tapping and the butts shaking for the Boomers, GenX and, to some extent, the early Millennials.

Southern California (SOCAL) served up (surfed up?) beach rock, (The Beach Boys) car rock, (Jan and Dean), country rock, (Eagles), and, less well known, the Big Band sound.

To many, the appearance of Benny Goodman and his Big Band at the Palomar in Los Angeles in August of 1935 was the start of the Swing Era.

Almost every major record company ended up with HQs in the LA area.

From the northern part of the state (NORCAL) came psychedelic rock, (and funk), head-banging hard rock, and a host of fusion sounds that remade old genres into something new.

Here’s a quick list of California’s major musical culture-smiths:

22. Cold Blood

21. The Runaways

20. Little Feat

19. The Mothers of Invention

18. Sly and the Family Stone

17. Creedence Clearwater Revival

16. Tower of Power

15. Doobie Brothers

14. Grateful Dead

13. Guns N’ Roses

12. Green Day

11. The Doors

10. Mötley Crüe

9. The Byrds

8. Jefferson Airplane/Starship

7. Metallica

6. Red Hot Chili Peppers

5. Santana

4. Journey

3. Van Halen

2. The Beach Boys

1. Eagles

What stands out about these bands is that they were for the most part musical innovators on an industrial scale that spread their innovations far and wide with massive sales and influence on hundreds of bands that echoed them, and millions of fans who adored them.

And that’s just music, the soundtrack of culture. The visions of American culture, however, were hammered out in the dream factories of Hollywood.

Ah, Tinsletown! Where dreams really can come true - or so they say. Never mind that many of the town’s legends are at least semi-manufactured. No, Lana Turner was not discovered by director Mervyn Leroy at the soda fountain of Schwab’s. However, she was discovered by Hollywood Reporter publisher William Wilkerson at the soda fountain of the Top Hat Cafe, across the street from Hollywood High, from which she was playing hooky at the time. Perhaps trivial, but this tale became a cultural artifact representing a Hollywood version of the Horatio Alger success stories, but with a twist: Rather than achieving success via hard work and persistence, Americans might achieve an even more glittering success simply by being “discovered” at the right moment or by the right person - no effort required.

That notion fueled another wave of immigrants to the Golden State who were certain that physical attractiveness would be their ticket to achieving all their dreams. After all, why bother with hard work when you can just look pretty? Kiss that protestant work ethic bye-bye and work on your fetching smile (and maybe a boob lift) instead. And if you don’t think that sort of thing is an example of manufacturing culture, you don’t understand how culture works in our modern era.

For going on fifty years, Hollywood both created and reflected American culture in tens of thousands of darkened theaters where dreams, aspirations, warnings, dooms, customs, and social agreements glimmered and flickered on diamond-dusted screens. And then an upstart knocked Hollywood off its pedestal with shocking abruptness.

Enter Beautiful Downtown Burbank.

The origin of that particular ironic phrase - there was nothing beautiful about downtown Burbank when it was first popularized - was NBC radio announcer Gary Owens’ intro to the Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In television show - which, along with NBC’s Saturday Night Live, (from “New York City”) gave NBC a stranglehold for a time on two of America’s biggest pop culture influencers. It referred to the fact that Laugh-In was broadcast from NBC’s Burbank studios, and, along with Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show* (which also used the phrase), marked the ascendancy of television as the most massive of mass media cultural influence even in the heart of the former all time champ’s domain itself.

*Carson famously moved his show from NBC’s studios at Black Rock in NYC’s Rockefeller Center to California because he wanted greater access to Hollywood personalities.

Once again California had remade itself into the 800 pound gorilla in the middle of America’s cultural living room.

You see this pattern repeated over and over again. Even as television began to lag, up north in Silicon Valley they were busy building the internet, the computer revolution, and social media, which superseded TV as the principle creators and brokers of national culture.

For decades, the two biggest exporters of American food and fashion to the world were McDonald’s and Levi Strauss. To eat Big Macs and cover your butt with Levi’s (501s during the tumultuous 1960s), was to mark yourself as an Americanophile, whether you lived in London or Lahore, Beijing or Bangladesh. McDonald’s was born in Los Angeles, Levi Strauss in San Francisco.

Speaking of which, starting in the 1970s, California began its great transition from being politically and ideologically on the right to its current state of almost Stalinist hard leftism. From Mario Savio’s Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, to Huey Newton’s Black Panthers in Oakland, to the anti-Vietnam war movement that had its earliest significant manifestations in California, California led the way…to the left, as it still does today.

Protests bringing attention to "the draft" began on May 5, 1965. Student activists at the University of California Berkeley marched on the Berkeley Draft board and forty students staged the first public burning of a draft card in the United States. Another nineteen cards were burnt on May 22 at a demonstration following the Berkeley teach-in.[7] Draft card protests were not aimed so much at the draft as at the immoral conduct of the war.[8]

The combination of the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement were probably the two biggest cultural influences in America during the early Boomer era of 1965-1980, (with feminism coming in a distant third) touching on everything from art to media to entertainment to, most especially, politics and ideology.

And when the New Left in all its manifestations began to seem a bit long in the tooth, especially to the rising generation of cynical and blase Xers, along came Gay Liberation, setting off a cultural nuke in California in response to AIDS, which killed tens of thousands in that state alone during the 1980s.*

*I moved to San Francisco just when The Plague fires were really starting to burn. I’ll never forget seeing young men in their twenties walking around with scarves over their faces to hide their disfiguring Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions, which were universally acknowledged as marks of death in the same way that bubos were during the Great Plagues of half a millennium earlier in Europe. I was working in the restaurant business, and during that period attended dozens of funerals of friends and acquaintances among my co-workers.

In California, particularly San Francisco, the Gay Liberation, or Gay Rights Movement eventually morphed into the Alphabet Mafia as we know it today, complete with drag queens demanding that you “respect their pronouns” and gender-optional being established as an integral part of the cultural and social dress codes. And while men donning dresses for various reasons, usually as entertainment for themselves and others, wasn’t unknown - and it wasn’t all gay, either - it took the California Treatment to really put it on the cultural map in bright pink neon lights.

Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason in drag, live in Central Park, NYC, 1975.

While transvestism certainly didn’t originate in California, it likely achieved its apotheosis as a “gay thing” there:

The Widow Norton

In 1964, Sarria was crowned the Queen of the Beaux Arts Ball by the Tavern Guild. Declaring that he was already a queen, Sarria proclaimed himself Jose I, First Empress of San Francisco, the Widow Norton — the fictionalized widow of Joshua Norton, the colorful San Francisco character who had proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States, and who had died nearly 85 years before Sarria proclaimed herself to be his widow.

The proclamation led to the formation of another organization, the Imperial Court, which annually elects a new Empress and Emperor to lead the court in philanthropic work. The Imperial Court has now grown into an international organization, with Portland, Oregon in 1971 establishing the first court outside of San Francisco. Currently consisting of 86 courts in three different countries, the Imperial Court is the second largest gay organization (behind the Metropolitan Community Church), in the world.

And therein lies the tale of California - a gay singing waiter in an obscure bar puts on a wig and a dress, and creates what will eventually become the second largest gay organization in the world - and it is an organization of drag queens and their friends.

Or some guy in 1970/71 invents and sells about forty copies of the world’s first true PC (personal computer), then goes broke and stops selling them, and that was that…until California got involved, and the guys at XEROX/PARC invented laser printers, graphical user interfaces, mice, and a host of other brainstorms, as SRI cruised the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area with a van full of hackers and generals while inventing packet switching networks (that your cell phone uses), VOIP, and, eventually, most of the Internet. California dreamer Nolan Bushnell invented video games and put a PONG in every bar in California. Oh, and IBM Los Gatos/Palo Alto (yes, where Xerox PARC is located) reinvented the PC and called it SCAMP, although wiser marketing heads eventually changed that to the more biz-like “IBM PC.” But California wasn’t quite done with the PC, because a year after that, Xerox Parc reinvented the PC again and called it the Alto, which used all that neat GUI/Mouse/onscreen windows/icons tech they’d dreamed up a few months before. They also threw in “a WYSISYG word processor known as “Bravo,” a paint program, a graphics editor, and email for example.” Just for shits and giggles, I guess.

And still California wasn’t done, not until two guys named Steve, one a pr/marketing/design genius, the other a technical wizard, decided that the PARC ALTO looked good, so they bundled most of it into a little build it yourself machine the first Steve decided to call the Apple Computer, (the company, too), which has since grown into the second most valuable corporation in the history of the world with a capitalization of three trillion dollars. (The East India Company more than doubled that, adjusted for inflation).

And that is California’s true specialty: Taking tiny acorns and flash-growing them into world dominating forests.

So why does a state with that sort of magical power, which it demonstrates over and over and over again, wield it in such strange and (to many) screwed-up ways? In unicorn-land, such power is supposed to be used for good. So…what happened?

We’ll dig deeply into that in part II of this essay, coming up shortly.