Preacherman
April 23, 2003, 12:33 AM
Never mind the appalling gun laws - this opinion column from the London Times says it all (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-655876,00.html):
April 23, 2003
Bye-bye good vibrations - California has become semi-detached from the US
Giles Whittell
Something rather startling happened in Los Angeles during the build-up to the war in Iraq. American military planners, concerned about the possibility of a long conflict and thousands of battlefield casualties, sent squads of navy surgeons to the city’s biggest public hospital for training.
On his first night there, one medic treated ten black youths for both lethal and non-lethal gunshot wounds to the head and chest. “I tell you,” he told a radio reporter. “That was something.”
He should not have been surprised. LA has yet to feel the healing wrath of a Rudy Giuliani. The gang wars of South-Central go on killing people and the vast, forbidding USC Medical Centre goes on receiving their bodies. Here was urban California’s contribution to the war effort: the Angelenos version of grit and tragic self-sacrifice.
Rural California is different. It plays host to two large bases that decamped en masse to the Gulf, starting last autumn. But otherwise this has not been a West Coast war. It started, ultimately, with terrorist attacks that took place while the entire region was asleep, and it has never quite woken up.
The dethroning of Saddam Hussein was conceived in Texas and Washington, prepared by generals in Florida and prosecuted by grunts drawn largely from the Eastern seaboard. The only senior White House hawk with ties to California is Stanford’s Condoleezza Rice, and she moved east in 1999.
She left behind America’s most determined pockets of dissent. Even after the ground war had begun, Angelenos and San Franciscans took to their streets in tens of thousands to dissociate themselves and demand it be reversed. Understandably, President Bush gave them barely a glance. He won’t win California next year, and he doesn’t have to. As he knows better than anyone, Florida is the must-win Sunshine State.
Bill Clinton visited California more than 50 times during his presidency to raise money, meet actors and have his hair done. Mr Bush is not so star-struck. He seldom calls, let alone visits. He openly disdains the Golden State’s pallid Democratic Governor, Gray Davis, and why ever not? So does the Democratic Party.
Until 9/11 wrenched America’s attention away from the amazing possibilities of software and stock options, Davis was widely touted as a runner for the White House. Now California’s state budget deficit is America’s biggest, and Davis is on no one’s list.
The state that was the powerhouse of the epic 1990s high-tech boom is now closing world-class hospitals to balance its books, with the USC Medical Centre hanging on only by its bloody fingernails. Hollywood is suffering a crisis of confidence so severe that its chief money-making prospects for this summer are two sequels, both to the same film (Matrix; the onslaught starts next month). Its stars use their moments of Oscar glory to call for peace over victory, unable to believe polls that insist most Americans want victory, even at a price, and then more victory.
How will the studios address the War on Terror? They don’t know. They’re flummoxed. There’s still nothing in the pipeline on 9/11 or its aftermath. Instead there’s a cheap English sleeper hit about girls, soccer and someone called Beckham, and cinema owners are heartily thankful for it.
Seldom has California been so out of step with the hinterland it once enthralled. These days it can’t even excel at surfing. The results of the annual Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Award were announced last week, and the winner was Hawaiian. The runners-up, thanks to a freak storm in the Bay of Biscay, were all French.
Whenever there’s a good swell and an offshore breeze, old-timers still paddle out from the beaches of Malibu and Orange County to pit themselves against the Pacific. But they also moan about the young doing something much flashier than surfing and, so the complaint goes, much easier. It doesn’t look it. What these upstarts do is fly. They attach their feet to a board thin enough to be a water ski and their arms to nylon lines leading to enormous aerobatic kites. They hurtle out into the breakers and leap off them for what seems like minutes at a time, somersaulting under their fluorescent parafoils like exotic seabirds in search of breeding partners.
While Iraq burnt, most Californians were still at play. They couldn’t help it. Their habits of frivolity run deep, strengthened by the conviction that they are living the rest of the country’s future.
They probably still are, but I can’t help remembering an odd lunch in Kiev a couple of years ago with a British diplomat and two good bottles of imported wine. After only one of them he looked me in the eye and warned me with total seriousness that, sooner not later, the US would fall apart. He was bonkers, wasn’t he?
April 23, 2003
Bye-bye good vibrations - California has become semi-detached from the US
Giles Whittell
Something rather startling happened in Los Angeles during the build-up to the war in Iraq. American military planners, concerned about the possibility of a long conflict and thousands of battlefield casualties, sent squads of navy surgeons to the city’s biggest public hospital for training.
On his first night there, one medic treated ten black youths for both lethal and non-lethal gunshot wounds to the head and chest. “I tell you,” he told a radio reporter. “That was something.”
He should not have been surprised. LA has yet to feel the healing wrath of a Rudy Giuliani. The gang wars of South-Central go on killing people and the vast, forbidding USC Medical Centre goes on receiving their bodies. Here was urban California’s contribution to the war effort: the Angelenos version of grit and tragic self-sacrifice.
Rural California is different. It plays host to two large bases that decamped en masse to the Gulf, starting last autumn. But otherwise this has not been a West Coast war. It started, ultimately, with terrorist attacks that took place while the entire region was asleep, and it has never quite woken up.
The dethroning of Saddam Hussein was conceived in Texas and Washington, prepared by generals in Florida and prosecuted by grunts drawn largely from the Eastern seaboard. The only senior White House hawk with ties to California is Stanford’s Condoleezza Rice, and she moved east in 1999.
She left behind America’s most determined pockets of dissent. Even after the ground war had begun, Angelenos and San Franciscans took to their streets in tens of thousands to dissociate themselves and demand it be reversed. Understandably, President Bush gave them barely a glance. He won’t win California next year, and he doesn’t have to. As he knows better than anyone, Florida is the must-win Sunshine State.
Bill Clinton visited California more than 50 times during his presidency to raise money, meet actors and have his hair done. Mr Bush is not so star-struck. He seldom calls, let alone visits. He openly disdains the Golden State’s pallid Democratic Governor, Gray Davis, and why ever not? So does the Democratic Party.
Until 9/11 wrenched America’s attention away from the amazing possibilities of software and stock options, Davis was widely touted as a runner for the White House. Now California’s state budget deficit is America’s biggest, and Davis is on no one’s list.
The state that was the powerhouse of the epic 1990s high-tech boom is now closing world-class hospitals to balance its books, with the USC Medical Centre hanging on only by its bloody fingernails. Hollywood is suffering a crisis of confidence so severe that its chief money-making prospects for this summer are two sequels, both to the same film (Matrix; the onslaught starts next month). Its stars use their moments of Oscar glory to call for peace over victory, unable to believe polls that insist most Americans want victory, even at a price, and then more victory.
How will the studios address the War on Terror? They don’t know. They’re flummoxed. There’s still nothing in the pipeline on 9/11 or its aftermath. Instead there’s a cheap English sleeper hit about girls, soccer and someone called Beckham, and cinema owners are heartily thankful for it.
Seldom has California been so out of step with the hinterland it once enthralled. These days it can’t even excel at surfing. The results of the annual Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Award were announced last week, and the winner was Hawaiian. The runners-up, thanks to a freak storm in the Bay of Biscay, were all French.
Whenever there’s a good swell and an offshore breeze, old-timers still paddle out from the beaches of Malibu and Orange County to pit themselves against the Pacific. But they also moan about the young doing something much flashier than surfing and, so the complaint goes, much easier. It doesn’t look it. What these upstarts do is fly. They attach their feet to a board thin enough to be a water ski and their arms to nylon lines leading to enormous aerobatic kites. They hurtle out into the breakers and leap off them for what seems like minutes at a time, somersaulting under their fluorescent parafoils like exotic seabirds in search of breeding partners.
While Iraq burnt, most Californians were still at play. They couldn’t help it. Their habits of frivolity run deep, strengthened by the conviction that they are living the rest of the country’s future.
They probably still are, but I can’t help remembering an odd lunch in Kiev a couple of years ago with a British diplomat and two good bottles of imported wine. After only one of them he looked me in the eye and warned me with total seriousness that, sooner not later, the US would fall apart. He was bonkers, wasn’t he?