Narda Zacchino - California Comeback: How

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For my husband, Robert Scheer,

who is never boring,

and for my familyPeter, Josh, Isa,

Tamayo, Christopher, and Benwho inspire me

Living in California is like living in a bowl of granola; what aint fruits or nuts, is flakes.

GALLAGHER, COMEDIAN

This popular late 70s East Coast rip on a state already then famous for trendsetting, cultural liberation, and technological innovation was notable for its ubiquity, so common that young children shared it without understanding who, exactly, it mocked: radicals and rebels, new agers and hippies, gay men and women. One of those made fun of was Governor Jerry Brown, whose unconventional and often quirky methods of governance and personal lifestyle landed him in the flake category of Gallaghers commentary.

But today, that dismissive stereotype, still repeated from time to time, is absurdly out of place. The second coming of Jerry Brown, prophet of revitalized notions of liberalism, progressive governance, and sound fiscal policy, has guided Californias ascendance from the economic mire of the recession and near failed state status a mere six years ago to prominence, rising again as the most important state in the nation and seventh largest economy in the world.

California has become the economic, social, and political model of the twenty-first century, which stands in contrast to the alternative examples of Texas, Kansas, Florida, and others hobbled by right-wing ideology. In just one area, Browns actions, with the support of a Democratic legislative majority and the people of his state, has cemented Californias place in the universe of nations as a leader in the move to combat climate change, while conservative governors and Republican candidates for president deny the problem exists or that there is any human harm that can be reversed. (Floridas Rick Scott banned state employees from using the words climate change or global warming in reports and documents.)

Now in his fourth term heading the state, seasoned in the art of governing, Brown has contributed significantly to making California great again, to borrow from the Trumpian slogan. He has done this by balancing the budget (not always as his fellow Democrats would like), and funding a multibillion-dollar rainy-day fund, pushed by Republicans, while crafting social and government policy that is more sensitive and forward thinking than back in the 1970s, when he ran the state according to his self-described era of limits.

Even back then, the nuts and flakes slam was way off base. And while the jibe was light, the mocking hinted at a larger American defensiveness, an attempt to write off the previous decades dramatic social and political upheavals as nothing more than a goof. Because if California wasnt the site of all the nations conflicts over civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the attempt to depants the Man and his system, it certainly had seemed to be the symbolic locus of changes many mainstream Americans were bemoaning as the root of a host of social ills. Meaner quips, in fact, often centered on the notion that if an earthquake pushed the state off the continental shelf into the Pacific, it would be no great loss.

From the rise of a bold Chicano culture in Los Angeles to the decadence and obscenity of an increasingly artistic and unchained Hollywood, from the myriad communes and cults dotting the forests and coastal towns along Highway 1 to columnist Herb Caens radical Berserkeley and Oakland, home of the Black Panthers, Hells Angels, and even the renegade Raiders, California seemed to have exploded with color, strife, and new ideas, some silly, some scary, some brilliant.

Nor was it all airy-fairy stuff, another popular dismissal of the Left Coast from Manhattans towers: The home-garage invention of the personal computer and the inventive commodification of the Internet created overnight fortunes even Wall Street had to respectat least, that is, until the dot-com collapse that began in 1999 drew national mockery for the hubris and chutzpah of twentysomethings blowing billions on concept companies built around nothing more than a URL. And, perhaps a bit jealous of all the attention San Franciscos overheated housing market had attracted pre-mortgage meltdown, the East Coast media was quick to celebrate presidential candidate Rick Perrys mocking of Californias foreclosure crisis after the recession.

Of course, as early as the gold rush, the East Coast establishment had chuckled at those crazy left coasters, perhaps smugly glad to have emptied their cities of so many dreamers, hustlers, and con artists making the migration westward. Yet the powerful draw of California, the final frontier of continental manifest destiny, ultimately prevented it from being perceived as a backwater for outcasts in the way, say, that the British saw their old penal colony Australia.

Instead, California became the seductress of the Wild West, bedazzling her suitors with shiny gold trinkets and promises to make them rich. They came in hordes and most stayed, if only to bask in her beauty. She was starkly different from what theyd left back home, warm and welcoming, her spirit conveying a sense of adventure and abandon. Over time, she would become the envy of the entire country, while those behind were left pouting, like jilted lovers.

Occasionally, she stumbled, yet she has always recovered her balance and run ahead, racing to embrace the future. Today, several years removed from a devastating recession that deeply challenged her confidence, California is surging once moreeconomically, politically, and culturallyas its quirky, ruthlessly practical leader, Governor Jerry Brown, aggressively pushes forward a new, trimmer, yet still essentially compassionate and optimistic version of the California dream.

As historian H. W. Brands described the birth of the California dream after the staged discovery of gold near Sacramento: The old American dream was the dream of the Puritans of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. [This] golden dream became a prominent part of the American psyche only after [gold was found at] Sutters Mill.

The dream proved remarkably enduring, even as reports began drifting back about the hell that was a miners life and the bawdy lawlessness of the nations new Paris-style theme park of debauchery, San Francisco, where venereal disease and earthquakes were equally terrifying facts of life. New Yorkers, Bostonians, Philadelphians, and the rest assumed that California would never be more than a distant novelty; the real power would always reside with the bankers on Wall Street, the industrialists in Chicago, the politicians in D.C. Let those westerners send us some fine, rowdy tall tales to read by the fire in our brownstonetales of cowboys and sailors, miners and naturalistsand then let us get back to work.

But by 1963, California had knocked off prideful New York as the most populous state in the nationand it seemed to have become the most interesting one, too. That many of the nations young people had been streaming west for more than a century left the nations elite a bit queasy, especially since by then the region had several bona fide industries of towering global importance: aerospace, technology, and entertainment. So it is perhaps not surprising, then and now, that when bad times befall California, pundits, historians, and leaders of other states often appear unseemly in their haste to pronounce the California dream on life support, if not already dead.