Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Okay, having read the comments and reflected on their emotional tone, here's my question. Let's say we write off Chinatown and the entire state around it--sorry, Californians, but you're just one state, and a notoriously lunatic one at that--and pretend this whole unfortunate Harry Reid business didn't happen. Would the mood here be very different?
By the way, did Harry Reid actually say that the elections show that Americans want bipartisanship? Or is that just the headline-writer's interpretation? Transcript at hand, anyone? Because you know, you can't vote for the bipartisan party. I can't see how anyone, even Harry Reid, could come to the conclusion that Americans voted for bipartisanship; it's physically impossible to do that.
Anyway, I think it's time to buck up and stop whining; we had our election, it went great, no tanks in the streets; let's get on with it. Unless you live there, stop ruminating about California. Failed State Express; too bad for them. Baghdad was a swell place once upon a time in the eighth century too, but you can't live in the past. Lots of other great states with a future.
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Jun '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
For those who know (and even revere) Polanski's classic film, the Chinatown comment is so appropriate, so perfect, along with Jake's (Jack Nicholson's) shrug of the shoulders. Whaddaya gonna do? I grew up in Southern California when Disneyland was first built, Reagan was governor for two terms, the defense industry dominated the state's booming economy, and the words Golden State meant something you could take to the bank. Oh, how times have changed. Quo vadis, California? Try reading Victor Davis Hanson's "Mexifornia" without weeping.
May '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
We'll remember this, Claire, next time Turkey takes a lurch towards Islamist theocracy...
May '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Everything is wonderful in California!
Jul '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Claire, I'm just tired of this California-bashing.
Just because we're the really, really pretty girl with a venereal disease doesn't mean we should be the target of more derision than the, um, ungainly girls.
New York, Michigan and Nevada are right up there with us. As are Oregon, Hawaii and - gasp! - Oklahoma, Arizona and Colorado.
Oct '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
I dunno. Somebody has to tell the hard truth about California. Victor Davis Hanson does, but from a point of view that suggests that it's still redeemable. Claire seems quite a lot less sure of that. I guess on my darker days, I'm more with Claire than with Dr. Hanson.
And the days lately have been pretty dark.
May '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
The libs are horrribly, horribly depressed out there. As politics is a zero-sum game, we should be elated. I sure am (but didn't have any investment in Cali anyway). Presently been trying to perk them up by saying I saved something for them personally in private messages. They totally buy that (suckas), and it does lift your spirits. Cause what says Christmas more than Lucius Malfoy with Muppet back-up singers? Roll tape, tape-rollers, and hum all day.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMRALxZ7PKY
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
I'm actually agreeing with you, Kenneth. I'm suggesting that people are getting all emotional about California because it's so pretty. But politically it's just Michigan with Redwoods and surfboards, so we don't need to get all distraught about it, at least no more than we would about any other ... look, we can't go down the road with that venereal disease metaphor, you know we'll end up having to deal with a CoC violation.
I was born in California, so if I can write it off, anyone can.
Nov '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
After we go bankrupt and after Brown finishes twisting the fine print of Prop 13 to mean that homeowners need to cough up yet more dough, after hundreds more businesses flee the state, after thousands more foreclosures... will we be able to see the light then?
I see no redemption for California.
Oct '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Do any Californians have any thoughts on the way our Secretary of State has handled the balloting process? I personally have always been very impressed with how we record votes in San Francisco (at least since 2000 or so, when I started voting here), and I think we use the same system statewide now. The optical scan system we use, which always leaves a paper trail, seems much less open to abuse than touch-screen voting systems. Though the system can't take the grain of evil from the the human heart.
Obviously I'd prefer having sane government and dirty ballots, but again, in the spirit of bipartisanship, I wonder if Republicans now feel any incentive to address problems with methods of recording votes. Californians, how much fraud do we have at the ballot box (as distinguished from in the registration process)?
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
G.A. Dean
We'll remember this, Claire, next time Turkey takes a lurch towards Islamist theocracy... · Nov 3 at 3:04pm
When Turks get to vote directly for their own representatives, I'll shrug just the same way at the outcome. Right now, they can't, so I sympathize a bit more when people they never had a chance to vote for are foisted on them. But not that much more, frankly. I'm having a low-patience day.
Jul '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
You and Kenneth are absolutely right about MI. We, however, had great night. The governorship flipped, the GOP improved it's hold in the state Senate, the state House went from minority (43 out of 110) to majority (63), and we picked up 2 congressional seats.
I'm noting none of this to gloat. Michigan's in horrible shape, we're gonna lose yet another congressional seat (last term for Dingell) in the 2010 census because people are leaving in droves. I'm just really happy that we might actually try to improve our economic outlook.
Edited on Nov 3, 2010 at 4:12pmMay '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Claire Berlinski, Ed.: I'm suggesting that people are getting all emotional about California because it's so pretty.
...
I was born in California, so if I can write it off, anyone can.
I'm getting all emotional about California because I live here. I own a home here. My job (for the moment) is here. I was born in Wisconsin, and I take great delight in last night's turning of the worm there, but had it gone the other way I would have lost no sleep. I don't think being born here correlates with being invested in what happens to this place.
Someday soon I hope to be living somewhere else, at which point I won't even care as much about California as I do about Wisconsin.
May '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Until I started to work on the artwork for this story I hadn't realized that Jerry Brown was, in reality, Gavin Macleod.
Edited on Nov 3, 2010 at 4:30pmOct '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
I was born and raised in New York City in the era where it lost two baseball teams. It included, Fun City and the New York Cannot be governed, and the idiocy of Ed Koch. We forget that Hugh Carey was the last great Governor of New York and maybe in America. Carey saved New York State and New York City, It then took almost twenty years later for Rudy to fix it. Unfortunately, Bloomberg and Kelly are ruining it once again. New York is about the past.
When I first lived in Southern California in the 1980s and the 1990s, it was always about the future and that is what I loved about Southern California. When I moved back in 2005, after eight years away. It had changed. California morphed into a West Coast New York, where people live in the past. Why?
It started with Bush I de-militarizing California with Sam Nunn and those industries going to Texas and Georgia and Arizona. Now, people are trapped in their houses and cannot move. Those with money and education are moving out. California is now the third world futre of America.
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Having grown up with the certain knowledge that New York City was a rusty busted hellhole full of needle-fiends and muggers, with only Kojak to help, I can't give up on CA. But I understand the despair and the desire to write it off: they got what they wanted. You made your bed, now weep in it.
What I miss is what California represented, what it meant to those of us far away from the reality: the sunny place of industry and oranges and freedom and hamburgers at a drive-in with Gidget, and all those post-war Pepsi-ad images. No matter how cold and bleak North Dakota might get, there was always California, and if there was always California there was always the future of America.
Oct '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
California is at the edge of the continent. At one time, it was a place of Dreams. It had gold, movies, technology and great weather. Strange people and fun people and a place where we learned to see an unlimited future. When America failed to see the impact of future of the next 100 years was in the West beyond California, in Asia, we became withdrawn. Innovation no longer was about inventions, but "financial engineering." Financial gimmicks replaced performance and profits were no longer important, and we got the internet bubble. Houses were ATM machines, whose price would always go up and up to the sky. The transition point came, when Wall Street decided it wanted in on the "innovation game." Then the innovation game became a bunch of pieces of paper moving back and forth with no inherent value. Entrepneurship is the only future America has, and the swindlers and the Smartest People in the Room chased that to China and India. Ph.Ds went to Wall Street and not to develop new products. It was all about quick money with no sweat of the brow. That is our problem, and CA just got there first.
Oct '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Sharron Angle got punished yesterday. I wonder which poll got it right in predicting Reid's victory.
Aug '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Thank you James for bringing that up.
California lives for the next boom, and whether we admit it or not, we look for largess from afar.
It was true when the Sepulvedas and the Dominguezes held massive land grants fom the King of Spain, it was true when the railroad barons snapped up huge easements along the rail lines, and it is true every time Hollywood finds more 'stupid' money (think Howard Hughes).
The last time we made an honest go of it Sir Francis Drake was sailing up the coast and we were all living in wickiups.
Obviously good people work hard and produce, but when the stupid money vanishes we all suffer.
What is off-pissing is that the stupid money now is our hard earned money- taxed and squandered.
Oct '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
California dreamin', on such a winter's day...
Oct '10
Re: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown
Texas was the anti-California in this election. Rick Perry was re-elected to a third term, the GOP gained 24 seats in the State House of Representatives, giving them 100 seats out of a total of 150, and three congressional Democratic incumbents (Chet Edwards, Ciro "Zero" Rodriguez, and Solomon Ortiz) were voted out, giving the GOP a 23-9 advantage over the Democrats in the congressional delegation.
It's a great day to be alive!