By Victor Davis Hansan in PJ Media
California is run from a sort of Pacific Versailles, an
isolated coastal compound of elite rulers physically cut off from its interior
peasantry.
To understand how California works — or rather does not work —
drive over the I-5
Grapevine and gaze down at the brilliantly engineered artificial Pyramid
Lake. Thanks to California water project deliveries, even in a third year of
drought its level still fluctuates between 90 to 100% full — ensuring, along
with its companion reservoirs, plentiful water for the Los Angeles-area
municipalities for the next two years. The far distant watersheds and
reservoirs that feed Pyramid Lake are about bone dry.
The same disconnect is true of Crystal Springs Reservoir along the
I-280 near San Francisco. The Sierra watershed that supplies the now 90%+full
lake is drying up. But San Francisco will have an assured water supply from its
manmade reservoirs for some time, even if the drought persists.
Yet most of the policies of the state that have led to
cancellations of additional water projects over the last thirty years — or
those that have resulted in vast diversions of diminished reservoir water from
contracted agricultural use to fish replenishment — are made by Los Angeles and
San Francisco area legislators, judges, and public officials.
It would be as simplistic as it is true to say that water policy
in California has been set by those who have plentiful water supplies in
manmade reservoirs with the highest priorities in claims on far distant snow
melts. Water elites pontificate about environmental restrictions on water use
to others who do not enjoy a rank so high in the water-allotment queue.
By that I mean at no time did any Los Angeles or San Francisco
legislator offer to divert their Pyramid Lake or Crystal Springs allotments to
replenish the San Joaquin River for salmon runs or to improve the delta
landscape of the 3-inch delta smelt. Instead I think the mentality could
best be summed up as something like, “Unnatural dams and reservoirs are
necessary to supply water for elite coastal grandees like us so that we can
live in arid, picturesque Pacific communities without aquifers and thereby have
the leisure to cut off water for others not so worthy.”
The same paradox is true of public utility policy. There are rarely
frosts or scorching 100-degree temperatures from San Diego to Berkeley, the
coastal strip where there is little need for air conditioners or for daylong
use of central heating. For hoi
aristoi, California’s public utilities can be regulated and taxed
for all sorts of utopian alternative energy investments in lieu of drawing on
massive newly discovered fields of California natural gas to lower generation rates.
The result is that those who live winters in the cold mountains or
summers in the sizzling interior cannot afford to consume the now nearly
highest priced electricity in the nation. If San Francisco should routinely hit
104 degrees for most of August, or if Santa Monica or La Jolla routinely should
have a string of 20-degree or so consecutive freezing nights, the manner in
which public utilities were run might be far different than it is today. If UC
Berkeley faculty could not afford to turn on their air conditioners in
105-degree campus heat, and there were no nearby Walmart to visit to find free
air-conditioned relief — the common refuges of the poor during August in the
San Joaquin Valley — then the price per kilowatt might begin to matter a bit more.
Ditto the ironies of illegal immigration. There are enclaves of
largely Latino barrios of recently arriving illegal aliens from Mexico and
Latin America along the coast — given that the Versailles coastal class over
the last thirty years has developed the tastes of the 18th-century
French aristocracy in hiring maids, groundskeepers, and nannies. But
nonetheless, the majority of recent arrivals mostly live in the southern
interior and Central Valley, where homes are more often $100 rather than $1000
a square foot. When Mark Zuckerberg assures Carlos Slim that his country’s
immigration policies make no sense, he assumes that his own family and friends,
by virtue of their influence, money, and superior ethos, not only have the
means, but deserve the right, to be exempt from the consequences of thirty
years of open borders.
Coastal elites do not visit public parks in Tulare. They do not
drive along the
antiquated 99 “freeway.” They do not go to
emergency rooms like those in Merced. Their children are not enrolled in
schools like those in Orange Cove. The coastal open-borders magnificoes assume
that they should profit both materially from cheap imported labor and
psychologically from the relief of helping the indigent cheaply but also
thankfully from a great distance — as properly being exempted from the
ramifications of their own ideology.
So California’s misrule is best explained by a few million along
its coastal strip whose elite advocacy is predicated on their bankrupt ideas
falling on others.
Take the Steyer
brothers, who pledge some of their many hundreds of millions to stop fracking,
natural gas use, pipelines, etc., and yet whose firms made much of their
billions financing coal plants in the former Third World. Then there is the
multimillionaire Rep. Nancy Pelosi praising the idea of de facto open borders
from one of her
many tony homes. Sen. Barbara Boxer has usually opposed finishing the second and
third phase infrastructure of the various state and federal water projects —
and then moved to Rancho Mirage, a desert retreat for largely white (90% plus)
multimillionaires, whose beautiful artificial lakes and numerous golf courses
are not predicated on its 3-4 inches of rain per year, but instead on
multibillion-dollar infrastructure that allows water diversions from the
Colorado River.
Diversity is a popular coastal concept — for others. The three
most powerful elected federal representatives of a state (Senator Barbara
Boxer, Senator Dianne Feinstein and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi)
with the largest percentage of Latino residents, with the greatest number of
residents under the poverty line and with the largest percentage of residents
on welfare are three Bay Area liberal multimillionaire women in their
seventies. In current liberal parlance, that is a demographic hardly reflective
of their constituents’ ethnic, gender, age, class, or geographical diversity.
The same habits characterize education. Most of the push for a
therapeutic and politicized curriculum, open admissions, and the Dream Act
apply more forcefully to places like Fresno State, Cal State Bakersfield or Cal
State Stanislaus, and not so much at UCLA, or the private bastions like Cal
Tech or Stanford. There are no Harker, Sacred Heart, Menlo School, Castilleja,
or Stevenson private academies in Modesto or Avenal. The state puts its new
prisons, not its new prep schools, in its interior. Could not the Menlo
School open a new branch in Corcoran to serve the needs of the
underrepresented?
Lots of things could derail it. A year or two more of drought
might make even Bay Area activists lose their gardens and showers. Hispanics
might see through the strange partnership in which their identity-politics
legislators vote for things like transgendered restrooms in exchange for
liberal support for the Dream Act and affirmative action policies — given that
reducing irrigated farmland, tabling fracking and horizontal drilling, or
derailing logging and mining hurt those in most need of well-paying jobs. High
speed rail might eventually come to the Bay Area and tear up Silicon Valley in
the manner its first phase will soon cut a destructive swath through the farmland
of Kings County. Soaring housing costs and no-growth zoning laws might
eventually spill the children of coastal elites into the state’s cheaper
interior.
But for now in our pyramidal state, there is a Versailles elite on
the coast, and a let-them-eat-cake mass everywhere else.
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