By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ Media
The proverbial thin veneer of
civilization has never been thinner in California, as if nature has conspired
to create even greater chaos than what man here has already wrought. What
follows below was a fairly typical seven-day period in the land of the highest
sales, fuel, and income taxes that have led to the nearly worst freeways,
schools, and general infrastructure in the nation.
I recently came home from an
out-of-state trip. Something was wrong: I noticed off in the distance a strange
geyser at the top of the hill. Vandals had apparently earlier taken
sledgehammers to the pump’s four-inch plastic fittings — all to scavenge two
brass valves (recycle value of about $20).
The fools did not know the pump was
even on. When they smashed open the plastic pipes the spurting water apparently
drenched them, and so they left their self-created mess. (No, criminals here do
not know how to turn off a pump.) The ensuing deluge of several hours had
ripped a three-foot-deep gully for about 20 yards.
I’ve lost count of how many pumps
have been vandalized over the last decade. Some people play golf after work and
weekends, but out here the pastime is to drive out to the countryside to wreck
things for a few dollars of copper and bronze. It reminds me of the Ottomans in
Greece, who pried off the lead seals over the iron clamps that had held
together the marble blocks of ancient Greek temples and walls. The Turks, who
could make little but scavenge a lot, got their few ounces of lead for bullets.
In the exchange, the exposed iron marble clamps rusted and fell apart, ruining
the antiquities that had theretofore survived 2,000 years of natural wear and
tear. One civilization builds and invests, quite a different one destroys and
consumes.
Four days earlier, three people (a
male and two females) had parked nearby at the neighbor’s abandoned house. It
was said not to meet California’s codes and thus was condemned, though the
dwelling is far better built than are the occupied shacks and trailers across
the street with various goats, chickens, geese, sheep, and cows grazing between
the houses. In any case, the vandals were kicking in the sheet rock to rip out
Romex wire (perhaps $5 worth of recyclable wire per ruined wall). I tried to
catch them, but by the time I got to the truck and drove back out after them,
they were speeding out of the alleyways with impunity.
When these things happen, no one
calls the sheriff, the insurance company, or any authority. The problem is so
ubiquitous, and the old civilized infrastructure so ossified, that it is
impossible to address the vandalism and chronic violation of civilization’s
basic tenets.
I think that we’ve come full circle
in California: from the premodern Wild West of the 19th century to a decadent
postmodernism that is every bit as feral,
though the roughness of ascension is always preferable to its counterpart in
decline. The day before Easter, Sacramento tried to stage the world’s largest
public Easter egg hunt. From news reports
it seems quickly to have devolved into a Darwinian free-for-all, where the ochlos swarmed the few who played by the rules.
After shutting the pump off, I drove
back into the yard. That night the most miserable canine creature imaginable
limped into the yard — a beaten bloody female dog dumped on the road.
This is a common occurrence in rural
California: when dogs go into heat or become too expensive to feed or can no
longer perform in backyard dog-fights, their peeved owners drive out of town,
pull up to a rural house, and toss the dog out the car window.
We cleaned the creature up, and are
trying to nurse it back to life to join our other dogs — who themselves were
once throwaways.
After fixing the broken pipes, the
pump ironically went dry the next day.
The well is a respectable 245 feet,
but the submersible pump is set at 80 feet. The water table has fallen from 52
to 79 feet in a year, as the absence of surface water for four years has forced
everyone to pump 24/7 to keep orchards and vineyards alive. (In the past, we’ve
gone 10 years in a row without turning on a pump, given the irrigation
district’s normal deliveries out of Pine Flat Reservoir — in the age before
fish and scenic river restoration.) Water is taken out of the ground, but none
is percolating back down. We forget that the logic of the Sierra snow runoff
was to fill valley ponds and canals, whose storage water trickled down and replenished
the aquifer, which farmers rarely had a need to tap through pumping.
I am on a list to have the dry
agricultural pump lowered to 130 feet. Right now, there is a scramble for pump
installers and well drillers. Daily, homes and farms go dry as the aquifer
plunges. A paradox emerges in Central and Southern California: unlike the
foothills, the Sierra, the coastal corridor, the West Side, and the Coast
Range, there is a vast aquifer beneath the San Joaquin Valley, at least
for about 10 miles on either side of the 99 freeway. The railroad men of the
19th century whose rails the freeway follows knew where water for their steam
engines was plentiful.
For the near future, the problem is
not running out of water per se, but rather the wild sauve-qui-peut mentality of deeper wells, bigger pumps, and larger power
bills, and who can get an overbooked well driller or pump installer first. But
then the current water chaos is not so different from driving the State 99
or trying to visit the DMV.
On the evening news, the governor
announced a 25% reduction in state water usage. A wise move — but still at this
late date, mostly a symbolic gesture after a half-century of state madness that saw (1) the state’s population soar from 20 to 40
million people, (2) the envisioned second- and third-phase reservoirs of
various California water projects all cancelled, (3) and several million acre
feet of stored water before and during the drought released from reservoirs to
the ocean for fish and scenic river restoration.
Given that the agricultural pump had
gone out, I also checked the house well and pump (it’s one thing to lose a
grape crop, quite another to have no drinking water). It was a good thing. The
much smaller pump was drawing on only 5 feet of water; so I had it lowered
another 20 feet to near the bottom of the well. When the final 20 feet margin
of error goes, that domestic well is kaput. But even a small new well for a
house requires $30,000, with a six-month to one-year waiting list.
I had thought I would call my son, a
history teacher and coach at a local rural school, to have him help me check
the wells and to fix the broken fittings on the pump. But he lives in
California, too. So, of course, he has his own disasters. An hour before I
called, his car was vandalized and window smashed, with the loss of computer,
keys, and wallet in broad daylight, the day before Easter in a north Clovis
shopping center. He cancelled his credit cards within an hour; too late, the
thieves had already used it at a Jack in the Box and gas station.
Do we look for guidance for all this
chaos from our governor? The Legislature? The clergy? The UC or CSU campus
hierarchy?
I doubt it. Students at UC Berkeley
are talking about creating racially segregated “safe spaces.” The second in
command at the Fresno Police Department was just arrested for drug trafficking
(a $180,000 salary I guess is far too little compensation). And the L.A. mass
transit train just had another human-induced collision (where are we going to
find enough educated workers to pilot the zooming high-speed rail cars?).
At least the governor recently
weighed in on illegal immigration to suggest that those who wanted existing
federal immigration laws enforced were “un-Christian” (the governor is now, in
Jimmy Swaggart style, habitually deriding those who do not share his ideology as un-Christian).
In the drought finger-pointing, it
is now de rigeur to damn “Big Ag,” and to decry the use of water for
things like almond trees. But why are almonds less important to our collective
lives than are iPhones? Can you eat an app? Drink a search engine?
If one massages statistics and lumps
environmental and recreational use of state and federal reservoir water under
“agricultural use,” one then can claim that only 4 to 8% of state GNP is
generated by agriculture and does not warrant “75%” of our water usage.
But where does “Big Facebook” get
its water — if not from far distant water projects? Which is more unnatural, to
farm corporate almonds outside of Tranquility where the water table is at 1,000
feet, or to cram millions of people into the arid Bay Area corridor where there
is no aquifer to speak of, and thus water must be transferred from the north and
east over vast distances to ensure the viability of Big Apple and Big Google?
At least the former elite in farming
understand that they must build and maintain reservoirs and that bait fish are
more expendable than is food, while the latter elite in theory object to the
very infrastructure that in the concrete allows them to live in a most
unnatural landscape.
Does anyone realize that the entire
California experiment — having 75% of the people live in a Mediterranean
climate where 25% of the state’s rain and snow fall — is unnatural and depends
on each generation’s ingenuity and industriousness to ensure water, an educated
populace, safe freeways, and basic safety and security for the citizenry?
The enervated middle class of
California struggles under high taxes, high housing costs, high-cost energy,
terrible schools, and high crime. Increasingly it is considering leaving
paradise. In our pyramidal state, there is a vast underclass (22% of the state
lives below the poverty line, schools are rated 46th in the nation, and
one out of three hospital admittances over 35 suffers from diabetes, etc., a
disease for whose prevention California rates near last in expenditures). The
base of the pyramid is growing, and now represents one in six of all American
welfare recipients.
Atop sits the wealthiest 1% elite in
the United States, whose capital ensures immunity from the consequences of
one’s own ideology — at least up to a point.
After all, Redwood City and East
Palo Alto are apparently seen as forcing wealthy white and Asian liberals into
private academies in Silicon Valley. Even those who demand higher taxes tend to
relocate one “permanent” residence in nearby tax-free Nevada — a potentially
disastrous trend, given than only about 160,000 Californians of 40 million
residents account for 54% of all state income tax revenue.
Even those in Malibu, Bel Air, and
Old Pasadena must use the unusable 405. Even Hetch Hetchy and other water
projects cannot supply the Bay Area’s voracious appetite for water.
Putting phase one of high-speed rail down among the yokels of Central
California does no good unless it is linked up with a messy, smelly, dirty
construction site in the Bay Area.
What nature’s deadly four-year
drought is teaching California is that even the liberal aristocracy eventually
has a rendezvous with what they created.
All the capital, income, and
influence in the state cannot guarantee exemption from their own self-induced
chaos. Climbing atop the smokestacks of the sinking Titanic is of little use
after you have deprecated the idea of more lifeboats.
The original link can be found at: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-drought-california-apocalypto/?singlepage=true
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