The California Spectator/Land of the Smiling Sun
Brookhiser, Richard
THE CALIFORNIA SPECTATOR LAND OF THE SMILING SUN T he last time I was in California, 1 apart from a few political trips, I was a five-year-old taken there by my parents on a cross-country drive in...
...Californians are supposed to fall for this kind of thing because of their openness to new ideas...
...THE CALIFORNIA SPECTATOR LAND OF THE SMILING SUN T he last time I was in California, 1 apart from a few political trips, I was a five-year-old taken there by my parents on a cross-country drive in a black Comet...
...Our inn in Big Sur gave each guest a list, two sides of a page, of the masseurs and masseuses who were on call, with brief bios, like a massage edition of Playbill: "Tringanath specializes in deep tissue work, and relaxation of stress patterns...
...But California was hardly alone in that crusade...
...Back-talk, in fact, is one thing they don't produce locally...
...The age differential between human and non-human is greater in California than in the east...
...Everyone knows that Californians dabble in peculiar beliefs, but it is still surprising to see them close up...
...But the great fact that shrinks all human phenomena, peaceful and abrasive, is nature...
...One of the few movements in which California has truly been at the forefront is the Protestant reaction, since Los Angeles was a bastion of turn-ofthe-century Pentecostalism and Funby Richard Brookhiser damentalism...
...I was impressed by the crookedest street in the world in San Francisco, and the biggest tree on earth in Sequoia Park, but anthropology was beyond my ken...
...I must also admit that if I lived in any place that was so smiling, I would probably become a Californian myself...
...Washington is, if possible, worse, because arguments there, though equally raucous and endless, are only about one thing, politics...
...Even when nature isn't scenic, there is something impressive about it...
...But I knew, as the farms slid past, where all my vegetables were coming from this winter...
...But if the Puritans and the Cavaliers had landed at Monterey instead, would the colonies have prospered...
...I only got one massage, but that was not for lack of opportunity...
...But I was also able to notice Californians...
...The one political slogan I saw all the time I was there was on a T-shirt: SEX IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN NUCLEAR POWER...
...Victorian qualifies as old there, while something like Fort Ross, a Russian stockade on the Sonoma coast built in Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer...
...It also doesn't watch our thoughts, and Californians don't pay much attention to them either, which is why they're so willing to pick them up secondhand...
...It impinges even in cities, as anyone who has made the mistake of walking up Nob Hill knows...
...Seventeenth-century New England was freezing, and Virginia had amoebic dysentery...
...In ten days I sat in three hot tubs, one mudbath, and one clothing-optional Japanese steam room built over a natural hot spring...
...Is Pat Buchanan as evil as Heidegger?—can be like pressing a clawhammer to a grindstone...
...In such lush soil, gaudy blossoms flourish...
...Californian nature is also larger-scale than the eastern variety...
...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...
...If I ever move there, I must remember to program regular vacations to the Times Square subway station...
...New Age crapola is theosophy, and spiritualism, and New England's fascination with the mystic East...
...What look like conflicts of ideas turn out to be conflicts of hedonisms instead...
...When we were in San Francisco, the papers were running stories about two Bay Area Pentecostals who called for "militant power-praying" to combat the spirit of the New Age which, they said, held the northern part of the state in thrall...
...Most of my fellow bathers were not disciples of Alan Watts but normal business people looking for a place to relax...
...Thirty years later, I revisited the street and the tree...
...In California, the New Age is not just a generator of dumb and boneless music...
...There were crystals for sale in hotel bookstores, pyramids in shopping centers...
...In rush hour...
...They came to the right place...
...I soaked more than I ever had in my life...
...If this is the life of the mind, lobotomy has to be a serious option...
...the 1820s, is prehistoric...
...But make some demand a Californian is unprepared or unwilling to meet—such as, my charming room at your charming inn isn't charming enough, can I change it?—and he will rest serenely in his space and watch yours implode...
...But their new ideas are actually old ideas, that have rolled across the continent and gotten paint jobs...
...when one mild perfect day gives way to the next, after succeeding the day before—you can start thinking of Toynbee and the doctrine of challenge and response...
...When Californians are being disagreeable, they treat you with what the shrinks call "passive" aggression...
...It is a faith, like Catholicism or psychoanalysis...
...Today's environmentalism, like Big Green, and yesterday's, like Robinson Jeffers, are slow letters from Thoreau...
...when the fruit trucks stream through the mountain passes like commuters onto the Long Island Expressway...
...Its books and paraphernalia are everywhere...
...The nastiest remark I heard in the whole state was a cabbie complaining that Chinese don't drive confidently because "they're into Tai Chi and flow...
...The latest news from Los Angeles is that the courts must now adjudicate between the rights of club-goers to go to clubs which only admit cool people, and the right of a nerd, who tried to enter but was turned back, not to feel hurt...
...Rights become pleasures, and the only restriction Californians recognize on pleasure is the overriding claim of a greater one...
...The implied position is one I happen to endorse, but it struck me as a particularly Californian way of framing the issue...
...The first thing an outsider notices, even before he arrives, is how agreeable Californians in service positions are...
...Here, nature is simply and unignorably present in a way that nothing human is, despite large numbers of human beings...
...And I didn't even get to Eureka, Tahoe, Yosemite, the beach...
...They can stand a little back-talk...
...Since, according to the 1990 census, one in eight Americans is a Californian, they have more right to hold forth on us, or anyone else in the country...
...The Central Valley, as we drove across it, was as flat as a floor and hot as blazes...
...Jeffers, from his perch on the coast, said of the Pacific Ocean, which he called "the staring unsleeping Eye of the earth," that "what it watches is not our wars...
...By contrast, in a few years the tallest non-building in New York is going to be a heap of garbage on Staten Island...
...T don't want to suggest that intellectual life in the rest of the country is problem-free...
...And I haven't been back to a college except for football games or reunions since I handed in my room key and my laundry...
...I could see what they meant...
...Have a nice day" isn't a tag line, it's a credo...
...The noise and futility of New York arguments—Is Karen Finley as great as Salman Rushdie...
...There is something impertinent about a New Yorker holding forth on the citizens of the opposite coast...
...But we buy their movies, their records, their fruit, and their fads...
...s it too beautiful for everyone's 1 good...
...The last was on the grounds of a Zen monastery, an hour and a half, by four-wheel-drive van, from the nearest paved road...
...According to some eschatologists, they will still be alive when Jesus comes back...
...All we had for company during the day were squabbling black- and bluejays, and during the night, stars as big as ice cubes...
...Disagreeable New Yorkers believe in aggressive aggression—the traditional kind...
...Since good health is the condition of all pleasures, they have made it as hard to smoke a cigarette in the state as on a domestic plane flight...
...In the natural world, by contrast, you can, without even seeking out the bristle-cone pines, find trees that were alive when Jesus was...
...When the light flutters on the eucalyptus leaves...
Vol. 23 • December 1990 • No. 12
