Where men ‘give birth’ and logic ends

The builders sow the destruction of the brilliant and useful world that they create. It’s the great ironic gut punch of the historical cycle. California is doing heroic labor to show how it works.

At a legislative hearing in Sacramento this week, a parent-activist named Erin Friday said something that stopped the discussion cold: Women give birth. Yes, she actually said that, out loud and in public. It’s stunning, right? Take a moment if it’s too intense to deal with.

The legislators in the room weren’t going to let that statement stand, and they launched an immediate attack to set the record straight. You can watch that whole amazing clown show here.

Two members of the California assembly led the rebuke. First, the eternally bizarre Lori Wilson explained that men and nonbinary people also give birth. Then, Mia Bonta thanked Wilson for “stating the obvious.” Of course men give birth. I mean, obviously. I might drop a few babies myself, tonight, just for recreation, in between shots of whiskey and deep sets of bicep curls. It's the ultimate expression of manliness, producing newborn infants out of your — hold on a moment while I check the manual, because I'm still not totally clear on this part.

Mia Bonta, who found it obvious that men give birth, is married to Rob Bonta, the attorney general who is fighting passionately to make sure that schools have secret sexual discussions with children and don't tell their parents. Rob and Mia Bonta have several children together, but of course we can’t be sure which one of them actually birthed the couple’s offspring. From the press conferences, though, I’d guess it was Rob.

I’ve been thinking about California constantly this week because I’ve been driving a remarkably tiring amount of it, burning fossil fuels up and down Interstate 5 and the generally more pleasant Highway 101.

You see our history when you drive the state: the Mojave Desert, where space-age aviation was built by a bunch of brilliant lunatics who strapped themselves to very fast things that flew up into the sky and sometimes didn’t quite fly back down; Silicon Valley, where tinkerers and college dropouts made the computer age while looking like a bunch of damn hippies; the San Joaquin Valley, which has fed tens of millions of people all over the world.

We have a remarkable number of cattle ranches, too, by the way. But they cover what they’re doing by putting up signs everywhere that say the cows are organic and extremely happy.

I drove south on Thursday night, through steady rain, past the ships delivering oil at Richmond, and was struck a couple hours later by the short distance between Apple’s multibillion-dollar headquarters and the cities that are famous for growing garlic and lettuce. We’re the people who make things, and it’s why California is so important. My grandparents moved here in the 1950s to seek opportunity in the land with the growing economy and the massive productive streak.

You probably remember how Chicago was once the “Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler.” That was California, too, for several remarkable decades.

And now we know that men give birth.

Productive, efficient, creative, effective people make things, which leads to prosperity, which leads to comfort and leisure, which leads to depravity, decadence, and Lori Wilson.

In other news, California voters approved high-speed rail in a 2008 referendum and even approved a $9.95 billion bond issue to pay for it. Last month, the officials in charge of building the thing — which doesn’t have a single mile of rail yet, but we’ve only been actively working on the thing for nine years — announced that the final cost to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco will be closer to $135 billion, and a much-shorter initial stretch might be operational at some point in the 2030s.

Building an aerospace industry and a massive agricultural powerhouse and a globally dominant computer business, our grandfathers were laying the foundation for a state that couldn’t build a piece of toast without starting a fire and screwing up the multibillion-dollar bond issue. You made everyone too comfortable, back there in postwar America, with all your making and doing, and look at us now.

But at least we have the consolation prize of men giving birth, which should keep the lights on when we shut down the last real power plants.