Late California

Writing by lantern light in the fourth-largest economy on the planet, thinking of Emil Cioran.

How many failed states can fit within a state? California is a pretty big state, you know.

How many times can it stagger to the brink of bankruptcy?

How many times must the power die before the people do?

Beats me, man. I just live here.

I woke this morning to silence.

No fans, no hum.

The outage today was planned.

Restoration was three hours late.

Yesterday’s came for no reason. In the Golden State, failure has no schedule and no excuse.

I did not watch the inauguration in January.

The oath was spoken in Washington.

My house heard only the growl of generators.

Southern California: paradise with extension cords and LED lanterns.

I live nowhere near the flames that effaced Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

My own fire was smaller, almost forgotten—10 days of exile, one home lost, a freak storm that birthed its own rain and hail.

Ash on my roof and deck.

Flame stayed its hand.

California survives on miracles it doesn’t deserve.

Outages are crueler, or at least it seems to me.

Southern California Edison names them “public safety power shutoffs.”

A euphemism with its own pulse.

Each red flag warning arrives by text message: “Your outage is likely.”

Nothing like doom delivered with emojis.

Dry ice isn’t cheap, by the way.

In winter, my lights are off more than on.

The Devil Winds are ancient.

Only our fear of lawsuits is modern.

Edison trims trees, rebuilds poles, installs machines to trip themselves into silence.

Innovation: switches that work only when they don’t.

Why not bury the lines?

Because graves are expensive.

Edison denies claims for spoiled food but hands out lanterns and firewood.

A gesture of charity that feels like mockery.

We are not meant to eat.

We are meant to endure.

California is where survival kits come with a logo.

This is not my father’s California.

It was not his father’s either.

He was born during the Depression in Pennsylvania, raised in upstate New York, and followed his parents in search of the Golden Dream.

My mother came from an Idaho potato town.

They sought paradise and found smog—along with real opportunity.

California with 20 million people, a friend told me once, was a paradise.

California with 40 million is a nightmare.

Orange trees outnumbered people in the1950s and ’60s.

Freeways shimmered like ribbons of possibility.

A house needed no water meter because water flowed like grace.

Now grace is billed in cubic feet.

My father spent 41 years at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

He knew the real Chinatown, not the film.

“That’s not what happened!” he shouted at the screen, furious at a lie better told than the truth.

I nodded and went back to watching Jack Nicholson slap Faye Dunaway in the face.

Now I receive my electric and water bills and think of the old man.

We once conquered deserts with aqueducts.

Now the desert is winning.

“Solar doesn’t pencil out,” Dad said. He was right. He built things. He knew.

When Joni Mitchell sang of paradise paved, she was dreaming of Hawaii.

When she sang of California, she was dreaming of home.

Even paradise has a bad sequel.

Pat Brown, a Democrat, called his creed “responsible liberalism.”

He built freeways, aqueducts, and a future.

But futures are fragile.

His son Jerry announced “an era of limits.”

When limits became gospel, California stopped building.

Basic infrastructure makes civilization possible.

Good infrastructure fosters prosperity.

Good infrastructure, good life.

Crumbling infrastructure, crumbling life.

As president, Reagan ended the Cold War, without a doubt.

As governor? He enabled no-fault divorce and signed, under duress, the bill that emptied the mental hospitals.

Historians call his legacy “nuanced.”

Which is the more important legacy—winning the world for a decade or losing the state for a lifetime?

Jerry Brown was called “Moonbeam.”

That was Jerry 1.0.

Every governor here carries a nickname—never flattering, always deserved.

By the time Governor Moonbeam returned to power, he had become serious, grave, a statesman among lunatics.

That was Jerry 4.0. Or maybe 5.0.

He swore he was still a builder, like his dad.

His proof: a high-speed train from Merced to Bakersfield.

Our California builds nothing but excuses.

Our present governor—the one with the beautiful hair—boasts of the fourth-largest economy in the world.

True.

But it is also the capital of poverty.

The kingdom of tents.

A citadel of lawlessness and disorder.

Great wealth and great misery share the same sidewalk.

Progress strolls past squalor pretending not to notice.

This California is not my California.

My children cannot afford to inherit it.

Not to rent, not to buy, not even to stay.

The Golden State is fool’s gold.

We polish it.

We pretend it shines.

The only thing we export reliably is irony.

(Well, that and tech. And agriculture. We have the best almonds. Only the best.)

The fires erase neighborhoods faster than permits can approve them.

The outages erase the illusion of security and permanence.

Every home here is a waiting room for disaster.

Los Angeles sells glamour with the same hands that distribute needles.

The Bay Area sells innovation while counting corpses on the sidewalks.

Hollywood lectures the world by flashlight.

We speak of “climate change” as though it were news.

The climate of California has always been arson.

Once the frontier of promise, now the frontier of decay.

California was supposed to be the future.

The Golden Dream.

Now it is only a preview. Of what, precisely?

Rome fell to barbarians.

We will fall to regulators, lawyers, realtors, and PR flacks.

The apocalypse here is scheduled in advance.

You will receive a text about it.

Californians live between inferno and blackout.

The state is either on fire or off.

Electricity: a luxury.

Water: a negotiation.

Housing: a hallucination.

Infrastructure: rubble in slow motion.

And yet the governor campaigns for higher office, as if exporting failure were the state’s new industry.

What is California but a cautionary tale told in real time?

Children inherit precious little but debt and smoke.

The American dream burns quicker in the Santa Ana winds.

We still call it the Golden State.

What else can we call it?

The Beholden State? The Ashen State?

The Extinguished State?

No: we keep the brand.

Even ruin has a logo.