The World's Eighth Largest Economy

I can't remember where I first heard the phrase but it's always amused me. "California is like the rest of the nation only more so."

As with the nation and the world more broadly, the state of California has been much in the news lately over it's financial issues. Ah, but things are always more spectacular in California, so "issues" seems a trifle subdued, as does the phrase that seems to be preferred by many news stations, "budget woes." Let's call it a trial reckoning; it's just a preliminary run for the more serious reckoning to come.

And today, this trial ended. After weeks of steady arm-twisting the system cried uncle and bridged the $41 million budget gap. And this is all before the president, clad in green tights and a hat not unlike one worn by a certain Holden Caulfield, rides into town redistributing the nation's wealth in sacks of funds, bundled in mysterious denominations whose zeros defy comprehension. The trial is over, huzzah!

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This is not quite as extraordinary as it seems. Grandiose and threatening it may be, but not beyond the ordinary for the edge of the world. Budget delays have been the norm for the past few years. I remember some strangely fervent tabler at Berkeley reminding me of this fact when I was an impressionable freshman who stopped to chat with these types. He talked enthusiastically about some W.A.S.T.E.-like alternative postal system he was attempting to build. Some part of his pitch involved the supposed fact that the state had temporarily ceased to exist during a recent budget lapse and the state's own laws had allowed for the rewriting of the state constitution had anyone had the ambition to jump the state's claim to civic authority.

How the state's laws would continue to govern in this supposed period of anarchic-bliss I never questioned. The Crying of Lot 49 has since come to top my California required-reading-list, but that's for a future post.

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But even beyond the immediate historical continuity these self-consciously pivotal times have made me think of a talk given by Bay Area activist-historian, Gray Brechin at one of the monthly California Studies Association dinners at Berkeley. It was delivered in the immediate wake of the first financial bail-out and the room was all a-twitter and agog with the thought of just what they'd prefer the government be doing with those $700 billion.

The talk was on Brechin's new project, California's Living New Deal Project. His books and his talks seem to sway with a sort of unique passion rarely seen since Chautauqua tents fell from fashion, and that night was no different. TARP gave him the sort of dramatic background California figures thrive on. He spoke passionately about restoring the public appreciation of Roosevelt's vision and, more to the point, the beauty of the plan's publicly-holistic tactics and tact. He told of men traveling the country and living in CCC camps, building dams, libraries, and, apparently Tilden Park. Go figure.

The point was that there is no list of all of the public works that these citizen-corps-men built and that we, especially in the West, have been living around and dependent upon for the past 70 years. Most of them even lack simple markers identifying them as New Deal projects. Brechin's goal is to create such a list and show the public just what it is that they didn't know they had and couldn't live without.

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Now, I don't know if Woody Guthrie's Grand Coulee or if Palm Springs High School would count as shovel-ready projects or if such comparisons are misguided extrapolations (I mean, we ain't starvin' yet... at least not many of us...), and I don't mean to intone that often quoted and highly flawed addage about history repeating. Nonetheless, according to those pesky New Western Historians, we are still living in the hunting trails, wagon ruts and interstate grades begun long before us, no matter what we think about our unique newness out here in the land of golden change.