Joe Mathews (1)

There is this idea we have, about California. It's about 'Hey, it's this so amazing place where they have sushi? And like wine that's better than France?' Judgment of Paris http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89159.Judgment_of_Paris. It's about 'The music is so amazing, it's like Dancing on the Streets.' California Dreamin rel="nofollow" target="_top">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/754493.California_Dreamin_ You know. Mamma Cass.

It's about admiring people who get really rich really quickly. It's about hey, it so isn't like the rest of the US. Come ooonn!

And yet.....

I had an idea California was something else. Not least because, as I was reading something Manny wrote here recently which referred to the idea that gaol in France isn't so bad as the protagonist has expected; I was remembering a friend who has just come out of Californian gaol. A privatised concern in the middle of the desert, prisoners shackled together as they shuffle along. This was the view that confronted his children when they came to visit.

So when I came upon JEH Smith's piece lately, I was relieved to discover that California isn't actually Mama Cass and Silicon Valley and red wine and film stars living in houses that are too big. Not only, at any rate. It is this:

To be of European descent and from California, by contrast, is somewhat more like being from South Africa. California was simply left blank on early modern maps of the New World, and it remains one of the earth's extremities. Here, just like the Cape, is where one runs out of continent. The fact that the 'Californians' to whom Beattie refers were annihilated, while the 'Hottentots' and other Southern African groups were only subjugated, doesn't make a crucial difference. Like the Boers, most white Californians are descended from people pushed by desperation to the edge of a continent, and, once there, pitted by a white elite against the other races they came across, either as a result of autochthony or through a parallel process of migration.

California generates and sustains its own permanent criminal underclass, largely, it seems, in order to make a perpetual spectacle of cracking down on it, of being tough on it. The criminals are Hispanicized Mestizos, descendants of slaves, and of Dust Bowl migrants (locally dubbed 'Mexican', 'black', and 'white', respectively). The prison system extends far beyond prison walls and into the domestic lives of parolees, of men made to wear signal-transmitting anklets, of everyone whose neighborhood is under constant police supervision not for their own protection but rather in order to keep them thinking of themselves as policed, to keep them conceptualizing themselves in polizeiwissenchaftlich terms as members of a problematic group.

Being policed makes a person into something at once more concrete and abstract: a 'Caucasian individual', a 'black male suspect', and so on. It transforms cars into vehicles and women into females, and generally distorts reality in the name of a supposedly scientific and dispassionate deployment of language. It makes convenient phenotypic identifiers into the outward signs of membership in real kinds: nowhere is race more reified, nowhere is it experienced as more real, than inside a prison, where personal security and survival often can only be assured through membership in a race-based fraternity.

It is true that the California prison system punishes the non-white lower classes with gross disproportion, and even, perhaps, that its very reason for being is to perpetuate, even into the post-Civil Rights era of legal equality, the disenfranchisement and diminished citizenship of African-Americans. But this principal reason has an inseparable corrollary: that it will also perpetuate the perception, among the Harvest Gypsies described by Steinbeck, that they are white and that this comes with certain natural advantages. That these advantages are never quite delivered as promised is the basic betrayal that structures the lives of the Americans I know best. http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2011/06/in-the-valley.html

It is a very moving piece. Read it! It took me to goodreads, no surprise there, and looking around found this book. This took me to Richard's review http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/163450537 which gives links to a whole series in The Economist on the subject. What an unmitigated disaster. I had no idea. The more one reads about the US the harder it is to believe it can extricate itself from the mire. And yet there is still that hope, isn't there?


… (plus d'informations)

The Governator: a fair and balanced look: I won't spend a lot of space going over the same ground as the two capsule reviews, but suffice to say that Los Angeles Times writer Joe Mathews has done an extraordinary job examining Schwarzenegger and how he came to be governor of California, in terms of both the man's strengths and weaknesses. While making the typical mistakes one expects of someone "new" to California politics (though he met Howard Jarvis and closely followed the machinations involved with Prop 13 many years earlier in the late 1970s), Schwarzenegger comes off smarter than one might expect.

Mathews' paralleling Arnold's business accumen and showmanship and to Hiram Johnson's much earlier version of direct democracy makes for a fascinating (and I agree page turning) read on the Governator, a Republican by party affiliation, but hardly in lock step with the GOP leadership.

Joe Mathews has managed to keep whatever personal feelings he has about Schwarzenegger in a file drawer somewhere, and takes an honest look the campaign and beyond with wit, vigor and good old-fashioned in-depth investigative coverage. In the end, whatever popularity Schwarzenegger maintains with California voters has been earned through trial and error, and hard work, as has everything he's attained all his life.… (plus d'informations)