State & Local Politics

California’s fate today begins to suggest that of Tibet.

It is a free and independent place with its own unique culture and vital life force, and its will is clear. But self-governance is quashed by autonomous and arbitrary magistrates thousands of miles away.

Received mail about seeing no bumper stickers in North Carolina and Virginia. Marilyn writes thoughtfully: “A possible explanation for no bumper stickers in NC is my observation that more couples here are a split-ticket. Bare bumpers are the compromise.”

But bumper stickers also express advanced political yearnings: “Charlton Heston is my President” or the classic, “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers” or “Had enough yet?” And devoted followers tend to keep the stickers on long after the race. Apparently not with Obama. Driving home to New Hampshire, only two drew attention. One said, “Danger: I drive like a Cullen.” Another was a Mitt Romney sticker seen at rush hour in Hartford on a car driven by a woman simultaneously driving and eating a plate of macaroni and cheese. Spooky. It brought to mind that quiet moment when the dogs headed for the hills just before the tsunami.

I feel about North Carolina much as George W. Bush feels about Texas or Sarah Palin about Alaska. I’m not from there but found attachment through love and marriage. We reared our babies on a little farm in Tobaccoville.

It is a different place. We New Yorkers live in abstraction, in ideas formed to steel and glass provided by so many. Hamilton built the Empire State to be and to expand itself like that. The South is a place of earth, more like a garden. Jefferson intended it to be like that. The South shares in the abstraction and distraction provided by us New Yorkers, then something happens and they don’t. And now that has happened again.

After watching Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed over the weekend on the “Tom Sullivan Show,” I’ve given up the long-held delusion that Arnold would ride the white horse to the White House. He could well do that, even in President Obama’s administration. But he will bring to that now only a charismatic novelty. And the White House already has one: President Obama.

As Arnold ends his term in November, a strange symmetry is occurring in California. When he first ran for governor, Arnold even got support from the most deeply conservative of the religious right in the heartland because he was a Hollywood hottie and suggested Ronald Reagan, the California governor who was also a Hollywood star. Reagan was followed by Jerry Brown as governor. What is odd this time around is that Arnold could well be followed by the same Jerry Brown, who is running again.

Gertrude Stein famously said of the Oakland region, there is “no there there.” The question the Bay Area must ask today is this: Is there any there there yet?

Recently, Jeff Adachi has been attempting to solve problems the old fashioned way, through self government. San Francisco is at a crossroads, writes Adachi. There’s a fiscal train wreck just around the corner. In fact, it’s already here. With our city’s failing infrastructure and roads, a $787 million deficit next year, $1.2 billion in city employee pension costs that are projected to double in five years, the term “go for broke” takes on a new meaning. Will San Francisco become the next Vallejo?

There has been a spate of books on America’s presumed decline in recent days. Most now and ever before compare with the rise and fall of Rome. I’ve always thought we should be compared with two empires, Rome and Athens. Or better yet, Rome and Constantinople, equal and opposite cultural counter-forces for at least 1,000 years. But ours are red and blue and their capitals are New York City and Dallas.

This division was identified by Henry James in the late 1800s. “The Bostonians,” which might be seen as visionary today, contrasted the radical feminist and reformer, Olive, with the Southern cousin Basil, who dines with “a six-shooter and a bowie knife.” When asked, “Don’t you care for human progress?” he answers, “I don’t know — I never saw any.”

I was turned against federalism by two things. First, when I’d walk up to get my first-grader after school in the neighborhood of Duke University in Durham, N.C., I had to keep my hand on my 3-year-old, to keep the students from touching her. They were not bad kids, but they were nervous and erratic because their mothers were addicted to heroin when they were born. The second was the president. Although I had voted for him twice, it appeared to be a mother/child relationship he had with Hillary. Lots of men — especially artists and musicians — have that because it works for them. But when it became approved by a good majority it seemed we had gotten to the end of the difficult work we started back in 1776.

From Lou Reed to “The Office,” there has been something in us which seemed to delight in the idea of falling apart. This could be our chance. Illinois’s “pension is the most underfunded in the nation,” Karen S. Krop, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, told The New York Times. “They have not made significant cuts or raised revenues. There’s no state out there like this. They can’t grow their way out of this.”

For the last few years, California stood more or less unchallenged as a symbol of the fiscal collapse of states during the recession, writes Michael Powell in an article titled “Illinois Stops Paying Its Bill, but Can’t Stop Digging Hole.” Now Illinois has shouldered to the fore, as its dysfunctional political class refuses to pay the state’s bills and refuses to take the painful steps — cuts and tax increases — to close a deficit of at least $12 billion, equal to nearly half the state’s budget. Only an infusion of federal stimulus money allowed many states to deep layoffs last year.

There is a lot of hot air blowing in Washington, but most of it is happening in the cold, cold air inside the well-air-conditioned House and Senate chambers.

While modern air-conditioning didn’t come to the Capitol building until 1950 or so, both chambers had earlier versions by the 1930s.

Air-conditioning has been one of the most remarkable sociological developments in history.

Without air-conditioning, it is hard to see how Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada could have grown so rapidly over the last three decades. Sure, it can get hot in the summer, but in most of those places, people wear sweaters most of the day. They wear sweaters because they spend most of their time inside.

Those who follow historical cycles are well-aware that we are at the end of things. Political cycles erode after the third generation, in around the 64th year. From Eisenhower to the Dalai Lama, it has been an astonishing half-century. Yet history falls into troughs. It did with the death of Jefferson. It did in the 1930s and it has entered one now. The old gods are gone; the Kennedys are dead, but the successes have been great, the era ending with a victorious milestone: a black president. But at the Creation, the Monkey God, Bob Dylan, said he would not be so all alone if everybody would get stoned. So they did. Could we start again with that?