There isn’t enough, not in all the world, to get cover on all the fallow acres before next spring. The past few years we’ve had long, wet winters. We’ve had dry springs, but not dry enough to cause more than local dust problems. But time is against us.
Let’s see now, which of my peeves and beefs haven’t I covered?
Well, there’s the state of the industrial economy. The fact that most Americans are traveling in trains when we could easily be flying. The fact that the Japanese will not provide us with the equipment to build microchips on our own. Short-term, that’s a sensible policy for them, but in the long run the vision of America as an agricultural society, industrially backward and politically castrated, just isn’t going to work.
We’re seeing one good thing, though, and so far it hasn’t been interrupted, except by Japan. This is the return of American technology from abroad. We’ve recently seen RCA’s whole Singapore and Taiwan manufacturing facilities returned. They’re in Los Angeles now, in twelve bonded warehouses, the equipment we need to start producing a whole new generation of computers on American soil. And we’ve kept our intellectual base intact. Our schools are still damn good. We’ve had IBM equipment returned from Europe, Pan Am and TWA planes from all over the world, U.S. military equipment coming back, all sorts of things like that.
But we could easily absorb millions of small computers, and hundreds of thousands of large ones. Not to mention radios and televisions in the hundreds of millions. Net import of televisions in 1991 was exactly six million units. You know what a Sony TV costs, of course. Ridiculous, that the average American would have to put in six months’ work to buy a television set—if he can convert his paper to gold. Of course, I understand the Japanese problem. They can’t possibly produce enough electronic equipment to satisfy U.S. needs. What’s more, we can’t afford it. All the gold we’ve got won’t be enough to rewire the electronic village.
By the end of this century, either Britain or Japan will be the most powerful nation on earth. I was taken to England last year.
The London School of Economics offered me a chair, with about triple my current salary, free medical care, and the same kind of life we were used to here before the war. Hell, I would have taken it if I hadn’t been such a stubborn old curmudgeon. I like these goddamn United States. My family emigrated from England to get work. The Golden Door. I am not going back, it’s as simple as that.
But my trip there was a hell of a surprise. First off, you have the Conservative Party and the Social Democrats. Labor is dead. The Liberals are a strong third. That is one vital, alive, active country. The Thames is jammed with shipping. The airports are full of planes. They’ve built a high-speed, magnetic-cushion train system between London and their various other cities. Planes, trains, cars.
I never saw so many Rolls-Royces and Bentleys in my life. My God, London is like some kind of a high-tech jewel. You can talk to your goddamn TV set to order goods and services. Talk to it!
I was shown the Royal Space Center, where they’re planning for eventual interstellar travel. They hope to reach Barnard’s Star, which they believe has an Earthlike planet.
I came home on Concorde II. Seven hours, London to San Francisco, and no sonic boom, not flying as high as it does. I came back to Berkeley. Back to my damned Consensus with the cracked rear window and the permanent pull to the right. I came back also to Quinn, and Russian Hill, and the slow process of rediscovering myself as a person and a Californian. Also an American, of course.
Documents—California Dreams
The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Long cars on long roads; restaurants and bars open round the clock; supermarkets that sell everything from toothbrushes to pasta machines pina coladas and pink silks compete with Coors and Steam Beer; enormous flounders served in light, bright, Muzaked restaurants; Pinot Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon; sun-bleached hair and the thick scent of Ray-Ban Coconut V Aloe.
America, in other words, ten years ago.
California today. But also: illegal immigration warnings posted on every wall and in every bus and trolley; Whitley and I on the run; holding camps and returnee camps and prison camps and four new gas chambers in San Quentin; military uniforms everywhere; black market Sony and Panasonic televisions; meatless Fridays and the wonderful red interurban trolleys; “finder” columns in the Los Angeles Timesand the San Francisco Chronicle; the Beach Boys; Meryl Streep defying the police by producing and acting in the banned play Chained.
I am dazed by California. Sometimes, walking the streets with Whitley, I get a joy in me, and I think to myself that the past is returning like a tide, and soon all will again be well. There is energy and movement here—danger too, of course—but there is a little of something else that I think is also an important component of the American spirit—frivolity. Not much, I’ll grant you, but it isn’t dead yet.
Of course, the place is also tension-ridden. In Los Angeles, militant Asian Returnists whose native countries won’t let them come back compete for barrio space with Chicanos and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from the other states. The American illegals are by far the worst off. Because they are de facto criminals, they are helpless and are ruthlessly exploited. The division between rich and poor is exceedingly sharp. Beverly Hills and Nob Hill glitter with Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes.
In California, the rest of the United States is thought of as a foreign country, poverty-stricken and potentially dangerous. The local press reports it only incidentally. A bus plunge killing a hundred in Illinois will appear at the bottom of page forty of a Times that headlines the discovery of strontium 90 in Anaheim.
It is possible to be greedy here. It is possible to be blind. Impressions:
A movie is being made at the corner of Market and Powell as we leave San Francisco—massive reflectors, Brooke Shields looking like a goddess as she steps from her air-conditioned trailer.
There are casting calls in Billboard West and The Hollywood Reporter Street-corner newsstands, which used to line up the porno papers, now feature half a dozen small-time political journals, state and Chicano separatist papers, the Aztlan Revolution, and Westworld and Ecotopia, the journals of two geographical separatist movements.
In California, more than anywhere else, you hear talk of dividing the United States. “California First” and “Forget the Rest” are common T-shirt slogans.
There is also a lot of radiation paranoia. Vendors commonly advertise their fruits as “radiation-free.” There are walk-in clinics where for fifteen cents you can get a whole-body scan or have objects checked. The government regularly warns people to avoid the black market because of the danger of contaminated goods from “abroad”—which must mean the rest of the United States.
Immensely wealthy Japanese move about in tremendous Nissan limousines with curtains on the windows.
You can buy all the Japanese and English papers: Asahi Shimbun in Japanese, English, and Spanish editions; the London Times and Express in English, and something called The Overseas Journal for British residents. It’s all about where to get English cars fixed in California, and how to avoid the embarrassment of old-fashioned American hairstyles by going to local branches of chic London salons.