Delusional state
The other day, I had the opportunity to meet with graduate students at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC who are part of the News21 project funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation. Students at USC and other schools are working at the boundary of new and old media. Their reporting is most often aimed at the Web and video.They are very smart people in the "California in Crisis" section I met with. With a very smart instructor/mentor. He's Marc Cooper, an absolutely essential writer on state and national policy issues. Apart from being a journalist for the past 35 years (and the author of several books), he blogs at marccooper.com.
I'm reminded of a line from Yeats' Under Ben Bulben - "Cast a cold eye / on life, on death." Except that Cooper casts a cold eye on the politically right and left. He's a realist, a refreshing critic of the delusions that often make do as public policy these days. And delusions were a recurring theme of the two-hour interview Cooper conducted (taped as another of the students' projects).
Sometime around 1970, the California Dream (about which Dr. Kevin Starr writes with such erudition and grace) began to drift away from the aspirations of a mostly working-class electorate, to be replaced by a meanness that was initially driven by white anxieties about new dreamers of color and what they might want. Those anxieties and others have gone feral in recent times. And delusional thinking about California has gone viral.
The shrinking of the moral imagination of Californians - the subject of bleak speculation as early as 1850 - gave us an unworkable state, a failed system of public financing, and a permanent political class that forms and feeds our delusions about California.
The image on this page was made by Flickr user Wouter Walmink. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
