California Dreaming ... or is it Just a Nightmare?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

I’ve just returned from a two-week stay in southern California.

When you’re sitting at a table sipping latté and looking out at the ocean on a bright sunny day at one of the many cafés along the beaches between Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach, it’s hard to believe there’s anything wrong with the world – or the state.

Coastal towns along the scenic Pacific Coast Highway such as Manhattan Beach, Huntington Beach, and Newport Beach are breathtakingly beautiful.

Their citizens are also incredibly affluent – even modest homes near the water start at over one million dollars, with many in the five to ten million dollar range.

And as for the Los Angeles megalopolis itself, almost everyone in the world has heard about “hip” and wealthy towns like Beverley Hills, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Venice and West Hollywood, home to famous actors and multi-millionaires.

The city was of course built on the business of making films—“the industry,” as people in L.A. call it.

Even I have come to know someone who was intimately involved with “Hollywood”: Millicent Wise, widow of the famed Oscar-winning director Robert Wise, who made, among many other memorable films, “The Sound of Music” and “West Side Story.”

Millie Wise is the sister of a close friend of ours, and lives in an apartment full of mementos of her late husband’s career, near the appropriately named Avenue of the Stars.

But don’t be fooled by the glitter and the glamour, the surfers and the sunshine. California is hurting badly.

The current state unemployment rate stands at 12.3 percent. Thousands of civil servants and teachers have been laid off, and many more thousands of families are losing their homes through foreclosure.

They watch helplessly as so-called “trash-out men” come to their houses, remove those belongings the homeowners cannot afford to keep, and drive off to landfills with the possessions.

In the L.A. area there are, according to some estimates, some 88,000 homeless people. Many can be seen on the streets panhandling and rummaging through outdoor garbage bins at fast food restaurants in strip malls.

While Los Angeles boasts of world-class universities such as the California Institute of Technology, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Southern California, inner-city neighbourhoods such as Compton are saddled with failing public schools and high drop-out rates, and rife with juvenile gangs.

This coming November, Californians will be electing their governor and one member of the U.S. Senate.

The Republicans have nominated two women, former eBay president and billionaire Meg Whitman, and former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, respectively, for the two positions. (Term limits make Arnold Schwarzenegger ineligible to run again for governor.)

They will face off against the Democratic candidates, former governor Jerry Brown and current U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer.

Both races promise to be nasty. But no matter who wins, the disparity between rich and poor in California keeps getting bigger. The Golden State has never before been this tarnished.