There's still something about California

I've been telling various conservative friends about how strange I found my reaction to northern California: that it was extraordinarily beautiful and welcoming and easygoing, but that I felt unnerved by it, as if there were something ... unhinged about the place, as if its prosperity, its beauty and thoroughgoing pleasantness were a thin veneer over something chaotic. Oddly enough, several of them report having had the same feeling, and not being able to explain it. A conservative journalist friend I spoke with this afternoon said that a former girlfriend was driving him around southern California a few years ago, and remarked, "Can't you feel your will just slipping away?" Yes, that's it! But why should it be so? And why California? I've lived up and down the East Coast, and traveled all over Europe, but I've never had the same feeling anywhere.

I remarked to my pals that somehow driving around there helped me understand Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," a stunning journalistic account of moral collapse among privileged young Americans living in San Francisco, who had lost their center entirely. Didion has said that reporting and writing the essay left her depressed, because it forced her to confront directly the fact that "things fall apart." Here's a key passage from that piece:

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. ... These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. ... They are less in rebellion against society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words--words are for 'typeheads,' Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips--their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.' They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

The unnerving sense that there is a society out there with no center, at least no center that a traditionalist recognizes as having gravity, and the power to bind you to earth, must be at the root of my anxiety. I remember telling a friend the first time I went to California (to L.A., in 1992) that I had the feeling that I might just float off the edge of the continent, because nothing seemed tethered to anything permanent. That's what I felt even more in northern California -- probably because there is no chance that I'd find SoCal alluring, but the Bay Area is something far more enticing to me.

Don't get me wrong, all the sins of northern California are plain to see here in Texas. But there is still here among Texans a strong sense of sin, of a moral center Whose orbit we can never quite escape collectively. I can see how easy it would be to believe that the Bay Area, about whose beauty I cannot say enough, is Eden. Except there's no such thing. Hence the problem.

Here's the other problem: how do you come from a place as screwed up in many ways as Texas (or Alabama, or Georgia, or any other Red State) and tell people who live in that materialist paradise (I know, I know, Silicon Valley Steve ... a relative paradise, but hang with me here) that they're worse off than they think, and that they should repent? What happens if there is no center, but contra Yeats and Didion, things don't fall apart, not really? What then?