California

Victor Davis Hanson:

I have developed a sort of ritual recently of driving from the High Sierra (Huntington Lake, ca. 7,200 feet), descending into the San Joaquin Valley and stopping at the farm for work and maintenance (southwest of Selma, between Fresno and Visalia), and then continuing over to sea-level at the Hoover on the Stanford Campus.

Trying to be empirical rather than romantic, one nevertheless must admit that this state offers one of the most rare landscapes in the world. Anyone can leave a vast untouched Sierra alpine forest, snowbound, and on the edge of an even more vast wildness to the immediate east over Kaiser Pass, and then within one-and-a half hours descend through foothills into the richest agricultural land in the world—still at this late date not yet completely turned into a San Jose or San Fernando Valley, and replete with orange groves, table-grape vineyards, and endless miles of tree-fruit. Then in a little less than three hours, you drive over a Mediterranean-like coast range and end up near the Pacific with a climate like the Greek or Italian seaside.

We sometimes rightly cry about despoiling our natural heritage. But eastward 50 miles from the Stanford campus to the coast are literally millions of acres that are untouched, and relatively unknown—as is true even in the corridor surrounding the 280 freeway. And this radical change in landscape within hours is matched by equally radical cultural transmogrification as well.

Up in the Sierra at this time of year, there are a number of rugged, 1940s types who plow snow, supply propane, or work for the power company who are as eccentric as admirable in their contrariness and independence.

The world should visit the Valley below to see how various races and religions live in relative harmony without killing each other. Millions of Mexicans, whites, blacks, Punjabis, Southeast Asians, Armenians, and Filipinos intermarry, integrate, and assimilate. Tuesday in Fresno County in the space of 30 minutes I drove by a Catholic Church, Greek Orthodox Church, mosque, Sikh temple, and synagogue—and about thirty Protestant congregations from Unitarian to Church of the Holy Redeemer. Anywhere else in the world—the Parisian suburbs, Darfur, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Congo, etc., such races and religions would be letting off bombs, assassinating or rioting.

And yet, and yet somehow the United States is pilloried for its “anti-Muslim” stance. When one reads that the Chinese government does not even allow the electric amplification of mosque prayers, that Moscow flattened Grozny to global silence, that the Arabs grow quiet when a Hama is leveled or the Kurds gassed, or that Africa is a story of serial genocide, and instead we are still talking of Guantanamo, then reason fails and we enter the dark world of primordial emotions, as hearts and minds are governed by envy, honor, jealousy, and a sense of inferiority.

But moving on: the most notable cultural achievement of the Valley is a shared allegiance to hard work, family tradition, and the sense of the land that combines to destroy pretension and self-importance. Valley people cannot stand affectation; and are great haters of all pretense.

Finally, under three hours away, then comes the sociology of the Bay Area …

But while it would be easy to caricature the pampered, selfish nature of many of these overachievers in Silicon Valley, and the manifestations of their newfound wealth—lavish homes, BMWs, electronic gadgetry—there is also an undeniable talent and egalitarian competitiveness, a meritocracy at work that creates new things of value to the world and, especially, to the United States. And all that energy and brilliance are sometimes apparent on the street of a Palo Alto or Menlo Park—something to grant and appreciate, albeit in small doses of a day or so. It is a world away from the Sierra or Selma, but in a strange way a logical part of this most unusual state.

Well, that was a long excursus about the eerie geographical and cultural miscellany of a great state—beautiful and majestic even at its supposed eleventh hour.