California, What's the Matter with

Intellectual Fraud

Intelligent Design

Mega Fix

Ron Brown

TWA Flight 800

Church

About What's the Matter with California?

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© Jack Cashill
frontpagmag.com - October 2, 2007

FP: Jack Cashill, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Cashill: My pleasure. I am a big fan.

FP: What inspired you to write this book?

Cashill: A few years back, Thomas Frank wrote a bestseller called What’s the Matter with Kansas, a soft-core Marxist hit on red state America. I felt both slimed and honoured -- and more than a little surprised -- to be profiled in the book, especially given that I was born and raised in New Jersey and live and work in Missouri.

The Frank book inspired a whole swarm of smarmy know-it-all writers and filmmakers from either coast to interview me and my Kansas buddies.

I decided to return the favor and turn a provincial eye on the progressive guy. I chose his natural habitat -- that coal miner’s canary of progressive Americana, California, which is much more fun to visit than Kansas. For the record, I have a Ph.D. in American studies.

FP: Before we move on, can you tell us what your Ph.D. thesis was about and what your main fields of interest were in American history? What attracted you to history and to the American brand in particular?

Cashill: What I liked about American studies is that it did not lock you into a narrow discipline with all of its methodological straightjackets. My primary fields of interest were literature and intellectual history, but I always had a weakness for popular culture. My dissertation, which I finished in 1982, had the self-explanatory title, “The Capitalist as Hero in the American Novel.” You can imagine how much fun that was getting through committee. As an historical side note, the word “entrepreneur” is not in my dissertation. It had not yet entered common parlance. I am convinced that the word “entrepreneur” did much to improve our national attitude toward business.

FP: Can you talk a bit about cultural tectonics and the emerging fault lines between the cultural plates, most notably black vs. brown, brown vs. green and rainbow vs. red?

Cashill: The physical tectonics most people in California know a good deal about. But in many ways the state’s culture mimics its geology, including the omnipresent fear of a “big one.”

During the course of its brief human history, cultural island after island has rammed up and into the state. First the Indians came. Then the Spanish. The 49ers followed. So did the Chinese, the Japanese, various waves of Mexicans, southern blacks, the hippies and gays and more Mexicans still. The movie Crash nicely captures the tectonics, at least along the ethnic faults.

There are a few fault lines worth watching, and for ease of readership I color code them. One is between the Greens (eco-warriors) and the Browns (Hispanics). This is a slow grinding daily feud being fought over property and the right to buy it throughout the state.

A more explosive one is between Black and Brown. This one is being fought in the streets, the schools and the prisons and has the potential to splinter the Democratic coalition. As you can imagine, the media are reluctant to talk about these two.

The Red-Rainbow rift makes the news daily. The Red is on the defensive but fighting a good fight for sanity and traditional values. The Rainbow (gay) plate has, alas, abandoned its historic libertarianism for what some call homo-fascism. At the heart of the book is the story of an 18 year-old sailor who gets ground up by the meshing plates in San Francisco and is still preposterously in prison twelve years later.

FP: How about the corrosion of traditional "shackles"-- family, faith, nation, state -- that once allowed for a certain cultural harmony? What has replaced these shackles?

Cashill: In 1962, California reached something of a high water mark when it passed New York State in population, its go-go, can-do ethos still intact.

The national magazines celebrated the milestone on their front covers. The then popular Look Magazine was particularly excited about how California had thrown off “the shackles of the past.”

In 1962, most everyone was. Forward thinking people throughout the state were in no more mood for shackles than they were for rainy days. The more forward among them saw shackles everywhere, even in traditional notions like state, nation, family, and faith. And so these good thought thinkers started to hammer away, unaware that they had nothing to replace them with but walls, fences, gates, and prisons.

Today, cities like Beverly Hills are armed camps despite the fact that the state has increased its prison population by a factor of seven in the last 25 years alone. It’s a mess and doesn’t have to be.

FP: What is the ABETTO factor?

Cashill: In 1968, Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived in California, and he was awed, not just by the weather, but by the sweep of the place, the potential, the lively traditions of free speech and free enterprise. The girls weren’t all that shabby either.

Today, every Californian you meet will tell you that the metaphorical sun shines less brightly today than it did 40 years ago. And it will shine less brightly every year going forward -- at least until its thought leaders can bring themselves to call a cloud a cloud.

By denying the obvious, as they inevitably do, the state’s creative classes fail to get a handle on root causes of the state’s problems. They fixate instead on the less true, the less relevant, the half true, the irrelevant, and sometimes the downright false.

I came across this phenomenon so often that I had to create an acronym for it, ABETTO, as is A Blind Eye To The Obvious.

FP: In what context are tax revolts futile?

Cashill: The ABETTO factor has proven most destructive when it comes to the question of family. California created the world’s first divorce culture and enshrined it in 1969 with the creation of no-fault divorce. In 1970 more Californians got divorced than got married in 1960.

Worse, the creative classes decided to see family break-up as something other than a problem. When fatherlessness trickled down to the inner cities, it caused an explosion of crime and other very costly social pathologies that America had never before experienced.

Between 1953 and 1980, the life span of Crips founder Raymond Washington, murders in California went from 276 to more than 3400. A gangbuster economy was producing a gangbanging culture, and few seemed to understand why.

As much as I admire -- and recount with great gusto -- the Prop 13 revolt of 1978, it did not address the undeniable cost of a culture in free fall. Someone was going to pay for it somehow.

FP: The role of Hollywood?

Cashill: Divorce culture has long dominated Hollywood, but only in the last thirty or so years has Hollywood chosen to celebrate family breakdown. The incestuous nature of Hollywood stardom has led to a creative class that simply has no idea how a healthy American family actually works.

Despite Hollywood, I remain a movie buff and watch everything. I talk at some length in the book about the movies, good and bad, among the latter Pleasantville, which nicely embodies all this is wrong with the Hollywood worldview.

In the movie, through some mildly entertaining gimmickry, our young hero find himself teleported to “Pleasantville,” a perfect black and white representation of 1950’s America. Here, of course, he learns that morals are a scam, marriage a fraud, innocence an illusion, and “family values” a euphemism for bigotry.

Swell! The problem is that Hollywood has absolutely no alternative vision. When the kid returns to his messed up real life world, his divorced and distraught mother tells him, “It’s not supposed to be like this.” With his newfound wisdom he reaches out to his weeping mom and reassures her with a bit of teen sophistry so tellingly empty it could have been this book’s title--“It’s not supposed to be anything.”

The Crips already know that. Hooray for Hollywood!

FP: What are some of your favourite Hollywood movies? How about the ones you disliked most? Who is one of your favourite actors? Who is an actor you despise?

Cashill: I could talk about movies all day. In the book I list the best twenty movies made about California. The top five, in order, are Chinatown, the Graduate, Crash, American History X, and L.A. Confidential. There are many ways a movie can go bad—and most do—but I reserve my real hostility for well produced movies that seduce and subvert. In the book I cite Pleasantville. In the last few years I would single out Million Dollar Baby, American Beauty and Syriana, plus everything Michael Moore has ever touched. On the good guys side, I would cite South Park’s Team America. It was so vulgar that most viewers did not realize how pro-America and anti-leftist it really was. As to actors, I can watch Alec Baldwin despite his politics, and sometimes even George Clooney, but I will leave the room before I watch a Tim Robbins movie. As to actresses, I am still hoping they will cryogenically revive Barbara Stanwyck. Good politics too.

FP: Your thoughts on Charles Manson and Jim Jones?

Cashill: A singer/songwriter—“ The Indian said, Kill only what you need/ But the Whiteman likes to see things bleed”—Charles Manson strikes me as a civil rights activist and environmentalist just a little bit ahead of his time. If it weren’t for the swastikas on his forehead Manson would have been an icon on the left. Today, in some quarters, even the swastikas would not be an issue.

Jones, however, was a leftist hero in his time. “I decided how can I demonstrate my Marxism,” he muses in his memoirs. “The thought was ‘infiltrate the church.’” And so today, as a result, we have in a mass grave at the Evergreen Cemetery, in the middle of Oakland, the bodies of more than 250 children, the victims of the greatest one-day murder of American young people in the nation’s history. James Jones killed them. Three year-olds don’t commit suicide. These kids did not die “in the name of religion” as is commonly supposed. They died for the opposite of religion. There was not so much as a chapel at Jonestown, but that hellhole displayed so much obvious reverence for Lenin, Mao, Che, and Fidel that one might have thought it an extension campus of Santa Cruz U. I spend a chapter on Jones just to set this story straight.

FP: What is the worst thing about California? What do you like best about California ?

Cashill: From the perspective of topography and climate, California is the most blessed chunk of real estate on the planet. I envy the people who lived there in the first century or so of its statehood when the state functioned as it should.

Although they were present from the beginning, the screwballs gradually took over. Writing in 1886 about Gold Rush California, historian Josiah Royce described “the true sin of the community” as a general sense of “irreligious liberty.” As Royce saw it, San Franciscans in particular “considered every man’s vices, however offensive and aggressive they might be (short of crime), as a private concern between his own soul and Satan.” Today, the champions of irreligious liberty have crystallized into powerful voting blocs that choke off at every turn the revival of faith and family and nation that California needs to save itself.

FP: What is the future of California?

Cashill: I think California will save itself. There is simply too much wealth here of every sort to walk away from. In the book, I suggest the need for a genuine Third Great Awakening of the sort that saved the Piedmont South from its own barbarism nearly two centuries ago. The one silver lining on the illegal immigrant cloud is that our illegals are coming from Mexico not Algeria. The situation is not beyond hope as it may be in Europe.

FP: Jack Cashill, thank you for joining us.

Cashill: Thank you Jamie.

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Cashill’s newest book, What’s the Matter with California, is available in bookstores - or you can order your autographed copy online .