CALIFORNIA DREAMIN – OR IS THIS A NIGHTMARE? 45

In his 2007 book What’s the Matter with California? Jack Cashill (author of the 2005 book Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture – see my essay Fools, Fakes & Frauds #15) has laid out an illuminating exposé of the modern incarnation of the Golden State. Kansan Cashill states that if someone from Kansas is asked what is the matter with Kansas the usual reply is: Why, is there something wrong with Kansas? If someone from California is asked what is the matter with California the common reply is: How much time do you have?

Do you know there is a parallel between the two Californians, O.J. Simpson and John Walker Lindh (the American Taliban)? One is black and the other is white, so that is not it. Both of their fathers divorced their mothers and left their families without any financial or social support. Unfortunately not too unusual, especially in California. What is a bit bizarre, even for California, is that they both left their wives and families and took up with another man. So far as I know John Walker Lindh’s father is still alive while O.J. Simpson’s father died from AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) or more correctly medically since people do not die directly from AIDS, he died because of an opportunistic disease brought on by a greatly compromised immune system. Still think California is not a bit weird? Read on.

In California, 1969 was a seminal year. It was the year the Crips gang was formed; the Tate – La Bianca murders by the Manson mob; and no fault divorce was passed. The prison population in California increased from 23,264 to 168,035 in the 25 years from 1969 to 1994. Was there a link between this much bigger incarceration increase than the population increase of the state and no fault divorce? The answer is an unqualified yes as I will justify later. For the moment consider that in 1970, the first full year of no fault divorce, the numbers of divorces was a record 112,942, a 38% increase from 1969 and was 60% higher than the nation as a whole. By 1980 California registered a new record 138,361 divorces which was more than twice as many as in 1966. What was the response of the politicians in California to the embarrassment of this accelerated divorce rate? Why, they simply stopped keeping or publishing statistics on divorce! Well, that would certainly ameliorate the problem of excessive divorces.

As related by Cashill, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) weighed in on the issue in 1999 with their program Sesame Street. In it, Kermit the Frog, as an inquiring reporter, asks one little bird where she lives. The perky baby bird coos that she lives part of the time in a nest in a tree with her mother and the rest of the time in another nest with her father. She cheerfully explains that they both love her. What PBS doesn’t explain is that this potentially traumatic and unnatural situation might cause some of the little birds to behave badly and a few to become sociopaths the way their human counterparts do. A mere trifle in the grand scheme of things PBS might rationalize.

Californian Susan Atkins’ mother died when Susan was 10 or 11 years old. Her father was a functional alcoholic when his wife was alive and a dysfunctional alcoholic when she died. This left Susan Atkins on her own when she was 15 years old and as a result she easily became emotionally dependent upon and under the spell of the malevolent Charles Manson. The story is similar for the other three people, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Tex Watson, who Manson dispatched to carry out the bloody business of the Tate – La Bianca murders as well as the 15 or so other young people, mostly women, who were lured into the Manson fold.

Charles “Charlie” Manson was a murderous monster – the very epitome of evil. Even far left loons might concede that he was worse than Joe McCarthy; or maybe not. Although he possibly was born a psychopath, Manson’s family background sure did not help his social development. Manson was born to an unwed mother. For a short time after his birth she was married to a laborer named William Manson. He never knew his biological father. His mother, a heavy drinker, once sold him to a childless waitress for a pitcher of beer. His uncle retrieved him a few days later. When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a service station in 1939 (Manson was five years old) he was placed in the home of a very religious aunt and uncle. Unfortunately when his mother was paroled in 1942, Manson was returned to her. In 1947 his mother tried unsuccessfully to place him in a foster home. The court put him in a school for boys, but after 10 months he fled and returned to his mother. She rejected him. What a pretty, uplifting, and inspiring story this is.

Since the Crips gang was formed in 1969 (the Bloods were formed as an opposition to the Crips in 1971) circa 100,000 Californians have been murdered and not a small percentage of them by California gangs. There are four times as many black males in California prisons as in California colleges. Approximately one out of three young black males is in jail or prison, on probation or parole, or under pretrial release in the California criminal justice system. An African-American in California is four times as likely to be in prison as a Hispanic and seven times as likely as a white. A counter to the charge there is a racial component to the inequalities of these numbers is the fact that it is 20 times more likely for a black Californian male to be incarcerated than a Californian male of Asian descent. It is simply the case that so many African-Americans are incarcerated because they commit so much crime.

Unwittingly and with the best intentions (remember, the road to Hell is paved….) federal and California officials encouraged young men, especially minority ones, to abandon their kids. The Aid to Dependent Children program was expanded to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1960. Or, in reality, Aid to Moms with Dependent Children. A working dad at home did not fit the state definition of a family. In 1964 the federal government sweetened the pot for forsaken moms with food stamps and in 1965 with Medicaid. Shortly thereafter public housing switched from fixed rent to the ability to pay. Each additional financial improvement for single moms was a discouragement for working dads to be in the home supporting their families. Talk about unintended consequences.

In 2006 the Episcopal Church’s diocese of California, headquartered in the Grace Cathedral at the top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill, was tasked with the appointment of a new bishop for the first time in 27 years. What made the selection process newsworthy was that three of the seven finalists were openly gay or lesbian. Three years earlier the appointment of Eugene Robinson as the first openly homosexual bishop in New Hampshire had almost unraveled the church worldwide. The Episcopal Church had been hemorrhaging members for 40 years prior to the elevation of Robinson. In 1960 1.9% of Americans were Episcopalians and 0.8% were Mormons. By 2002 these figures were reversed; 0.8% were Episcopalians and 1.9% were Mormons. There is nothing like defying tradition and morality to alienate people and California has a haecceity for that.

There are 250 mass graves of children in the Evergreen Cemetery in the middle of Oakland, California. Who were they? Victims of the most horrendous one day murder of children in the nation’s history. They are the remains of the tragedy of Jonestown, Guyana. Gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk said: “More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than any other reason.” He could not have more mistaken in his assertion that religion was the cause, but he would not live to be corrected. He was shot and killed a week later by the termagant and disappointed former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White who killed the San Francisco mayor George Moscone for good measure. After a trial in which the infamous “Twinkie defense” was introduced, White was only convicted of manslaughter. A little more than a year after he was released from prison in 1985 he did the proper job himself by committing suicide. After the verdict the normally oh so liberal, against the death penalty, homosexual community was outraged and demanded that White be executed. Only in San Francisco.

The malefic Jim Jones was the architect of the Jonestown killing fields and he was no religious leader. He was a self-professed Marxist who used religion for his evil ends. Jones founded the Peoples Temple and as one of his henchmen said “We are not a church, but a social organization. We must pretend to be a church so we’re not taxed by the government.” Jones himself said “Those who remain drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought into enlightenment – with socialism.” Jones reflected near the end that “There wasn’t a person that attended any of my meetings that did not hear me say, at one time, that I was a communist.” In all 918 people died that day at Jonestown, only some of them voluntarily; 276 children and almost as many seniors. There are jokes to this day about Kool Aid drinkers, unmindful that three year olds do not commit suicide.

So far all that I have written is rather tenebrous and caliginous (grim and gloomy), but I will conclude with a bipolar vignette which gives a ray or two of hope for California and therefore for the nation.

When Dr. Ben Chavis, a Lumbee Indian himself, although a genetic mixture of American Indian, black, and white dating back many generations, became principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA the school’s Academic Performance Index (API) score (the minimum being 200 and the maximum 1000) was 436 for the academic year 2000-2001. Under his leadership steady progress was made so that by 2005-2006 the API had reached 920. What was he doing right to achieve such dramatic success? Chavis said “The students were playing Indian when I got there despite the fact that the student body was almost equally divided into African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian. The school was in total chaos.”

Chavis replaced every teacher he inherited when he came to the school. Using the personnel freedom inherent in the charter system he replaced them with smart, ambitious teachers who did not have an education degree. Given the sorry state of teacher training in California he considered this a liability. He also paid his teachers $5000 per year more than they would get in other public school in California and saved money by avoiding all of the trainers, consultants, and assistant what-nots that clutter up public school payrolls.

Every class, every day begins with 90 minutes of no-nonsense language arts. The math is just as serious and intense. Even the special-ed kids take algebra. Chavis says “I have high expectations. I don’t want excuses.” Chavis believes strongly in punctuality and attendance. A student who arrives even one minute late gets detention, but a student who completes a year without missing a single day gets a monetary reward. The classic carrot and stick approach. Many students at the school go the entire year without missing a day. The daily absentee rate is 0.33% while other intercity public schools boast of a daily 8% absentee rate. There is a sign on Chavis’ office door with 16 posted rules. One says “Squawkers, multicultural specialists, self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers, and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best efforts will be booted out.” Another says “Our staff does not subscribe to the black swamp logic of minority students as victims. We will plow through such cornfield philosophy with common sense and hard work.” Chavis does not adumbrate his teaching philosophy. The school building is leased from a church next door and still has a large cross on the front. Asked how he is able to get away with that, Chavis answers “I tell the authorities that it represents the four directions of the wind and I haven’t gotten around to putting feathers on it.” Of course only an Indian could keep the PC police at bay in this topsy-turvy politically correct environment.

A second school success story is that of the Oakland Charter School. When Jorge Lopez took over the 92% Hispanic school in 2004 it was failing just as badly as the American Indian Public Charter School had been and for the same reasons. Lopez observed that the school was forcing “culture crap” on the students and mixing in enough “liberal jargon” to turn the kids against their parents. He fired the entire staff down to the janitors and started over with the Chavis model. “Culture is the job of the parents, my job is to educate the kids” said Lopez. In 2006 with 100% of the students taking the API test, Oakland Charter scored 875, second only in Oakland to Chavis’ school.