Not key lime pie

1 (9 inch) prepared graham cracker crust
2 avocados - peeled, pitted and pureed
120 ml lemon juice
140 g sweetened condensed milk

Avocado pie was a significant plot point in the Daniel Pinkwater book The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Doom. It is also highly delicious. No cooking is required - simply combine the above in a sensible order, mixing and pureeing when appropriate, and let chill in your fridge for several hours.

Delicious!

An experiment

I have learned three things in the last couple of weeks:

1. If I don't buy alcohol, my recycling bin only ends up about 1/5 as full as it normally does.

2. Midwinter is the wrong time to be curtailing alcohol consumption. It adds to the gloom of the season.

3. I am now perfectly happy ordering straight whisky, no ice in a bar. One step closer to being a boozy old expatriate; 1920s Paris here I come.

Evidently I am some sort of...

Anarcho-syndicalist, by the looks of it.

The Political Compass tells me that I look like this politically:

Economic Left/Right: -9.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.41



I don't think that it means much, as the questions were fairly transparent and often didn't allow for the answer I wanted to give, which was "Yes/no, but..." It is certainly interesting. I will note the famous JK Galbraith saying: "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." We have yet to devise a social order in which man ??????? man - i.e. in which we fall out of the same old patterns.

Mostly harmless

There's something wrong with this press release:

On July 7, Cyclone announced that it had completed the first stage of development for a beta biomass engine system used to power RTI’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™), a Phase II SBIR project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Defense Sciences Office. RTI’s EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling.

RTI’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” stated Harry Schoell, Cyclone’s CEO. “We are focused on demonstrating that our engines can create usable, green power from plentiful, renewable plant matter. The commercial applications alone for this earth-friendly energy solution are enormous.” (emphasis in the original)

What is wrong with these people? Have they never seen a sci-fi dystopia movie? Consider that line: "We completely understand the public's concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population." Oh no, you don't, not yet. But you will...

I am not sure what this reminds me most of - Terminator is the obvious reference, followed by The Matrix and its endless banks of dreaming human "batteries". But I think that it is most reminiscent of Douglas Adams' story Young Zaphod Plays It Safe. In that story, two-headed future president of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox visits a crash site with two bureaucrats who insist that the contents of the downed ship are "perfectly safe". Their "perfectly safe" mantra would fit perfectly well into the above press release.

Naturally, the ship is filled with appallingly dangerous weapons, and - worse yet - three "synthetic personalities" who are charming, simple, and "didn't ring alarm bells in other people" in spite of their dangerous lunacy. One of these experimental robots escaped and headed to Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha where (it is implied) it became known as Ronald Reagan.

The sport of frigid kings

We must go tobogganing. In the manner of Calvin and Hobbes.

If you grew up in a warm climate like me, you probably never got to experience the death defying thrills of winter sports. Think of it: If you can scrape together a pair of skis, minimal competence, and the willingness to launch yourself down a steep, icy slope, you can very easily plummet off a rock face to your doom or hit a tree at 50 mph and crush your skull like a grape. (I have actually hit trees while skiing, although I generally prefer to wipe out spectacularly on what I hope are not rocks and then spend the next day complaining that my back is sore.)

No other sporting pursuit will allow you the opportunity to inflict so much grievous bodily harm upon yourself. Even Nascar has airbags.

Nevertheless, you would expect tobogganing to be relatively harmless, as it is intended mostly for children and the infirm. Oh no. In the right (wrong?) hands, it turns into a high–speed pursuit.

Your basic cheap toboggan is made of thick plastic with slight intimations of runners in the bottom. It is long enough to hold most of a standard–sized adult, and contains a rope handle at the front. In spite of this it is virtually unsteerable.

The sport goes like this: Find a slope, the steeper and bumpier the better, and drag two toboggans up to the top. Bring people as well – one to three per toboggan. Line up, launch, and race to the bottom. Points can be gained for crashes, unintended jumps, skulduggery and sabotage.

After experimenting with a variety of positions, I concluded that the best way to ride is lying face–down on the toboggan, arms out on either side to facilitate impromptu turns and shove away competitors. Snowflakes and chips of ice will fly up into your face as you do so, and extraneous clothing (gloves, hats) will be cast off in your wake. You will be as likely to fly down the slope backwards as forwards, and the only way to stop is to throw yourself over the side of the toboggan.

Afterward, I recommend whisky or rum and a warm bath.

Values other than value and the longer game

I got a big surprise the other day: The Pope did something that I agreed with. An encyclical released by Benedict XVI, entitled Caritas in Veritate ("Charity in truth") meditated on "justice and the common good" and lamented the current technocratic “hegemony of the binary model of market-plus-state”. (I described one facet of this technocratic ideology last week.) It is a fascinating document.

The encyclical is essentially about human development, albeit in a less narrow way than the common discourse of human capital or the workplace idea of "career development". Its notion of human development is, inevitably, rooted in religion, "because Jesus Christ, who loves us, is concerned with the whole person."

What is interesting is what Benedict takes aim at. Given his history - as a Cardinal he played a key role in repressing Latin America's left-Catholic liberation theology, and as a Pope he has mainly made the news condemning birth control and abortion - I expected a screed against reproductive freedom. Caritas in Veritate is nothing of the kind. After reviewing the contents of the last encyclical, written in 1967 by Pope Paul VI, it turns its gaze towards capitalism. The tone is set early on in the second chapter:

We recognize, therefore, that the Church had good reason to be concerned about the capacity of a purely technological society to set realistic goals and to make good use of the instruments at its disposal. Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty. [...] The technical forces in play, the global interrelations, the damaging effects on the real economy of badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing, large-scale migration of peoples, often provoked by some particular circumstance and then given insufficient attention, the unregulated exploitation of the earth's resources: all this leads us today to reflect on the measures that would be necessary to provide a solution to problems that are not only new in comparison to those addressed by Pope Paul VI, but also, and above all, of decisive impact upon the present and future good of humanity. The different aspects of the crisis, its solutions, and any new development that the future may bring, are increasingly interconnected, they imply one another, they require new efforts of holistic understanding and a new humanistic synthesis.

This sort of passage could have easily have been written by, say, a Marxist like David Harvey. In fact, Giovanni Arrighi said something quite similar. Benedict, meanwhile, appears to be channeling Naomi Klein as he lays out the fundamental problems:

The world's wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities are on the increase. In rich countries, new sectors of society are succumbing to poverty and new forms of poverty are emerging. In poorer areas some groups enjoy a sort of “superdevelopment” of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation. “The scandal of glaring inequalities”[56] continues. Corruption and illegality are unfortunately evident in the conduct of the economic and political class in rich countries, both old and new, as well as in poor ones. Among those who sometimes fail to respect the human rights of workers are large multinational companies as well as local producers. International aid has often been diverted from its proper ends, through irresponsible actions both within the chain of donors and within that of the beneficiaries. Similarly, in the context of immaterial or cultural causes of development and underdevelopment, we find these same patterns of responsibility reproduced. On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care. At the same time, in some poor countries, cultural models and social norms of behaviour persist which hinder the process of development.

The Pope goes on to indict (in not so many words) the global neoliberal order for causing or exacerbating these social ills - the smashing of organized labour and nations' race to the bottom with respect to environmental, health, and labour standards. It rips the veil off the harsh vicissitudes of contemporary capitalism, rising at times to a critique of its ideologies. (Such as the idea that market exchange is always isomorphic with the public good. Benedict ripostes: "Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility." In short, he's calling for the subordination of capital to human needs, rather than vice versa.)

I found two aspects of Caritas in Veritate particularly interesting. First, it looks outside of capitalism for solutions - something that most institutions are today incapable of doing. Second, it puts forth the notion of "human development" as a serious challenge to the hegemonic discourse of money-value.

First: the externality to capitalism. There are few contemporary organizations with an institutional memory that extends back before capital. No corporations predate capitalism, obviously, and few governments retain a connection to pre-capitalist social formations. Today, both of these types of institutions are intimately tied to capital - in fact, they cannot imagine existing without it.

However, the Catholic Church is to a large extent still engaging with issues that predate the origins of capital in the Italian city-states of the 15th century, and its rise to global preeminence with the Industrial Revolution and British Empire. They've been around for almost two millennia - seen the Roman Empire fall and the world slip into the Dark Ages, seen feudalism come and go, assimilated successive waves of invaders and outsiders, and I suspect that they conceive of capitalism as a passing fad as well. The Church expects to continue existing, regardless of how the economy is arranged. (Naturally, the Church has been embedded within particular economies throughout the ages - so the separation is not as clear as they might believe.)

Second: alternative values. The Church, which operates in a different time-scale than any other currently existing institution, occupies a position of (relative) externality to capitalist relations. Intellectually, probably more so. This enables it to put forth a quite radical critique of capitalism that flows from those values.

Here, the Pope is humanist, broadly speaking. He emphasizes a broad view of human development, one that gives primacy to the "immortal soul". (The young Marx would have said "species-being".) This alternative value structure, which must in his view flow through all parts of human society, is ultimately rooted in divinity - but it is no less of an alternative for that:

God is the guarantor of man's true development, inasmuch as, having created him in his image, he also establishes the transcendent dignity of men and women and feeds their innate yearning to “be more”.

This is the part of the encyclical that is most seductive, yet it slips away like a bar of soap from an atheist like me. The Church has kept a relative distance from capital, which enables it to level a critique and present an alternative structure of value, an alternative notion of human dignity. Leftists can generally do the first, but are poor at thinking through the second. Perhaps this is why so many old Marxists seem drawn to religion today - witness Terry Eagleton's recent book on religion, or Jurgen Habermas's 2007 dialogue with the then-Cardinal Ratzinger.

Afterword: At times, the encyclical is almost Benjamin-esque:

"Without the perspective of eternal life, human progress in this world is denied breathing-space. Enclosed within history, it runs the risk of being reduced to the mere accumulation of wealth; humanity thus loses the courage to be at the service of higher goods, at the service of the great and disinterested initiatives called forth by universal charity.

Benjamin, I believe, was trying to think his way out of the trap Social-Democracy and Communism had painted themselves into. Both failed parties fell into the thrall of technocracy - they saw their political work as a matter of tactics, or inevitable improvement. In doing so, they defeated themselves - by turning a blind eye to the Nazis, or turning their weapons against the working class they claimed to represent.

Benjamin's difficulty was that he wasn't willing to take "eternal life" as his premise. He sought to derive an ethical solution or alternative view of progress without looking outside of time, or forward to Utopia. As he says in the last of his "On the Concept of History" theses, "We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future..."

Perhaps this is a task for when I am smarter: Work through the implicit challenge of Caritas in Veritate, which is to instantiate values outside of value, with Walter Benjamin.

Postscript: Yes, I discussed this with my 87-year-old Catholic grandmother. She approved.

Nostalgia for a childhood I never had

A find in a bag being taken to the Salvation Army: A tangle of cables, several electronic components, two pads with buttons on them. A glimmer of the outmoded.

A financial transaction: Change obtained for a $20, directionless small-talk, the exchange of some of the money for a plastic case containing a plastic cartridge.

An assembly: Cords snaking this way and that from a table, the insertion of the cartridge, nervous pressing of buttons. A blue screen. Some more fiddling with buttons. Static. More buttons. More static. And finally to channel seven, which displayed:

Two smirkingly anthropomorphic woodland creatures, a tranquil island background, and the words: "SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2".

Harry and I had been testing an ancient Sega Megadrive system, a relic from the early 90s. We never had any videogames ourselves, other than crudely rendered early Macintosh games (Specter Supreme, anyone? How about Cosmic Osmo?) and (later on) pirated copies of the Diablo games and the quasi-educational Age of Empires. But when we we lived in Nigeria in the heyday of the early Nintendo and Sega systems, we would see them played. (And occasionally join in ourselves - I was horrible at it.)

The screen flickered and the colors seemed slightly too bright. Presumably the symptom of decrepit components. We huddled in front of the box, Harry standing, me sitting, and we directed the shimmering figures left, then right, then up and forward, forward into the past.

Cars

I spent part of last night drinking with some farmers in a bar in Ireland. I left before dark and hitched a ride across the green countryside, spinning yarns with some geezers.

Later on I discovered that my parents had given me the car of my dreams: A flimsy boxy car, apparently made in Communist Romania, painted a Naugahyde green and fitted out with a refurbished interior. I drove around a new city as though it was the 80s, stopping to enter a few buildings and navigating smoothly (if not particularly rapidly) through the sunny grid of the city's streets.

Upon returning to the raised expressway, I remembered that I had left an important bag in one of the buildings. Rather than driving back, I pulled the car off to the side and hopped down to street level to walk back. (It really wasn't a very swift car at all, but this is to be expected with Soviet manufactures.)

Bag retrieved, I returned to my car, only to find that its interior had been stripped clean by thieves and the car itself slid off the edge of the freeway. I watched it crumple sickly on the pavement. As it was made out of fiberglass I found I could smooth out the wrinkles, but to no avail. They had taken the engine.

I awoke. The car vanished. The city, I now realize, resembles Evanston, Illinois. I have never been there.

Slipping in the value judgements

I heard an interesting one today: It concerned the need for more "economic literacy" across the public sector. Some types of agencies - Ministries of Finance, Treasuries, Departments of Trade and Industry, etc - are already economically literate, by which I mean that they understand that resources should be used in a "productive" (read: profit-making) manner.

By contrast, other types of agencies - such as environmental protection agencies, departments of conservation, etc - base their priorities on other values, such as conservation or biodiversity. They would argue that land and resources should be preserved due to the fact that they bear irreparable complexity and unique forms of life. This is a value judgment that places long-run sustainability above immediate human needs.

An organization that was "economically literate" might look at that tract of land (say, the US national parks) and see the potential for using it in more productive or profitable ways - mining, condo construction, farming, and smokestacks. This is also a value judgment - it places resource extraction and private profit above the independent existence of our biological commons.

There is a legitimate debate to be had between these two hierarchies of value. However, the above phrasing - that the conservation agency needs more "economic literacy" - tries to smuggle in a value judgment in the guise of a narrow technical perspective.

This is a very revealing phrase! In effect, it indicts the economics profession as a whole by implying that to be "literate" in economics, you must have already adopted a certain set of values. Mainstream economics talks about some things - growth, profit, productivity, inflation, efficiency, etc - while ignoring a number of crucially important issues - long-run sustainability, biodiversity, limits to growth, distribution and inequality, human rights, etc. The things that aren't discussed are assumed to be meaningless nullities. Unfortunately, it's dangerous to ignore them.

To put it in other terms: Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. A cost-benefit analysis of the pest-proof fence around it would have concluded that the expense couldn't be justified by any payoff. But the Sanctuary has immeasurably enriched Wellington by creating an island in which native birds and tuatara can breed safely. This wealth couldn't have been described by economics, as you can't put a dollar value on tui-song on the walk to work.

There is one other aspect of this "economic literacy" comment that interests me. While we might scoff at the idea that we should all be "ecologically literate", it's not considered absurd to advocate universal "economic literacy". In short, mainstream economics (and its implicit value-structure and blind spots) is seen as a viable prism through which to view all human/ecological decisions.

Some time ago, Frederic Jameson diagnosed the end of the "master narrative", and the breakdown of discourse into contending sub-disciplines. Comments like this make me wonder whether that's the case, or whether mainstream economics has in fact been successful in establishing hegemony over our thought.

Nerve

Ye gods, when did I lose my nerve? I used to be worldly-yet-not-worldly - that is, I'd been all over the place and seen and done all sorts of uncommon things, but at the same time I was blissfully untouched by any sense of difficulty or complexity in succeeding.

Now, I am more-worldly-yet-jaded-about-my-abilities. I'm quicker and smarter and more sociable, but I am acutely aware of the limits I must work within. I used to think: I would set my priorities, and they would happen. Now I feel hemmed in; my notions are constrained by (the appearance of) reality.

There is a context: I am planning on applying to graduate school (in political science most likely). When I think about it I see more sticking points than opportunities. I worry that there are insurmountable barriers at recommendation letters and application essays, professors and dissertations, and (assuming I ever get that far!) employment, debts, and tenure. In doing so I lose sight of the fact that I actually want to do this. I can see myself lecturing, teaching seminars, researching and writing. Engaged in intellectual life.

In the last half-hour I realized how absurd all these worries are. I need to be the old Peter, the one who thinks, sure, I'll do it. No worries.

An attitude change. I am sick of this worrying about circumstances. I've lived on four continents and, last year, I got on a plane to go get a job halfway across the world. If it matters to me, I'll do it. If I don't get into Berkeley, I'll go to Minnesota. If I'm not ready for a PhD, I'll get an MA and go from there. Time is a-wasting, and nobody ever gained a thing from doubting themselves.

Moral turpitude

Or: To quote Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

Robert McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War, Donald Rumsfeld of the 1960s, died today at the ripe old age of 93. It had to happen at some point.

What I found most interesting, or revealing, was the reaction of some prominent economists. Libertarian Tyler Cowen, whose blog I read occasionally in spite of its insipid forays into culture, society, and politics, commented that:

But McNamara also had a huge influence on the economics profession, most of all through his 13-year presidency at the World Bank. He focused the Bank on poverty reduction, he brought Communist China into the Bank, he introduced the practice of five-year lending plans, he significantly increased the Bank's budget, he grew staff from 1600 to 5700, he favored sector-specific research, he raised money from OPEC, he strongly encouraged "scientific project evaluation," and he started a largely successful program to combat "river blindness"; the latter may have been his life's achievement. The Bank as a large, modern technocracy -- for better or worse -- dates largely from his tenure.

He probably shaped the Bank more than did any other single person. Here is one overview. The Bank, of course, continues to be a major employer of economists and a major influence on the theory and practice of development economics.

I am not entirely sure whether Cowen says this approvingly - while the Bank has been extraordinarily active in promoting neoliberal policies in poor countries, libertarians often view such state- and quasi-state-entities with suspicion. But note that he spends more time talking about McNamara's role in expanding employment opportunities for (neoliberal) economists than he does about his escalation of the Vietnam War. Although it isn't clearly stated, there is a strong suggestion that his work at the World Bank - which, judging by the above, has benefited rich-country economists more than actual Third World populations - has made amends for McNamara's role in the deaths of millions.

Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal clears up any ambiguity or need to read between the lines. Its Free Exchange blog quotes Cowen's commentary, and notes that it sees McNamara's changes to the World Bank as being "for better, in my view, though those most uncomfortable with Mr McNamara's actions in Vietnam will probably also be uncomfortable with his tenure as head of the World Bank."

Its view is that McNamara's hiring of thousands of economists, with little demonstrable benefit to the world's poor, was more noteworthy than the Vietnam War. In fact, it was such a praiseworthy action that the rest of that nastiness could be whitewashed over.

Going back to the Upton Sinclair quote above: Isn't it clear that the economics profession, or at least some respected voices within it, displaying moral blindness on this issue? Some of their fraternity receive paychecks from McNamara's organization, and so they tacitly approve of, or at least fail to comment on, McNamara's ghastly mistakes.

Summer is for bloggers

(Although it is winter here.) I have been at this for four years now. In that time, I have graduated college, studied in Argentina and lived in New Zealand, worked at several jobs (some odder than others), gone steady (and unsteady), written reams of paper, ruminated on war and growth and the end of the long American century, grown up (somewhat), and so on and so forth.

In a mode of smug self satisfaction, I will quote of of Todd Snider's many songs about riffraff and lowlifes:

Did we get arrested? No we did not
We didn't shoot anyone - we didn't get shot
We didn't hurt anyone - at least not a lot
And we got what we wanted
We got what we wanted.

In other news, Anne and I have a new virtual project: Bookaneering. We will be doing weekly reviews of bookshops in our areas - Chicago is where she is, and New Zealand is my beat. We will expand (geographically) when we move. Until then...

4th of July

No fireworks.

Here, they are only purchasable in the two weeks leading up to Guy Fawkes Day.

Instead, drank a bunch of beer with sibling, friend and his siblings. Decided to fight in the bar. Formulated double– and triple–crosses. The sibling dynamic is fucking excellent. The best gift any man can receive is another brother.

Left that bar. The singer in the band was wearing blackface. Got meat pies. Almost–fight with some imbecile. Falling over in the street. Going to an Alice–in–Wonderland–themed bar. Teapots full of drinks, and a vague shred of common sense that informed me that I should not drink from them...

California's burning!

You listening to the Clash's first album? Good. You'll need it. The California dream - the American dream, really - is imploding in on itself.

The situation is thus: The state government is buried in debt; most likely it won't be able to pay most of that debt. (Due largely to a structural inability to raise new taxes.) This year alone, it is facing a $24 billion gap between revenue and expenditures. Roll that around. $24 billion.

A Salon.com article explains the consequences:

The world's eighth-largest economy has just gone belly-up. When midnight tolled on Tuesday night with legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger still deadlocked over how to resolve the state's staggering $24 billion budget shortfall, California became unable to pay its bills. The state will have to begin issuing IOUs to its creditors as early as Thursday. It is the worst budget crisis in the state's modern history.

There is an unreal, almost dreamlike quality about this moment. Dreadful things are about to happen: Hundreds of thousands of children will lose their healthcare. Five thousand state workers will be laid off. Massive cuts will decimate education at every level. Social services will be slashed. Two hundred and twenty-nine parks, out of a total of 280, will be shut down. Even some of the state's landmarks may go on the auction block to raise money.

One of the state parks likely to be shuttered is Mount Diablo State Park, which I've run up and around for years. This hits close to home. These savage cuts - which will amount to the destruction of everything the California government does except for prisons, police, and roads - will lower standards of living for most people in the state.

And make no bones about it: This "black budget" will damage or ruin the prospects of most Californians. And it will do so largely due to a minority's refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy. This is class struggle in naked form. And they're winning.

The irony of this economic crisis is this: It was caused, in a general sense, by the excessive greed of a few, by growing inequality papered over by exploding debt. It was caused, in short, by ascendant capitalist class power. By rights, the people who benefited from the bubble should lose out in the crash. But that's not been the case - in general, the economic crisis has resulted in the consolidation of that same power, at the expense of the rest of society. (As David Harvey argues.)

The situation in California is one manifestation of that - the poor and middle class must suffer vicious cuts to healthcare and education, and the end of welfare. This at a time when California has an unemployment rate of 11.5%. But higher taxes for the wealth is a political impossibility. The likely result? A catastrophically raised poverty rate and severely reduced social mobility.

Much of the commentary about this refers back to California's "Golden Age" in the postwar era, when rising prosperity went along with expansion of education and government investment in infrastructure. As a Washington Post article notes:

The terrible irony in decimating the public sector to save the state is that the California that was the epicenter of the postwar American dream was fundamentally a creation of government. Fighting a Pacific war during World War II compelled the federal government to spend billions on California industry and infrastructure, and the state was the leading beneficiary of Pentagon dollars during the Cold War. As Kevin Starr, California's leading historian, points out in "Golden Dreams," his brilliant new history of the state in the 1950s and early '60s, fully 40 percent of all defense dollars for manufacturing and research in 1959 went to California, anchoring the state's booming economy in a well-paid workforce that was either unionized or professionalized, and seeding an electronics and high-tech sector that was to blossom in the following decades. Building on that prosperity to create more prosperity, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown -- two Republicans, one Democrat -- invested state dollars in schools, universities, freeways and aqueducts that were the best in the world. The Golden State was never more golden.

Of course, the time for that is long gone. Since the 1970s, California has been increasingly committed to imprisonment over education, funding social programmes and infrastructure with bonds rather than taxes, and scraping back social expenditure. And now, as the state government comes to a crisis that was born out of these short-sighted policies, it is ready to double-down on short-sightednes:

Today, its governor seems determined to turn that gold to dross. On Monday, the Democrats in the legislature passed a budget that included cuts of $11 billion, levied a tax on oil companies and tobacco, and raised auto registration fees by $15 per car to keep the state parks from closing. Schwarzenegger reiterated his refusal to raise any taxes or fees and said he would veto the budget.

From a model for far-sighted investments in the future, California has become a state that uninvests in the present and has no vision at all for the future. Proposition 13, enacted by state voters in 1978, effectively blocked its cities and counties from funding their own endeavors, and the Republican minority in the legislature, abetted by Schwarzenegger, has made it all but impossible to invest in the kind of projects that Warren, Knight and Brown undertook.

I don't have a great deal to add to these points. I've never particularly been a student of California history or politics. The state has been a touchstone for me most of my life - when I lived in Nigeria it almost seemed like a golden land - rather than an ongoing process. I recognized the geological dynamism, the plate tectonics that are still shaping the landscape, and missed the political rottenness. California almost struck me as cast out of history, a place that would basically continue on without serious crisis for a while.

It's no fun to have your illusions stripped away.

Perhaps the Clash isn't the best music for the moment. Perhaps we need to go to Cracker's album about loss, travel, and California, Greenland, which leads us into "a trip to California to see where those old days had gone". It takes us "from Point Arena to Stinson Beach /from Arcata to Bodega Bay" - many of which will be closed down this year - and shudders to a halt with a few plaintive wails:

Darling, we’re out of time—so pack up that old circus tent, even the animals know this is the end / Darling, we’re out of time / Our best days have come; our best days have gone / It’s already hard, let’s not make it harder / Darling, we’re out of time—so put on that dirty red lipstick...

Back to the Salon article one last time:

...California has time and again proven itself to be a national and global trendsetter. The least American of places, a piratical exception to East Coast gentility on the far end of the continent, it is also the most American of places, with its brilliant, selfish and wanton extremities mirroring the oldest and still-unresolved contradictions of the American spirit. As Kevin Starr, dean of California historians, writes in his superb 2003 book, "California: A History," California has "long since become one of the prisms through which the American people, for better or worse, could glimpse their future."

There are many things I love about California. There are the soon-to-be-shuttered wild spaces, totaling 13% of the state's land area, the long roads that seem to stretch off into the future, the sense of vibrancy and growth. On a social and cultural level, there is iconoclasm, dynamism, a ceaseless will to change and reinvent. It's been, for much of its history, a place of rebirth, second chances, and big dreams. It's heartbreaking to see such a great place fold in on itself.