JOAN DIDION AND CA DREAMING

I picked up a book of Joan Didion's writings. She is arguably  the  great contemporary CA writer though she no longer lives in CA. Her short piece "notes from a native daughter", "letter from Los Angeles", and her "goodbye to all that" about being young and hopeful in New York in the 60s, are very powerful personal statements. She is able to bring herself to writing so a reader feels her presence more believably than almost any one else. "Notes from a native daughter" about being from Sacramento lifts a veil from the OZ of the golden state. Ken Starr is right to express his history as the history of a "dream".  For outsiders looking in, California is a projected fantasy.  But growing up there was a different matter.

The other night I watched two "road" movies: the last bit of Ford's "Grapes of Wrath", which seems horribly dated and talky, but in which Fonda is totally believable, and the harsh black and white seems exactly right to capture the harsh times in which the people lived. "Bound for Glory" about Woody Guthrie is another view of the migration of the30s. The two captured that hopeful second migration of the Okies who struggled to get to the "California where every man has a job, and gets everything he wants", a second migration after the first covered wagons of Didion's ancestors.  The Okies came swarming to Southern California in the 1930's imagining it was the Eden of their dreams, only to find themselves blocked at the borders by the previous generations of immigrants, who were aware of  the limited opportunities, and did not welcome competition. Didion's description of Sacramento includes impatience with the economic invasion of post war immigrants, who were not "settlers" and did not understand what they had been through. The 3rd migration, after the WWII, in the 1950s, overran Sacramento, along with the rest of CA, usurping the homesteads of Didion's family and neighbors, and replacing it with a less personal mall/chain store/subdivision world that would eventually invade the rest of America.   

I am a new "migrant" to CA.  I came with dreams to be close to family which was realized, and be part of the film industry which was not.  It is not an easy place to retire. The housing costs are high, and the scattered development makes you very dependent on cars in a place where this can be very frustrating. (Driving in LA is a whole other story.) The weather is often pleasant, though not quite as lovely as the promotions. Some very wealthy people retire to LA and enjoy its charms buoyed up by their affluence, and it has been that way since its origins. But most come with less, and struggle to find their place in a city which embodies the exaggeration of rich and poor for longer than the rest of the US.  There is a mental transformation that each immigrant to California must go through after arriving. The "dreams of California" must be replaced by the realities of sustaining oneself in a difficult environment. At one time, the challenges were a lack of water, and limited opportunities. Agriculture, oil, movie, aviation, military and real estate booms brought prosperity, over development, and the challenges of modern California: an overpopulated, economically declining state the size of most countries trying to find its economic balance. As always, the poor suffer most, and the middle class have less coherence as they try desperately to ascend to the 1% to have more influence. And even the 1% have little influence in a place where the 0.1% are in great supply.  There is great natural beauty here, and significant cultural experiences. But surviving economically has always been difficult, and is no easier today, though the challenges are different. The "old timers" who managed to survive understand: if you have not struggled to survive here, you are not really a Californian, just a "California dreamer".