Geodog

Proud to be a Californian

The NYT has an interesting article by Dean E. Murphy today, Move to War Leaves Some Feeling Alienated, that does a reasonable job of conveying how differently Bush and his war are seen out on the West Coast, where anti-war protests of all kinds have already started. There are some nice quotes from Warren Langley, Air Force Lt. Colonel (Ret), former president of the Pacific Stock Exchanges, and prominent anti-war protester. The article is mostly true to my perceptions, although I don't know anything about the feelings in Hollywood which Murphy seems entranced by.

We Californians certainly don't seem to feel as insecure and as ready to compromise our liberties as some of the people I have talked to on the East Coast seem to be, and we seem to be less susceptible to the canard that we need to "rally around the President". As the article points out, some of that is probably due to the fact that we were a long way away from the 911 attacks, and we didn't feel ourselves as targets as viscerally as people on the East Coast did. Another part of it is that as a state, we voted strongly against Bush, and we were punished for doing so by the FERC allowing Enron and the other energy trading and production companies to rig our power distribution system, so that our electric bills have doubled or tripled. We are also suffering from a ongoing recession, as the bust from the dot com boom continues into its third year without letup.

Maybe all those reasons explain why we are, on the whole, less mesmerized by Bush's lies than the rest of the nation. Or maybe it is just because we are wacky Californians, the place on the map where all the loose marbles stop. Or maybe we are starting another trend, as we so often do. In any case, for once I'm proud to be a Californian.