THE DEMOCRACY CENTER ON-LINE
"WELCOME BACK TO CALIFORNIA.COM"
Volume 30 - December 15, 1999
Dear Readers:
Last month I returned to California for a visit - my first in just more than a year. In addition to suffering some serious "culture shock" I also ran into a lot of people who said they enjoy getting and reading these newsletters, feedback I appreciated. In this issue of "The Democracy Center On-Line" I offer some reflections on returning to California on the eve of the year 2000 and on the differences, both subtle and huge, between these very different worlds - the US and Bolivia. To all of you, happy holidays and best wishes into the new century.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
"WELCOME BACK TO CALIFORNIA.COM"
It was the kind of image that sticks with you. After twenty hours of careening through the air (and airports), from one side of the world to the other, I finally touched down in my hometown of Los Angeles. Running on too many hours of bad airplane food and even worse coffee, I ran immediately to the airport men’s room. Two men, nicely dressed, were standing upright at the urinals. Each was peeing away with the help of one hand while simultaneously, in the other hand, each held a cell phone, into which they were jabbering away, madly (I couldn’t hear what they were saying but I imagine it was something along the lines of "Get that script!"). To paraphrase Dorothy, "Well Toto, I guess we aren’t in Bolivia anymore." Welcome home to California.com.
Traveling north from Bolivia to California is like a combination of going through a time machine from the 1950s to the 1990s and having your revolutions per minute doubled or tripled. Everything is very big and moves very, very fast. My first moments in the airport were a daze. I shuffled to the luggage carousel where I had the LA experience of waiting next to Tom Arnold, the TV star, for my luggage (though I think some guy in a fancy suit and dark glasses picked up his).
THE DANGERS OF UNATTENDED BAGGAGE
Over the loud speaker came a series of announcements: "ATTENTION PASSENGERS, YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO GIVE MONEY TO SOLICITORS, NO ONE IS AUTHORIZED BY THE AIRPORT TO ASK YOU FOR MONEY." I imagined that this must have come as some relief to travelers who felt somehow legally obligated to purchase a Hari Krishna bible. The loud speaker boomed again, "ATTENTION PASSENGERS, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR BAGS UNATTENDED, UNATTENDED BAGS WILL BE REMOVED BY LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS." It was right about then that I watched the airport police grab a homeless man, who had apparently been making one of those unauthorized solicitations for money. I guess he was one of those pieces of "unattended baggage" that law-enforcement officials felt obliged to remove from the airport.
In no time I was in a rental car, zooming down the Century Freeway, perhaps the last of the big asphalt ribbons that the state will ever build. When I was a kid growing up in southern California local politicians used to debate whether to build that freeway and where. For a while it was going to be called the "Richard Nixon Freeway" and run smack through our house in Whittier, an idea our family didn’t care too much for on two counts. But that plan, by coincidence, evaporated around 1974 and the route got moved to Norwalk. Once state freeway planners demolished a whole neighborhood and moved all the houses away, but later they changed their minds again about the route and put the houses back (but not the people). I guess that’s how progress works sometimes.
THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF AFFLUENCE
Woody Allen once said that California is a place where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light. I’m not sure about this, but I don’t think Woody Allen ever lived in Bolivia. In addition to my family and friends there were other things I missed about California - freeways where you could actually drive 65 miles an hour (although mainly in the middle of the night), machines that actually wash your clothes for you, shelves at Safeway stocked with huge boxes of Cheerios. Walking into a Barnes and Noble in Santa Monica I became so overwhelmed by the selection of books (and in English!) that a friend of mine had to lead me babbling out the door by the arm before I lost it altogether. And the movies - I went to a multiplex in San Francisco with fifteen theaters, with an entrance hallway a full block long! Never mind that each of them were showing another piece of commercialized Hollywood schlock. In Cochabamba we get the same commercialized Hollywood schlock but in theaters that are 40 years old with bad sound and rats on the floor. I began to see the first world attractions that make the US the material envy of the globe.
All this material abundance is propelled by a bombardment of advertising that must hit Californians at the rate of at least several thousand messages a day (if not an hour) - billboards, TV and radio ads, product placements, they were everywhere, demanding the mind’s attention without rest. Even some of the toilets have little ads placed now at the bottom, encouraging you to stay off drugs while you take a whiz. Can movie promos be far behind ("as you flush don’t forget to see Eddie Murphy’s latest…")?
All these carefully crafted images and messages seemed to congeal together into one big one - with affluence, it is possible to live in a state of material perfection. But then life’s reality of imperfection seems to intervene and the result, it appeared to me, is a lot of really stressed out, really angry people. The sleek, powerful (and wicked expensive) BMWs end up stuck in the same bumper to bumper traffic as the used Toyotas with dented fenders. The public fax machine will gladly note and bill your credit card and then eat your urgent message alive. The calm-voiced computer that took your reservation will utterly screw it up. I was not immune. It took me just one attempt to drive from San Francisco to Oakland in traffic to remember how easy it is to go postal when you move at 5 miles per hour and arrive perpetually late everywhere. At least in Bolivia everyone arrives exactly half an hour late for everything, as if the whole country is set on the wrong time zone.
At the San Francisco airport pay phone I found myself next to a man screaming into the receiver. I thought his eyes might just pop clean out of his angry red face. "I RESERVED A NON-SMOKING ROOM!! LET ME SPEAK TO A MANAGER!!" When we glanced at each other for a moment I quickly looked away, knowing that with just a second of eye contact more he would begin to tell me the whole story. That’s another advantage of Bolivia, no one ever expects anything to go quickly or as planned. You travel on a bumpy bus for an hour to run an errand and the office you went to is closed down for no apparent reason. Something simple like receiving a fax or buying a chicken becomes a half-day task. Bolivians respond to situations like this with calm shrugged shoulders and a resigned, "¿Que voy hacer?" (So what am I going to do?) and go off to sit in the Plaza a while, or see a friend, or just go home. You don’t meet a lot of stressed people here.
ELECTIONS - HERE AND THERE
By coincidence, San Francisco and Cochabamba were both having their big mayoral elections at the same time, which also marked a cultural contrast. By the bay, the political debate was spirited and focused. Everywhere I went people were talking about the swift changes brought on by the Tsunami of affluence sweeping through the neighborhoods, one bedroom condos down the street from our old house in Noe Valley selling for $499,000, upscale chain stores moving in everywhere. What the hippies did for flowers in the 60s, rich young Internet entrepreneurs seem to be doing for sushi bars and Starbucks at the close of the 90s. The political reaction found its voice in the campaign of Supervisor Tom Ammiano who vaulted himself into the runoff against Mayor Willie Brown with a dinky budget, volunteer-driven, write-in campaign, whipping candidates who spent as much as $2 million. Mayor Brown’s slogan, plastered over taxi cabs and the like, was "World Class City, World Class Mayor. Any Questions?" For a skilled politician whose Achilles Heel is his well known arrogance, it seemed like Bill Clinton running under the slogan, "Chicks Love Him".
In contrast, the Cochabamba mayor election seemed more like a playoff match between rival soccer teams. Whole neighborhoods were transformed overnight with walls, phone polls and even rocks painted over with each party’s colors. Rallies were held neighborhood by neighborhood with lots of baseball caps and T-shirts given away. In other elections the parties have painted water trucks with their colors and filled people’s water tanks to save them a walk to the river. In the end our own dapper mayor (who goes by the nick name "Bom Bom") also got returned to office. People liked him because he paves lots of roads and he built a fancy new airport and folks say that he doesn’t steal as much as the others. I especially liked the fact the whole city shuts down on election day (including no cars or buses, leaving lots of room for bicycle riding) but I never heard any of the candidates talk issues. Given the choice between baseball caps versus San Francisco’s "What about condo conversion?!" specificity, I vote for the latter.
WANT IT - BUY IT!
Finally, near the end of my visit, I visited San Francisco’s newest attraction, the hyper-modern Sony Metreon shopping mall and movie complex. Near the entrance there is a huge quote emblazoned on the wall, "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and make a trail." I thought this an odd theme for a square block "Entertainment Center" dedicated to getting masses of people to buy and watch exactly the same thing, sort of like that old Steve Martin routine where he stands before a stadium crown and gets thousands of people to chant in unison, "We are all individuals, we all have our own ideas."
On the bottom floor of the massive complex was Sony’s own flagship store. Decked out with a huge window display of Sony Playstations, the state-of-the-art TV video game machine coveted by almost all 12 year old boys, including mine (although we would also have to own a TV, which we don’t). A half-dozen of the space-age control handles were set up in front of a bank of television screens that flashed over and over the words: WANT IT…BUY IT…WANT IT…BUY IT…WANT IT…BUY IT… And there it was, on the eve of my departure from affluent California, materialism’s mantra laid bear, WANT IT, BUY IT. There also was no question mark involved. This was not an inquiry, but a command. WANT IT…BUY IT. It seemed an odd sort of message to send our kids at the start of the season which supposedly marks 2,000 birthday of someone who preached, "blessed are the poor".
I returned home to Bolivia just a few days later, just missing the onslaught of the Christmas season. I admit that I did sneak in a visit to Toys ‘R Us, though ahead of the long lines that would come soon after. Back in Cochabamba, I chided myself for not remembering to use the opportunity to use a friend’s washer and dryer to deal with the stack of dirty laundry I’d acquired during my trip. But as I stood at the sink behind our house handwashing weeks of accumulated clothes, I found it all pretty relaxing. All things considered, I’ll take hand washing my blue jeans over the fast life and multiplexes. But I really do miss the Cheerios.
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