{"id":2043,"date":"2011-09-10T20:13:45","date_gmt":"2011-09-10T20:13:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=2043"},"modified":"2013-03-14T20:42:59","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T20:42:59","slug":"the-other-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-other-california\/","title":{"rendered":"The Other California"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n

City Journal<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York after spending the summer bumming around Italy and Greece, the customs agent looked at my passport and said with a Bronx sneer, \u201cBruce Thornton, huh? Is that one of them Hollywood names?\u201d Hearing that astonishing statement, I realized for the first time that California is more of a distorted idea than a place. There were few regions more distant from Hollywood than the rural, mostly poor, multiethnic San Joaquin Valley, where my family had a ranch. Yet to this New Yorker, the Valley didn\u2019t exist. And it doesn\u2019t exist for many today, because it doesn\u2019t conform to the fantasy of California better expressed in the state\u2019s Hollywood south and dot-com north.<\/p>\n

This ignorance of the \u201cother\u201d California has significance beyond illustrating the parochial sensibility of city dwellers. The San Joaquin Valley is the world\u2019s most productive agricultural region and one of the great achievements of modern engineering, created by storing and diverting water from the Sierra Nevada and using it to irrigate what were once semi-arid grasslands. The San Joaquin Valley boasts five of the nation\u2019s top ten counties in farm-production value, and they account for almost three-quarters of California\u2019s $36 billion in annual agricultural revenues derived from the sale of 400 commodities. Yet even in California, many people either don\u2019t know or don\u2019t care that their lives and civilization rest on the shoulders of those who produce their food.<\/p>\n

Our wired-in, high-tech world is made possible by the agricultural industry that produces the food we take for granted. Yet \u201cagribusiness\u201d is usually depicted as a corporate villain like Big Pharma or Big Oil, producing junk food oozing with high-fructose corn syrup and toxic pesticides while exploiting the labor of Mexican immigrants. Of course, the business of producing food, like all businesses, is concerned with making a profit. No doubt it has unsavory aspects, as do the academic, entertainment, medical, and journalism industries. But the rest of us can be professors, actors, doctors, and reporters only because we don\u2019t have to spend ten hours a day cultivating the food that we need to survive.<\/p>\n

That simple existential fact makes the contemptuous indifference to the San Joaquin Valley indulged by the California coastal elites a species of moral idiocy. Worse yet, it leads to policies detrimental to the region\u2019s economic well-being. Diverting water from the Valley and dumping it into the Pacific during a drought to protect the three-inch Delta smelt, as happened a few years ago, is the most recent\u00a0example<\/a>. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost and land left uncultivated just so city dwellers could indulge their romantic environmentalism, a luxury of the well-fed who take the abundance of food for granted. It\u2019s a safe bet that if San Francisco\u2019s drinking water came through the Delta pumps, the smelt would have been history.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s enormous Sierra Nevada snowpack has defused the water crisis for now. But California still has on the books myriad environmental regulations, most based on bad science or irrational prejudice, that make the business of growing food more costly and difficult than it need be. The bias against chemical pesticides and fertilizers \u2014 which across the globe have saved billions from malnutrition and starvation by exponentially increasing productivity \u2014 has led to Byzantine regulatory protocols that increase costs and impede production. Obviously, where science has definitively shown a danger, we need regulation. But many of the rules California farmers must now negotiate are aimed at minimizing risks equivalent to the danger of drowning in water a quarter-inch deep.<\/p>\n

Truth is, agriculture is not just another industry, but rather the precondition for civilization itself. The historical progress of agricultural improvement that liberated more and more people from the drudgery of providing food was the precondition of our urban industrialized world. Today only about two people out of 100 are directly involved in the production of food, compared with 90 out of 100 in the late eighteenth century. The goods and services that make up our lives, from computers to movies, are luxuries we can create and afford because of this new freedom. Remember that the next time you start grocery shopping \u2014 or pontificating.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a92011 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York after spending the summer bumming around Italy and Greece, the customs agent looked at my passport and said with a Bronx sneer, \u201cBruce Thornton, huh? Is that one of them Hollywood names?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,16],"tags":[643,1014,251,94],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-wX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6289,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-hollywood-has-ruined-sex\/","url_meta":{"origin":2043,"position":0},"title":"How Hollywood Has Ruined Sex","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 31, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0Acculturated.com \u00a0 In the early 80s my mom and her sister dropped by our condo while my wife and I were watching\u00a0Payday\u00a0on HBO. (If you\u2019re unfamiliar with this movie and Rip Torn\u2019s brilliant performance, just think\u00a0Crazy Heart\u00a0for grown-ups.) They happened to come in during a scene\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Hollywood_Sign.jpg?fit=566%2C297&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Hollywood_Sign.jpg?fit=566%2C297&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Hollywood_Sign.jpg?fit=566%2C297&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1445,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/despicable-israel-libels-on-display-in-california-universities\/","url_meta":{"origin":2043,"position":1},"title":"Despicable Israel Libels on Display in California Universities","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 19, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The moral and intellectual corruption of American universities has recently manifested itself in the California State University system, the largest in the country. A group of faculty and administrators has sent a letter to Chancellor Charles Reed asking that he not approve the reinstatement\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3052,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/corrupt-language-breeds-bad-history-and-bad-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":2043,"position":2},"title":"Corrupt Language Breeds Bad History and Bad Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 24, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society As the history of communism and fascism both illustrate, modern political tyranny has relied on fabricated history to legitimize its claims and actions, and such history in turn relies on the debasement of language. Nowhere is this axiom more evident than in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4137,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fantasy-and-worse-from-the-los-angeles-times\/","url_meta":{"origin":2043,"position":3},"title":"Fantasy and Worse from the Los Angeles Times","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 14, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton and Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers [Editor\u2019s Note: In the Sunday February 5, 2006 edition of the\u00a0Los Angeles Times Magazine, Fresno-based\u00a0Times\u00a0reporter Mark Arax published an essay purportedly about how acrimony over 9\/11 issues, Iraq, and the war on terror has divided his community\u00a0\"The Valley's Not So\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3326,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-abandons-history-for-melodrama\/","url_meta":{"origin":2043,"position":4},"title":"California Abandons History for Melodrama","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 21, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society Just when you think California can\u2019t get any wackier, the state legislature steps up and proves you wrong. Despite a looming fiscal catastrophe that should be concentrating the minds of politicians, the Assembly is set to vote onSB 48, a bill already\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":2043,"position":5},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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