by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Here is a brief travel log of five days amid 21st-century California.<\/p>\n Day One. A Virtual Library<\/strong><\/p>\n Reader, I am returning today to the rather new, multimillion-dollar\u00a0CSU Fresno Library<\/a>[1]. We\u2019ve been there before, but I thought I would see whether things have changed from my last visit. It is easier to use than Stanford\u2019s far larger holdings. Few students seem to check out books on history and literature, so recall is rare. (Few students inside know that it has over a million volumes and that its real creator, Henry Madden, was an eccentric genius.)<\/p>\n The glass and metal addition\u00a0was underwritten by<\/a>[2] a local tribal casino corporation. It is far more lavish than the old library I used for a quarter-century: Starbucks inside, Wi-Fi, and plenty of lounging nooks. To get into the stacks, you go downstairs and push red and green buttons to move the huge tracked bookcases that are otherwise crammed together. I think the idea was to save space. But the inconvenience of waiting on slow-moving book cases does not seem to be warranted by opening up space for those who do not use books.<\/p>\n I studied ten random students as I walked about looking for six books. Four were engaged, eating and laughing, a sort of student-union experience surrounded by a backdrop of books \u2014 reminding me of talking heads that do interviews with faux tomes in the background.<\/p>\n Two were on cellphones (loudly so). Two were video-gaming on their laptops (from a few glimpses, they seemed glued to some sort of road race game and a military-style assassination exercise). One was reading, at a table marked \u201cPhysics,\u201d and one was typing. Twenty percent at work confirms my earlier visits \u2014 given that the library has very little to do with students searching out books and articles in a repository, deferentially quiet in respect for other scholars, careful to eat and drink only in assigned places, and wide awake. Out with the old, in with the new.<\/p>\n Instead, the campus library that I saw is still not quite a library, at least by any definition that we used to employ. Most there had little visible interest in reading or writing. The stacks were for the most part not being used. It is part student union, part a movable Starbucks meet-and-greet over coffee and cookies, part a nice place to text, net surf, and play around with video games.<\/p>\n Better yet, the fact that it says \u201clibrary\u201d and not \u201cstudent union\u201d or \u201carcade\u201d or \u201cplayhouse\u201d makes it even more desirable. Today\u2019s virtual student goes to a virtual library and does virtual research. That way you can be successful in that you are in \u201ccollege\u201d and you say you are \u201cat the library\u201d as you entertain yourself. Who cares whether someone knows the difference between the Parthenon and Pantheon or that e.g. is not quite i.e.? Get over it.<\/p>\n The popular culture changed the library; the library did not change the popular culture.<\/p>\n I have not researched the topic, but I expect that there is an entire literature on \u201creinventing the campus library\u201d that goes way beyond e-books and the Internet, and talks grandly instead about democratizing \u201cknowledge\u201d and turning the library experience into something more relevant culturally to today\u2019s students. Again, virtual libraries, virtual students, virtual degrees \u2014 I just hope that one of the students I saw texting and video-gaming is not the unionized public employee of the near future, guiding the lead car on the soon-to-be high-speed rail to Corcoran.<\/p>\n If the new library is now designed as a valuable cultural nexus, to throw together all sorts of young people of different classes, religions, and races, and at least expose them to the idea of sitting in a comfortable and humane learning place, overseen by courteous and professional staff, where reading is theoretically possible, then it is a smashing success.<\/p>\n If, on the other hand, it is supposed to be a place where disciplined young people individually pursue real knowledge in the liberal arts and sciences, through self-motivated and faculty-guided research, then it appears an utter failure. Does playing a video game next to the\u00a0Iliad<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Prometheus Bound<\/em>mean that it is more likely that the video game is educational?<\/p>\n Day Two. An Agricultural Miracle<\/strong><\/p>\n A day later, I am now driving westward on Manning Avenue, for about 60 miles to I-5 through the towns of Raisin City and San Joaquin, dissecting the corporate farms of the West Side. A few things are striking in a way not true even a decade ago. Agriculture has never seemed more productive or lucrative. New orchards and vineyards are going in everywhere. Sky-high prices for alfalfa, row crops, nuts, fruits, and wheat show in the face of the land. Water is scarcer and more likely to be cut off \u2014 and yet even more brilliantly squeezed out and metered by sophisticated computerized drip-irrigation regimes.<\/p>\n Tractors are both even bigger and look right off the lot. There is a feeling of neatness \u2014 no junk piles, no burn piles, no paper and trash blowing over the road. One can smell money, as in billions of dollars in export cash pouring in from India, China, Japan, and South Korea. Of course, few live out here in the land of corporate\u00a0latifundia<\/em>. But these vast agribusiness conglomerates, to the eye almost on autopilot, are earning billions of dollars for their owners, and a good life for their fewer and fewer employees, as machines make the old hard work rarer.<\/p>\n I pull over for a bit to watch a skilled driver in a huge John Deere with a mega-ripper, prepping a field for planting. In the 1980s I drove what I thought was a large 100 horse-power Allis-Chalmers, with a four-foot ripping blade to develop a new, small vineyard. In comparison, this tractor is a colossus \u2014 enclosed temperature-controlled cab, and the expert driver on a cell phone. In one swath, he covers the same ground I did in four, but straighter, deeper, and just better all around. My Allis smoked, his John Deere seems to have no exhaust.<\/p>\n When I wrote\u00a0Fields Without Dreams<\/a><\/em>[3] and\u00a0The Land Was Everything<\/em>,<\/a>[4] I compared a land of agrarian communities that once grew families and cultures with a Mendota and San Joaquin out here, pyramidal societies, more Egyptian than Hellenic, in which a tiny top lorded over a large bottom, with very little middle in between. That\u2019s truer than ever. But it is also accurate to confess that never have so few produced so much food so cheaply for so many throughout the world.<\/p>\n In other words, the world gone by of my youth and early middle age \u2014 small 40-acre and 80-acre orchards and vineyards, farmhouses with real owners living in them, three or four children working with a dad in the fields, a mother overseeing the books and taking her turn on the tractor in the hectic season \u2014 is dead. That agrarian culture is gone, vanished, kaput. Central California\u2019s once agrarian east side now operates like out here on the West Side.<\/p>\n Yet with agrarian demise, food production soared with economies of scale and decisions that were entirely market-based and not culturally predicated on tradition and morality. Is this good or bad news, both or neither \u2014 you decide; I cannot any longer. I know a nice guy who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars speculating and merchandising land to pension funds, EU expatriates, and celebrity investors. He does not know a spring-tooth from a flat furrower, and is richer for the ignorance. And I know a cranky, obnoxious old-timer holdout who still farms his small acreage and snaps at his workers. I want to believe that the latter is superior to the former, but I have seen too much in the last thirty years to be able to tell any more. Does someone in Africa who eats cheap US wheat or rice say, \u201cThank God for mass food production?\u201d<\/p>\n Day Three. Ground Zero<\/strong><\/p>\n On day three I am eating alone on University Avenue, a mile from the heart of the Stanford campus. Downtown Palo Alto is ground zero of the eBay, Facebook, Apple, Google, Adobe, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard revolution. The culture is international, and part Stanford, part Silicon Valley \u2014 or is there a difference anymore? Everyone looks like they are either a student or were a student. There are lots of Europeans and Asians, all young. I can detect four different languages from my corner table. From the conservations I eavesdrop on, these guys are confident and upwardly mobile, if not already rich technicians. Men are dressed better than women. Metrosexual heaven I guess.<\/p>\n On the street, few seem over 40. America\u00a0is supposed to be in decline<\/a>[5], but the best and the brightest flock here on the assumption that unlike the Arab world, India, China, or Africa, where your name, your race, your gender, your caste, your class, your age, your religion \u2014 or your first cousin \u2014 propels or hinders your trajectory, in Silicon Valley it is more often merit: as in, how much money can your skills make for us? University Avenue is a sort of electronic version of turn-of-the-century Nome, Alaska, or Sutter\u2019s Fort.<\/p>\n It would be easy, as I often do, to caricature this superficial world \u2014 $2 million, 1,500 square-foot cottages that would be worth $70,000 two hours away in uninviting Modesto; BMWs and Mercedes sports cars using 30% of their horsepower to rev 100 yards until the next stoplight.<\/p>\n Yet all that said, like the corporate agriculture I saw yesterday, one should not discount the smell of success in the air. Again, come here and you can see why China did not invent Google, or even why Germany did not invent Apple or Japan didn\u2019t invent Facebook. There are no prerequisites other than smarts, aggressiveness, a good degree that one earned, and lots of confidence that blind merit \u2014 and some luck \u2014 should prevail.<\/p>\n From their conversations, those in Palo Alto seem Obamites to the core, but their leftish politics are more like a contrived medieval penance, an Al Gore-like \u201coffset\u201d for the worry of caring so much about having nice things. And nice things are everywhere. Doctrinaire liberalism is predicated on new federal and California taxes stopping right now, at taking only 55-60% of their incomes. Go much over that and some in the Bay Area might well\u00a0turn into Reaganites<\/a>[6]. I don\u2019t think the twenty-something, foreign-national guy next to me who just stepped into a Porsche takes seriously \u201cYou didn\u2019t build that.\u201d He seems instead to assume that he earned his car and has no problem letting me see that it is worth three of mine.<\/p>\n Day Four. The Panorama<\/strong><\/p>\n I am up in the eleventh floor of the stately\u00a0Hoover Tower<\/a>[7], on the Stanford campus, taking in a 180-degree view of the world that Leland and Jane Stanford built well over a century ago. I read often of Leland Stanford. Eight miles away from my farm was the 1880 Mussel Slough shootout \u2014 which spawned Frank Norris\u2019s\u00a0The Octopus<\/em>\u00a0(I was reading his novel a week before I too got a ruptured appendix in Libya, faring better than the 32-year-old Norris did when his burst in1902 San Francisco).<\/p>\n Even the best apologist for the Southern Pacific Railroad would have a hard time defending the railroad\u2019s land gymnastics designed to cheat those whom they enticed upon the land. (OK \u2014 I confess: I grew up in a conservative Democratic household of homesteaders whose ancestors arrived in 1870, bought 180 acres of land from the SP Railroad, and passed on to the next four generations animosity for both the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads.) The Big Four, the Central Pacific Railroad quartet \u2014 Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford \u2014 built California (also intermeshed in finance, electricity, banking, development, agriculture, etc.) in the way later visionaries built Silicon Valley. But what a tough bunch they were, at least by modern standards and in comfortable hindsight.<\/p>\n I am now writing a book, and one chapter deals with the Big Creek Hydroelectric Project, in which Collis Huntington\u2019s gifted nephew, Henry Huntington, hired the brilliant engineer John Eastwood to plan the extravaganza. Henry soon acquired Eastwood\u2019s visionary blueprints for dams, penstocks, lakes, and powerhouses on the north and south forks of the San Joaquin River. He won him over with stock in Huntington\u2019s new corporation. Then almost immediately Huntington required the new \u201cstockholders\u201d to pony up $5 a share \u2014 ensuring that the poor Eastwood could not pay his way and was railroaded out, just as Big Creek got underway.<\/p>\n Huntington took the financial risk, sent the power to Los Angeles, gave us beautiful lakes, flood control, irrigation water for vast acreages \u2014 and siphoned off the work of the man who thought it all up. You figure the morality, I can\u2019t \u2014 other than did Huntington really need $27,000 from the poor Eastwood, or need to drive him out as payment for his genius?<\/p>\n Leland Stanford\u2019 millions (over a $1 billion in today\u2019s money) created a top-notch research university that improves the lives of millions with medical breakthroughs, high-tech innovations, and state-of-the-art engineering. The beautiful world of tiled buildings below this window is an enclave of big-government liberal thinking that one might think is antithetical to Stanford\u2019s 19th-century laissez-faire worldview. Yet on second thought, it is not so antithetical at all \u2014 given Leland Stanford\u2019s notion of unfettered capitalism as predicated on insider deal making (he was both magnate and governor and senator). It is difficult to figure out quite how the methodology of gaining huge fortunes is atoned for by later unprecedented generosity. Might Bill Gates have been a little more honorable to rivals when 35, earning a billion or two less \u2014 or did he need every penny so that he could give most of it away at 55?<\/p>\n Day Five. Very Much Alive<\/strong><\/p>\n On the fifth day, I am pulling into Selma, after a brief stop in Fowler. Say what you wish about the 17% unemployment of the San Joaquin Valley, the 48th or 49th slot in the national ranking of the public schools, the ground zero of illegal immigration, the flat landscape between the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada, but one can feel alive here in a way not quite possible on University Avenue. California has lots of rules, but they mostly don\u2019t apply out here. Who wants to pull over a smoky truck with tree limbs flying off the bed, outside of Kerman, when the easier $300 fine is found citing the cell-phoning soccer mom in her Yukon on the 99? Does the Carmel resident really care that there are 10 unlicensed, unvaccinated dogs down the street out here on Mountain View Avenue? I don\u2019t think any more so than those of the Gilded Age on Fifth Avenue worried whether 1884 Dodge City followed habeas corpus.<\/p>\n This day, a clerk, working 12 hours at a shift in the local food market, complains to me about EBT cards and illegal aliens, and starts praising \u2014 yes, this is true \u2014 Mitt Romney, in a right-wing rant. She says she immigrated legally from Jalisco. Another guy in the heart of Obama country posts garish signs on his desolate one acre about Obama as a socialist. (Does he get it \u2014 or care \u2014 that 100% of his neighbors voted for Obama?) I talk to a guy from India who has leveraged his way into owning 500 acres and taking million-dollar gambles on rising almond prices, cooler than I was when I borrowed $10,000 to plant five acres of Shinko apple pears. What a world.<\/p>\n Lately, I\u2019ve seen men in sombreros riding down the street on horses, coyotes trotting along side the road eating garbage, and a compact car pulling a huge flatbed truck with twenty feet of heavy-duty rope. I just drove by some ancient relic of a farmer with a pith helmet, who was mounted on a 1953 NAA Ford Jubilee (all 30 horse-power) tractor, making wide turns onto the rural avenue; and nearby five Mexican nationals were on their hands and knees, weeding a one-acre onion field they must have rented and thought was the way to riches. Behold the old and the new.<\/p>\n Recently I saw another guy throwing out a baby carriage on the road, but two others on bikes carefully hunting cans and plastic. I went into a stop-and-go in the local barrio, and an immigrant owner from the Punjab was discoursing on California gas taxes at a level a policy wonk might emulate. Yet on the way home, a pick-up and trailer coming in the opposite direction cut across the white line of Highway 43, and pulled into one of the many roadside taco canteens, waving and smiling as he heard me hit the brakes.<\/p>\n Whatever you say about some of the small towns of central California, and I\u2019ve said a lot, they are certainly alive, a boom-and-bust Tombstone that is premodern and postmodern all at once, and so similarly a lot more exciting, a lot more dangerous, and a lot more alive than was life back in 1880s Massachusetts. There is a Doc Holliday on a corner. And a Johnny Ringo to match. Maybe a Wyatt Earp as well. And like Tombstone, you know that it can\u2019t quite go on quite like it is, and will either get better or worse and sooner than you think. Tombstone and Dodge did not last long.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been quite a five days\u2026<\/p>\n URLs in this post:<\/p>\n [1] CSU Fresno Library:\u00a0http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Henry_Madden_Library<\/a> \u00a92013 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Here is a brief travel log of five days amid 21st-century California.<\/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":[16],"tags":[643,72,1014,221,1023,251,327,1024],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-OK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1623,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-remains-of-a-california-day\/","url_meta":{"origin":3146,"position":0},"title":"The Remains of a California Day","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 2, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Yesterday I think I understood why California is in deep trouble. Let me walk you through another day out here. At 7AM I put a few letters in my armored, heavy-duty steel rural mailbox. Four thefts of mail in the last five years have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2010"","block_context":{"text":"May 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/may-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1625,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-remains-of-a-california-day-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":3146,"position":1},"title":"The Remains of a California Day","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 2, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Yesterday I think I understood why California is in deep trouble. Let me walk you through another day out here. At 7AM I put a few letters in my armored, heavy-duty steel rural mailbox. Four thefts of mail in the last five years have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2010"","block_context":{"text":"May 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/may-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1049,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/civilization-in-reverse\/","url_meta":{"origin":3146,"position":2},"title":"Civilization in Reverse","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 24, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount. News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin \u2014\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8517,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/we-are-all-californians-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":3146,"position":3},"title":"We Are All Californians Now","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 2, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"California Drought -- Bad Policy, Poor Infrastructure\u00a0 By Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online California\u00a0is in the midst of a crippling four-year-old drought. Yet the state has built almost no major northern or central mountain reservoirs since the New Melones Dam of 1979. That added nearly 3 million acre-feet to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Lake Oroville Marina, CA Photo via NRO ","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/img_8_1024-500x333.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":890,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-tuition-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":3146,"position":4},"title":"California Tuition Blues","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 21, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In so-called March in March protests, thousands of students in California universities recently demonstrated in outrage over spiraling tuition costs. At both the California State University and University of California multi-campus systems, tuition hikes in recent years have far exceeded the national average.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13065,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/thought-of-the-day\/","url_meta":{"origin":3146,"position":5},"title":"Thought of the Day","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 30, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Private Papers Water, Water and Not a Drop?Behind the national headlines are lots of other stories. Here in California, the Department of Water Resources and the Federal Bureau of Reclamation announced that they may not (be able to?) honor the meager 5% of the contracted water\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 18 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 18 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/thought-of-the-day\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3147,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3146\/revisions\/3147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\n[2] was underwritten by:\u00a0http:\/\/info.aia.org\/aiarchitect\/thisweek07\/0126\/0126d_pw.cfm<\/a>
\n[3]\u00a0Fields Without Dreams<\/em>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0684835703\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0684835703&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20<\/a>
\n[4]\u00a0The Land Was Everything<\/em>,:\u00a0http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0684845016\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0684845016&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20<\/a>
\n[5] is supposed to be in decline:\u00a0http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/eddriscoll\/2013\/03\/18\/the-eu-crosses-the-rubicon\/<\/a>
\n[6] turn into Reaganites:\u00a0http:\/\/twitchy.com\/2013\/03\/17\/bill-maher-says-his-taxes-are-too-high-conservatives-reply-boo-hoo\/<\/a>
\n[7] Hoover Tower:\u00a0http:\/\/www.stanford.edu\/dept\/visitorinfo\/plan\/guides\/hoover.html<\/a><\/p>\n