Our foreign correspondence

AMERICA

Way out West

JOHN GRAHAM

Son Francisco To the more traditional easterners, California is a wild place, too far away from the real centre of the world to know what is going on, and inhabited by a fun-chasing populace which is either mad or dangerous

or irrelevant, or all three. Yet California -has

often set an example which the world has followed, and not only with its now faded Hollywood. The students at Berkeley in 1964, the city riots in Watts in 1965, the hip- pies of Haight-Ashbury in 1966 . . . California was first every time.

If this pattern is to continue, we are in for an eccentric time. There is a lively organisa- tion here in San Francisco called the `Gay Liberation Front'. This is a sort of homo- sexuals' union, if that is the word, and right

now it is getting a lot of exposure. Some gay spark has had the bright idea of migrating inland from San Francisco with a few

thousand homosexuals and taking over an

existing village. Since the village numbers only 400 persons at present, the members of

the front will be able in a short space of time

to take over the complete administration simply by their voting strength. Without breaking any state laws they hope to be able to win a degree of freedom for their way of life impossible in the big city.

Or take the case of the girl injured in one of San Francisco's famous cable cars. This is indeed a tale of freedom and eccentricity, for she sued the company on the grounds that her accident had so shaken her, that she had become an uncontrollable nymphomaniac.

Well, of course, no one took it too seriously and the cartoonists had a field day, but .the psychiatrists triumphed in the end and she won her case, being awarded handsome damages. As far as I know, the company has not appealed the verdict, on the grounds that it was a miscarriage of justice ... But experiment invites reaction, and no- where in America has youthful energy run so foul of middle-aged authority as in the golden state. No one knows for sure, but there are believed to be more people under twenty-five In California than over twenty-five, and they are not all riding the surf or wearing flowers In their hair. They are making everything from wine to music, from aeroplanes to trou- ble. Above all, they are living on the cam- puses of some of the country's best universities.

And here, as for the last six years, is where the real trouble is. California has tradi- tionally been proud of its universities, and with reason: university education is free to a resident Californian, and the state has pro- , rtionately far more places than the national `"erage. You can produce statistics showing that Californians are the best educated of all Americans. Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech, are famous names. And yet, in a few short years, the overnor of the State, Mr Ronnie Reagan of movie fame, has done enormous damage to he university system and has built himself n even more enormous political reputation by doing so. It may be odd that someone should have been able to construct a political base by attacking the state's pride and joy, but it has undeniably happened. The more the undergraduates are enraged at Governor Reagan, the more political mileage he gets.

A member of the university board or regents, and a bitter foe of the Governor's, explained it to me this way. When Reagan came to power in 1966, there was no single issue strongly in his favour. The comfortable belief that the Vietnam War was good for the economy, and therefore for California with its defence industries, was fast being dissipated. The state was in fact about to come out of a boom period fast and enter its greatest slump since the second world war. There was nothing in the economy as a whole that would particularly help Reagan.

Simply in order to keep the state running more or less smoothly, whoever was Governor was going to have to raise taxes and do other such unpopular things. Nor was the Federal government going to help much, with its greater emphasis on stopping industrial pollution—the Californian oil -companies have experienced something of this—to take only one example. The movie industry was hardly the vibrant animal it had once been, and so on and so on.

In this faintly discouraging picture, the students offered Reagan a handle almost too good to be true. He became, in effect, one of the first of the recent crop of great silent ma- jority manipulators, with as hard a line as any yet shown on student radicals, disorderly campuses, revolutionary long hairs and the like. It was the iron fist in the iron glove. The cowboy rode again.

As this particular regent puts it : `Everyone has to have at least one issue. The south has the blacks, the Egyptians have the Israelis, Hitler had the Jews, and Reagan has the students.' And certainly, the students keep on providing ammunition. Only last week there was a revolution conference at Berkeley for hundreds of student activists from all over. The star speaker's topic was `How to make a revolution in the United States'. There's do-it-yourself, for you. The tax-payers of California resent paying for free education for all comers if it can be made to look as if they are subsidising their own overthrow.

None of this might matter very much if California was a small state, or if it really was irrelevant, but it is a large state and Reagan's horizons are larger still. Though few people realised it at the time, he was the only serious threat to Richard Nixon at the republican nominating convention two years ago. He was also clever enough to stand down when it was clear he couldn't win, thus preserving the appearance of party loyalty and solidarity. There can be no doubting his intelligence.

And he has now won a second four-year term as Governor. It may seem early to start thinking about the presidential campaign of 1972, but the party primaries are scarcely over a year away and the politicians have started thinking, all right. Reagan's staff is keen as mustard for him to begin a national campaign, and 1971 will see him making speeches throughout the country. He won't be tagged with any disasters, as the in- cumbent president may be. There are already plenty of Democrats who would rather fight against Nixon in 1972 than Reagan.

A final word about disorder. For all its ec- centricities, California houses some im- portant beasts, and right in the middle of San Francisco is the headquarters of one of them, the Bank of America, largest bank in the world, founded by an Italian immigrant, Signor Giannini. The revolutionaries have been after the Bank of America, of course, and have burned down some of its branches. Last week on two successive days there was a fire in the headquarters, the massive skyscraper at Giannini Plaza. As smoke poured out of the thirty-fourth floor I asked what was the matter. 'Nothing.' he said, 'it's only the Gianninis electing a new Pope.'

Take heart. Even the Golden State's revolutionaries couldn't get Ronnie Reagan elected Pope.