TABLE TALK

California, fare thee well

DENIS BROGAN

At the end of the long trek westward, the American frontier is producing or provok- ing some odd and even alarming phenomena4 It is, perhaps, not surprising that the sure vivors of the western voyage have felt thwarted. It was prophesied by Herman Melville that they would find that there was 'no promise in the voyage' and that the voyagers would find themselves 'whelmed'i Certainly, California is no 'insular Tahiti' today. It has its share of problems, new and old, and it may be that governing the most populous state is as impossible a job as gov4 erning New York City or the United States itself.

The 'golden state' is overrun with Hippies more ideological and more often dangerous than those I described in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in this journal a few years ago. 'The Hashbury' is (I am told) now as much a mere tourist trap as the North Beach, which advertises bottomless as well as topless entertainment and has. at a rough calculation, about fifty movie houses (or theatres) showing foreign and native 'art' movies.

They are, I am told, much bolder than anything we have yet seen in London or even in Copenhagen and some old veterans in the war against prudery are not so much shocked as alarmed that the purity backlash will start moving north from Orange County. an area sound even by the standards of Portadown. For it is only that there are two Californias. the libidinous North with its memories of the Gold Rush, and the Barbary Coast and the 'Sunny Southland' with its memories of Aimee Semple Mc- Pherson (best described under a pseudonym in Vile Bodies), of mushroom growth of the new churches, new religions, new prophets, the world to which Messrs Heard and Hux- ley moved but which found its real vales %acer in the Evelyn Waugh of The Loved One.

Today, of course, Southern California is not simply a transplanted colony from Iowa or Indiana. There are many, many hundreds of thousands of children of Dubuque or Terre Haute in the clustering encampments round the nearly immobile centre of the third greatest American city in population (in whose history, pessimists see the future of American urban life). These are the Solway of this new Israel and they aregoften

as incomprehensible to the exiles from the Heartland as, I am told, many Sabras are to the Fathers (and Mothers) in Israel. But the Fathers in Israel are still numerous and they are not always alienated from their off spring who also want to preserve the Ameri- can way of life.

An academic conflict raging during my recent visit suggests the character of the ten- sions. The old debate over the teaching of evolution as a scientific theory, which many had hopefully thought ended with the Pyrrhic victory at Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, of the rigorists of the old time religion, has been renewed. Evolution, bland and sacred word, may be taught 'as a theory' if the Genesis history of the Creation is also taught. I have not, in northern California, been able to get a clear account of what version of the Genesis Creation story is to be taught. (The few readers of Genesis who are still around know that the sacred record is not free of problems and ambiguities).

Nor could I discover whether Genesis is to be taught 'as a theory' or, as I think likely, as divinely certified fact. Anyway, the forces that rally behind the belligerent head of the state educational system, Dr Max Rafferty, are not to be put off with 'the Bible as literature' supplemented by readings from the Koran. the Bhagavad-Gita or even the Book of Mormon or Science and Health.

The Raffertyites are, I suspect, of the mind of Parson Thwackum, although pos- sibly less devoted to the Church of England than to Southern Baptist orthodoxy. Dr Rafferty is a popularly elected official, and none of my friends admire him or can mention his name without choking. This revulsion occurs even among people who think something can be said for the his- torians turned statesmen, Governor Reagan and Senator Murphy (but think that more is to be said for that important mouthpiece of the Nixon administration, Mrs Black, better known in the outside world as Shirley Temple). But Max Rafferty, 'the Orange devil', is thought of as more of a disgrace to the state than anybody since the bandits whom the Vigilantes hanged. The wickedness of the eloquent Dr Raf- ferty is probably exaggerated as. was the wickedness of Jix, the first Lord Brentwood.

Dr Max is probably brighter than Jix; he certainly has a lush vocabulary although he has now to compete with Vice President Agnew, the Cleon of our age. But his enemies insist on the indubitable truth that

the learned doctor's 'thing', field or Fach is physical education. They ponder (when I ask them) how do you research in physical

education, especially if you were, to your bitter disappointment, refused induction into the American army in World War II for flat feet? Obviously Dr Rafferty and Dr Roger Bannister have little in common. Yet the field of applied science which Dr Rafferty adorns has many practitioners and admirers, I was, to my astonishment, offered an introduction in a southern city to the 'Director of Physical Education in Cam- bridge University', an academic official un- known to me. He declined an introduc- tion.

But the anger of Northern California at the rule of the Golden State by Rafferties and Reagans has been mollified by the one attractive historical event of the black, recent years. I have met no one in San Francisco or its surrounding cities who hasn't rejoiced at the capture of Alcatraz by the Indians. How often have I heard the phrase 'give it back to the Indians' applied to New York, Chicago, and, of course, Los Angeles. Now the Indians have taken the Rock with even more ease than Admiral Rooke took the Rock of Gibraltar in 1704.

The first invaders offered to buy it for the price paid for Manhattan by the Dutch, twenty-four dollars and a red blanket. Vic- tory won, Indians poured in from all over their lost Israel and the parallel was at once perceived; these were the new Zionists.

(There are many thousands of very depressed Indians in the Bay Area as it is). The Indians of Cape Cod had enabled the Pilgrim Fathers to survive and their gifts made the first Thanksgiving possible. Now the Pale- faces have been pouring in gifts; the for- mally affronted Federal government has been pumping in water onto Alcatraz. Only Senator Murphy has continued to take a stern, proprietary stance.

Of course, some smart operators have horned in. A popular proposal is that the Indians be given title to Pelican Island (as

the Spanish name suggests) on one condi- tion; that they take back Manhattan island, receiving a clear title plus twenty-four dol- lars and a red blanket. No other charge would be made for a clear title to Alcatraz.

Of course, such unpatriotic suggestions have American precedents. We learn from the recently published correspondence of U.S. Grant that he wrote to his wife from Mexico City as the Mexican war was obvi- ously coming to an end and negotiations

were proceeding at a brisk pace; 'the Army is unanimous on one thing; the Mexicans must be forced to take back Texas'. The chance was lost; but one wonders what Northern California would pay to have the Sunny Southland returned to its original owners?

I spent my last two nights in California in an apartment with a magnificent view of the Rock. At night there was a single light but no smoke signals. I hope the garri- son stands fast. They should; they have been reinforced by some Iroquois, whose most distinguished tribal head was Sir Winston,