Scott Wilk thinks California is “off the rails” (“Right Here, Right Now,” June 29). How inspiring, such leadership! He based his entire premise upon an assumption that a “Google search” is representative of the reality of our complicated world. He ignores the fact that global complaints about local conditions are an absurdity. I ask: Does the Santa Clarita City Council have any reason to address the preferences of people in Yuba City or Placerville or Menifee?
California is ranked No. 5 in world gross domestic product. Any state that exists within a federal system and has the economic potency to rank among nations is bound to be both difficult to pilot and consequential to the nation (and world). Thus, the problems of California are magnified by the attention paid to them in our modern globalized mediasphere. The most rudimentary examination of how clicks for cash works in modern media evidences this. Scott tries to negate the clickbait phenomenon, and claims it does not apply — when it serves his worldview and political ends.
Our nation and its problems get magnified in world news as well. In many visits to Canada, for example, my Canadian friends spoke excessively about U.S. politics. During a number of visits, each of a few weeks’ duration, I eventually tired of talking U.S. politics with nonvoters and asked them about their own Canadian politics, of which I knew a good amount, yet they had nearly no interest. When pressed, their response was that their own nation’s politics were relatively inconsequential.
Scott, that is why California is constantly being dragged in the mediasphere. It is a consequential place; Tennessee, not so much.
Are California’s problems real, and do they merit solution? Sure. But to utilize the global mediasphere’s click-based popularity schema (“Google search”) as representative is ludicrous. Even more ludicrous: Once California DOES provide a solution, the same complainers then take every opportunity to complain about the consequences of the solutions they themselves traditionally advocate.
A couple examples follow.
California is required to run a balanced budget by law. A balanced budget is the gravitational neutron star of conservative fiscal policy. Yet, last fall it was all the rage to heat up the mediasphere with complaints about how California was hosed because it was going to have to adjust to a lower-than-expected budgetary basis. Scott mentioned it in his June 29 column.
California complies to the Supreme Court-ordered mandate to keep prison populations below a 134% threshold that maintains compliance with the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Conservatives have for years complained about the solution voters chose. Proposition 47 and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation policies have been working to achieve compliance for years to meet the SCOTUS order. Scott mentioned this as well. We are now in a mediasphere where the original problem, a SCOTUS order to comply with the Eighth Amendment, is being ignored and never mentioned in context of complaints. Ignoring the basic problem is an asinine way to manage, to govern.
The cost of dutiful compliance is ridicule; great genius shunned by mediocre minds. How does the old joke go? Of the six phases of project management, Phase 5 is the punishment of the innocent.
California is consequential to the nation in the way the U.S. is consequential to the world. Consequential locales suffer scrutiny because they are consequential.
Both the U.S. and California can choose to listen to or to ignore complaints. For example, Donald Trump is often campaigning that the U.S. suffers from attending to the needs of other nations, being driven by their opinions, and that we are better to “ignore them.” I suggest that a little of that Trumpian attitude is reasonable in the way California addresses the outside feedback from the mediasphere of complaint (“Google search”). Consequential places have to keep their own interest in mind and pick which battles to fight and what adversity can be safely ignored.
My friends in Canada have no vote here but feel free to complain that the U.S. needs to do this or that in order to fulfill their preferences. I still love my friends there, but the U.S. need not fulfill the preferences of random Canadians … or Frenchmen, Germans, Israelis, Russians, Chinese, Britons, etc.
California can likewise safely choose what to ignore from the amalgamated global “Google search” mediasphere. The complaints there are like the emissions that drive global warming. They heat up the mediasphere, offer no desirable precipitation (i.e. “solutions”) and spiral the environs to become more inhospitable.
I am sorry that, again, “Right Here, Right Now” is “Wrong Here.” How is it that this keeps happening?
Christopher Lucero
Saugus
