I was pretty darn happy when we became a city in 1987. But then, a bittersweet realization visited: “In two or three generations, Santa Clarita will end up just like the San Fernando Valley.”
I didn’t mean like the blatant leprosy that infects our neighbors to the south. A thousand years ago, they hid it with gossamer bandages. Today’s endless and tacky blight of condos and apartments are masked by a single palm tree out front, iron gates and a 25-watt light bulb to keep out the night’s evil.
Santa Clarita is much better planned and while it does suffer from the smothering mediocrity of too much vanilla, our problems ooze from a different kind of person who calls this valley home. With nary a pitiful shrub of common decency to hide behind, I’d be tempted to brandish a word synonymous for “house cat” and rhymes with the last name of the famous French pianist and father of musical impressionism, Achille Claude Debussy to describe this citizen.
Since its inception in 1876, the Santa Clarita Valley was a forgotten backwater where Los Angeles County, California and even Washington, D.C., viewed our riparian paradise as a sewage pit, a place to dump the reeking diapers and byproducts of government and society. We’ve been mapped out to become home to prisons, toxic waste dumps, a couple of nuclear power plants and disease-ridden hog farms to consume SoCal’s garbage. When I grew up here, the population was sparse. We became noted among criminal and volatile elements as the just right ducky place to dump headless corpses and dead bodies.
Lots of canyons. No nosy lookie-loos.
In the late 19th century, we flirted with self-government. There were movements every couple of decades to form our own city or at least break away from the elephantine and corrupt Los Angeles County. I believe it was 1956 when we came pretty darn close to joining Ventura County, which then, shared our farmer and cowboy leanings. In the 1960s, we attempted to create the city of Newhall-Saugus. In the 1970s, we twice tried mightily to form California’s 59th county with the fitting name of — “Canyon.” Needing the blessing of the voters at large in L.A. County, we failed both times by a margin of 65-35%.
Finally, in 1987, we became this marvelous American experiment in self-representation, the city of Santa Clarita. I assure you. This herculean act wasn’t accomplished by a bunch of mincing sissies. Strong, determined, tireless men and women from all walks of life banded together to not just battle an entrenched, bloated and uncaring bureaucracy. They fought to ensure that Santa Clarita didn’t become just another soulless and generic ZIP code, a la Van Nuys — but a home. Their home. Our home today.
Unlike today’s Santa Clarita citizen, they didn’t virtue signal. They didn’t fire off a Gosh-I’m-So-Upset Letter To The Editor and return to a collapsed vibrating recliner to binge-watch Fox News. They weren’t the daft and elderly aging hippies or brain-dead high school students once again eager to skip class, the usual suspects straight out of a Larsen cartoon who pose at the corner of McBean and Valencia with their yuppie Birkenstock designer outrage, exhausted and in need of a latte after an hour of playing, “Look At Me!”
The people who built this city? They — fought.
There was a wonderful word coined years ago by a Chinese studies scholar. The word? Mandarinism. It means, “government by bureaucrats.” It was coined from ancient dynasties where the emperor had so many servants, advisors and hangers-on to the hangers-on that the government eventually went bankrupt and collapsed. These “mandarinocracies” became so powerful, they even fatally poisoned an emperor who tried to downsize their immense power.
Currently, the Judicial Council of California has come up with perhaps the most eye-wateringly imbecilic idea since the High Speed Rail. The state — the one powered by a supermajority of Democrats — is planning to build an atomic eyesore, eight-story regional courthouse smack dab in the middle of the valley and city’s heartland. Like much of what comes out of Sacramento, it comes already poorly planned. Our own, personal Empire State Building dedicated to perps, perverts, gang bangers, drug dealers and the dregs of society will be the tallest building in the valley and will forever define our community identity. Not as a tree city. Not as the home of Bill Hart and our cowboy heritage. Not as one of America’s most pleasant and safest communities, filled with parks and tree-lined streets. The plan calls for 330 parking places. Is that just for the media for the high-end murder cases? Will the various Christmas retail shoppers have to be bussed in because California will declare eminent domain on the mall parking lot?
Certainly, the mandarin, ours and theirs, will go through — pardon the mixed cultural metaphor — the kabuki theater of bluster and outrage. Each side will take little hop-hop-hop steps across the stage, fanning themselves and feigning shock behind faces thick with makeup. The answer to running this civic monstrosity out of town with britches filled with metaphorical buckshot and hot coals (not so metaphorical) down the underwear of Sacramento is — us.
Bureaucrats eat well-worded letters of complaint like a fat lady downs bon bons. Do you think California’s high-speed rail, the homeless crisis, gas prices and a list longer than Honby to Rancho Cucamonga changed any of the problems facing the Golden State today?
What will stop this is passion. Passion will get you media coverage.
A famed basketball coach had a great observation once: “You can teach a mule to run the Kentucky Derby, but that doesn’t mean he’s gonna win it.”
Santa Clarita? Get up off your ass and don’t be the mule …
“Naked Came the Novelist,” John Boston’s long-awaited sequel to “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” is on sale at JohnBoston-Books.com. So are other fine books, including his two-part “SCV Monsters” series. A lifelong SCV resident with 119 major writing awards and nearly 12,000 columns, Boston is Earth history’s most prolific humorist and satirist.
