What’s the Matter with California?
By Jack Cashill
October 2007 (Simon & Schuster)
Jack Cashill, author of What’s the Matter with California
published by Simon and Schuster, visited the Thomas Aquinas College
campus for a few days last fall. In his mind, the College and the
community that has grown up around it are what’s right about
California. Thus, they are featured in the final chapter of his
book, printed below. Enjoy!
The Third Great Awakening
37. Santa Paula
"There are thousands upon thousands who are searching for,
and at the same time rebelling against, authority and solidity in
their lives. They, as I was, are looking for something that will
hold still and be true. They are looking for a real family."
Susan Atkins, Child of Satan, Child of God
Midwest Flight 87 soared through the chill rain of a Kansas City
night and put me down three plus hours later on the tarmac of LAX.
From LAX I shuttled past the airport's appropriately manic light
pylons to the Emerald Aisle at the National Car Rental. There were
no cars. I went downstairs and informed the lady at the desk. "Carlos,"
she boomed to the unseen Carlos, "there are no cars in the
Emerald Aisle." "There will be," the unseen Carlos
boomed back.
Welcome to LA.
Carlos was as good as his word. Fifteen minutes later, I was heading
north on the 405, which I took to the 101 north-"Ventura Highway
in the sunshine"--and that to the 126 east, a route that Father
Junipero Serra likely traversed in journeying between Mission San
Buenaventura and Mission San Fernando. An hour and a few minutes
after leaving the Emerald Aisle, just before midnight, I exited
the 126 in the humble but still functional downtown of Santa Paula,
population 30,000 and change. From Santa Paula I took the Ojai Road
north out of town. So sinewy and remote was the road that I drove
high beams all the way and passed no one. A guide met me at the
gate of my destination six miles from town and led me down an unlit
switchback no wider than the car to my lodgings. It was midnight
now, and I fell right to sleep.
The next morning I awoke on the set of Ramona or so it seemed.
They call the place the Doheny Hacienda after the family that built
it seventy some years prior, a near perfect, open-aired, U-shaped
replica of an Alta California abode right down to the chapel, which
happened to be next to my room. I almost expected to hear Senora
Moreno welcome the morning with a hymn, but the only sounds I heard
were the local birds-species unknown--a serenading brook and the
soft rustling of the Santa Anas through the trees. And this, just
75 minutes from LAX.
I had come here looking for an answer. I had convinced myself that
the state has too much entrepreneurial zeal and hybrid vigor and
to be undone by its problems, however serious. Fate had drawn me
to Santa Paula, or perhaps Providence. In May of 2006, I had received
a copy of a magazine called The America Enterprise. "You have
been selected to receive this FREE ISSUE," declared a label
affixed to the cover, "plus your choice of a riveting new book,
also FREE." I never bothered with the book, but an article
by Chris Weinkopf caught my eye. "America has a growing string
of countercultural towns where religion, traditional culture, and
family life are taken very seriously," read the article's subhead.
"Come visit one of them." I do not think Weinkopf, the
editorial page editor of The Los Angeles Daily News, expected anyone
to take his invite literally, but I did.
At the heart of Santa Paula and other such countercultural towns-Catholic
or Protestant or Jewish--there is almost inevitably an institution
that serves as magnet, usually a church or college. For Santa Paula,
it's Thomas Aquinas College. Some of those who live in Santa Paula
are faculty members. Others are alumni. Others are friends of faculty
or just folks who have heard about the environment, some of those
not Catholic.
One alumna with whom I spoke came back to Santa Paula with her
two children from Washington, D.C. after her husband died. She was
looking for a welcoming place to call home. This she found. Her
parents and her sister and brother-in-law soon followed with her
sister tending to their father full time before he died. Strong
extended families take care of their elders as well as their children,
another material advantage to the larger society.
I wondered if others might find their way to Santa Paula as well,
particularly abandoned souls like Steven Nary. I shared his story
at lunch one day, and an older priest in our company smiled in astonishment.
Father Cornelius Buckley had instructed Nary in the faith at the
San Francisco City Jail. He renewed their correspondence immediately.
"I must say his letter brought tears of joy," Nary wrote
me soon afterwards, "and I wondered what God could be doing
bringing us all together." Father Buckley was equally pleased
to receive Steven's letter in return. "Steven was always an
extraordinary humble man," he told me by email, "and I
was so happy to see that the spiritual potential in him that was
so apparent has been realized."
What moved Buckley was Steven's knowing acceptance of his fate.
"I do not see my trial and punishment as an injustice any more.
After all I did take the life of another human being," Steven
wrote in his return letter to Buckley. "God is clearly showing
me a path through friends and family to use my life's experience
as a way to inform others and to live a faith-based life."
Thomas Aquinas president, Tom Dillon, had graciously invited me
to stay at his residence, the Doheny Hacienda. I was in good company.
Mother Teresa had stayed there before me. I took a walk that first
early morning and surfaced on the meadow up above. In front of me
lay the lovely, clustered Mission-style buildings that comprise
the Thomas Aquinas campus. Surrounding the meadow on three sides
were mountains of the Los Padres National Forest. A month earlier,
I had to postpone the trip because a fire on the far side of those
mountains had forced the evacuation of the campus. The setting is
not quite paradise, merely close. In fact, it was just down the
road a few miles on the way to Ojai that Frank Capra filmed the
money shot in Lost Horizon, the moment when his refugees see, for
the first time, the valley of Shangri-La.
I saw no students out and about and understood why only when I
passed the chapel, which was full. This was Sunday morning, but
it is close to full on weekdays as well. No one has to go to mass--not
all the students are Catholic for that matter. It's just that very
nearly everyone does. The students all followed the Mass in Latin.
That seemed to make more sense in contemporary California than the
unwitting apartheid that results from separate masses in English
and Spanish, which many churches now offer.
Over the next few days, I would speak to any number of these students
and sit in on perhaps ten classes. The college, which was founded
in 1971, features a great books curriculum and aggressive seminar-style
interaction. None of the classes I attended had more than 15 students.
"Miss Rack, have you yet had any of that Book Thirteen glory?"
asked the class "tutor" with a smile. Miss Rack responded
to his invitation. She promptly went to the board and with chalk
in hand explained how Euclid arrived at a particular geometric proof.
It was impressive. Every class was. The students spoke concisely
and to the point, and those not speaking listened intently. I saw
none of the empty grandstanding that passes for student participation
in too many college classrooms.
I was particularly struck by how confidently the girls held their
own in the ongoing debates that characterize all classes, including
math and science. I asked a student where the confidence comes from.
"The boys respect us," she told me. "They even open
doors for us. They make us feel confident." That same student
told me that she hoped to go to Harvard Law School after college,
then get married and have children. "How many?" I asked.
"Oh a dozen or so," she answered.
The girls wear dresses or skirts to class. The boys wear shirts,
neatly tucked, with collars. No jeans. This is code. So are separate
dorms and the ban on inter-gender visitation. Few object. Most prefer
it. They knew what they were getting into. I asked a few kids how
much drug use there was on campus. They looked at me as if I asked
how much voodoo there was on campus. Although Catholics don't object
to drinking, there is close to none on campus either.
One student told me that she was reluctant to come for fear that
the college was "an Amish-style sack cloth and ashes kind of
place," but one visit assured her otherwise. After his stay
at the campus, British social critic Christopher Derrick wrote a
book around the experience. "What struck me first," he
observes in the well-titled Escape from Scepticism, "was the
exceptional happiness of the students." President Dillon told
me that just about everyone notices this. I did.
Although a tad smarter than average, these kids are otherwise not
that exceptional. Few among them come from wealthy homes or fancy
prep schools, and many come from large, struggling families. The
kind of life they lead-or at least try to--is materially accessible
to most of their peers. Many of different faiths already live this
way like, say, Ben Shapiro, author of Porn Generation. Restricting
the argument to the here and now, if 90 per cent of young California
exercised a comparable "controlling power upon will and appetite,"
the state would change in some intriguing ways.
Tattoo parlors would go out of business. Piercing enterprises would
have to survive on ears and girls' ears at that. Doctors would find
something better to do with their time than breast implants and
nose jobs, let alone abortions. AIDS and STD clinics could shift
their attention to unavoidable diseases. ER staffers could focus
on the victims of accidents and illnesses; shootings, stabbings,
and ODs would consume them no more. The police and rescue people
could so the same. Drug cartels would take their business elsewhere.
Like Alcatraz, prisons could become museums, and the prison unions
would no longer run the state. Pimps and pornographers would just
about close up shop-"It's hard out there" for them anyhow--so
would divorce lawyers and most personal injury lawyers as well.
The Crips could shift from larceny and other louche behavior to
lawn care and cut the need for illegal immigration along with the
grass. The LA school district could sell its fences for scrap iron.
The state payouts for welfare, housing, food stamps, and Medicaid
would shrivel. Taxes would fall, and still there would be additional
revenue for infrastructure, schools, universities, and, yes, even
new green technologies.
The remaining 10 percent of the population could choose to behave
or misbehave as they would. It is just that they would have to do
far less injustice to themselves and to society to get attention.
A half-century ago, about the worst thing the then provocative Beats
imposed on California was bad literature. "That's not writing,"
Truman Capote said accurately of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. "That's
typing."
For those who remember the California of 50 years ago, the Thomas
Aquinas scenario may not appear all that novel. The difference,
however, is that the college, in becoming a fully post-racial community,
has moved beyond the 50's, moved beyond the 90s for that matter.
Here, a student's race or ethnicity scores him or her absolutely
no points for or against. A few years back, the credentialing authorities
attempted to impose race consciousness on the curriculum under the
guise of "multiculturalism." The college stared them down
and ultimately prevailed. As President Dillon explained, "The
fact that they're African is not why we teach Augustine and Ptolemy."
The "second language" at Thomas Aquinas is Latin.
On the bookshelf of my room at the Hacienda, I found a copy of
the Bible and sitting next to it, a copy of Tocqueville's Democracy
in America. For an institution as distinct as a Thomas Aquinas to
work within the state, this placement suggests a necessary understanding,
namely an adherence to the larger principles of the nation. That
adherence is the great stabilizer, the one that assures that friction
among and between cultural plates, though inevitable, is manageable.
As attractive as the Thomas Aquinas model might seem, the state's
Blue establishment does not exactly embrace it. There is one fundamental
reason why. A Red plate thrust, Santa Paula style, would surely
check the progress of the "Do as thou wilt" revolution
and perhaps even reverse it. A Thomas Aquinas grad, after all, drafted
Proposition 85, the ultimately unsuccessful 2006 initiative that
would have mandated parental notification on abortion.
From their redoubts in places like Santa Barbara and Santa Monica
and San Francisco, the good thought thinkers will continue to resist
a Red revival until their personal fortunes are at risk. In the
meantime, they will hover nervously behind their iron gates and,
like the characters who people their films, repeat as mantra, "It's
not supposed to be like this."
The families in Santa Paula, by contrast, have a clear-eyed sense
of how things are supposed to be. I met with several of them, including
Chris Weinkopf's, and asked whether their vision of the good life
was likely to spread on its own. In general, they were more optimistic
for the long haul than the short. They see their strength in their
children, both the quantity and the quality thereof. Unlike some
of their Protestant peers, however, they are not aggressively evangelistic.
They prefer to "bear witness" quietly.
Those secularists who fret about a potential theocracy in a state
like California or even a city like Santa Paula do so with an impressive
disregard for history or reality. The Catholic Church has nothing
close to a monopoly. The Mormons, for instance, have missionaries
in Santa Paula actively proselytizing among the city's 70 percent
Hispanic population. There are also, of course, effective and influential
evangelical churches in Santa Paula and throughout the state.
The state's Hispanic population, legal and otherwise, will likely
determine the state's future, and everyone suspects it. The unions
are recruiting hard. The merchandisers are selling hard. The multiculturalists
are dividing hard. The Aztec wannabes are radicalizing hard. Christians
are evangelizing, but not as hard as they might. Nonetheless, they
have an advantage-the state does as well-in that these new arrivals
come from a western Christian tradition. The seamless, timeless
California that Santa Paula represents is very much the summation
of that tradition, the California that Junipero Serra envisioned
two hundred years ago but with a little butt-kicking American enterprise
thrown in.
To save itself, California will need to spread the spirit of Santa
Paula. The state government cannot do this, but it can at least
stay out of the way. The leadership will have to come from within
the ranks of the Hispanic Christian community. People like auxiliary
bishop Gabino Zavala and union leader Dolores Huerta are not likely
candidates. By preaching socialism, separatism and materialism,
they are leading their troops not to a City on the Hill but to a
city like Compton-or something quite like it.
One senses among the Hispanics of California a hunger for something
more, a hunger for stability and meaning. They will not find these
in the false gods that have diverted their more jaded Anglo peers
or in the Aztec concoctions that distract their own confused children
or in the unending victim trip that has paralyzed the black community.
Where they will find them is where Susan Atkins found them and where
Steven Nary found them-in the very same Christian God their ancestors
have been worshipping for generations. The Second Great Awakening
saved the Scotch Irish of Appalachia and points west from nihilism
and lawlessness. A Third Great Awakening could do the same for California.
And the place to start, right now, is the prisons. The mud-dancers
at Burning Man, the hot-tubbers at Esalen, the naked runners on
Hayes Street, even the leather folk on Folsom have a stake in seeing
this happen. Real revolutions have little tolerance for liberals
and even less for libertines.
This revived California, the California of Santa Paula, is the
one our Hispanic friends ought to come home to, the home we all
can come to if we have to, the one California "that will hold
still and be true."
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