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Mrs. Mick and I like beach towns, that’s where we usually go on vacation. Both my sons played volleyball, and for eight years we went to tournaments up and down the California coast.
I was familiar and comfortable with beach towns…I moved to Santa Cruz for high school, and I like everything inanimate about the place. I enjoy the beach and the ocean and the surf and the breeze and the small-town feel and the slower pace of life and the eclectic shops.
What I didn’t care for was the people. It was (and I suspect still is) an odd collection of stoners, surfers, hippies, street people (we didn’t say homeless back then), socialists, NIMBYs and an inordinately large population of rednecks. That was the real eye opener for me. Once you got a quarter-mile past the beach, there was huge population of people who would be entirely at home in the deep south.
It isn’t so much that I disliked any specific group, per se. I just found the constant, unrelenting far-left and far-right orientation of basically everybody to be extremely wearing. It wore you down. And I couldn’t wait to leave Santa Cruz, and I haven’t gone back much.
Peggy Noonan’s article “We Are Starting to Enjoy Hatred” brought that back to me, that constant mental/emotional, jaw-jutting aggression, the I-won’t-listen-to-you-but-I-demand-you-give-me-your-full-attention attitude. Couldn’t stand it in the 1970s, can’t stand it now.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-are-starting-to-enjoy-hatred-c3005b05
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“there was huge population of people who would be entirely at home in the deep south.”
as if there is something wrong about the Deep South. Having lived and worked in Tennessee and Alabama for nearly five years, I find the South actually full of open, friendly, and respectable people. Black and White. Are there still some underlying currents of bigotry and sexism, perhaps. My father in law still opens the car door for his wife. . . .
Boston was far and away the most bigoted and segregated city that I’ve lived in. Chicago a close second. . . .
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I didn’t say anything was wrong with the Deep South. You know I’m talking about the mid-1970s, right? Can we agree that the typical Southerner might not see eye to eye with hippies/stoners/surfers/progressives?
To your point, northern cities are often segregated. Detroit was a highly segregated city. When Ford and the other automakers started paying high wages to blue collar workers, it started a mass migration from the South, black and white, and they brought prejudices with them, as did many of the Eastern Europeans who moved there. When I lived in midtown Detroit, I could go a week or two without seeing another Caucasian. Here’s proof:
Most to Least Segregated Cities | Othering & Belonging Institute (berkeley.edu)
In 1977, my dad bought a factory in Brentwood, TN; just south of Nashville. Dad was a lifelong Californian, played college basketball on an integrated team, had and has many non-Caucasian friends. We lived in an integrated neighborhood near downtown San Jose.
Dad had never been to the South before. He described the entire experience similar to your description…everyone was unfailingly polite, friendly and respectable, as you describe. He said the underlying current of racism creeped him out. His factory foreman, a Black man, picked him up at the airport and drove him back to his house for dinner. Very polite, very hospitable. Dad said they literally drove over the train tracks and it was clear they were in a different part of the town. Kids playing in the front yards stopped and stared at him with open mouths. Dad asked “what are they staring at?” His foreman said “they don’t see white people in this part of town. Ever.”
All that’s entertaining, but not as entertaining as the good ol’ boy from Huntsville who told me that, as a Catholic, I wasn’t a real Christian.
Good times…
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Interesting list, and not very surprising. What was the factory? Lived in Green Hills, corporate office in Brentwood, factory in Lewisburg. Lived in Huntsville and ran a company/factory in Fayetteville. Huntsville I found to be pretty reasonable, though a couple of instances of ignorance here and there. Heck, even in California in 70s there was the thought that Catholics weren’t Christians, simply because of the deification of Mary and the Saints. . . .
Anyway, as you may know, my father in law was president of the University of Alabama in the mid to late 70s. Not a biased bone in the man’s body, and led them through some turbulent times. . . .
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The factory created grillbricks out of pumice stone. Pumice is a porous, igneous mineral that is still used as a cleaning material given its light abrasive nature. It was ideal (at the time) for cleaning commercial grills. Dad bought a similar company in San Jose and merged the two.
I think Huntsville is reasonable as well — NASA has a space facility there — I believe my FIL had been there a few times, he had multiple aeronautical engineering degrees from Stanford and was a materials science guru. I am certain that your FIL and other academics weren’t biased.
Again, Dad’s experiences were in the mid 1970s. I visited the South (Atlanta) for the first time in 1992, and I had some very unusual experiences with a racial tinge. But I was only in and out over the course of a long weekend.
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Ray Dalio thinks democracy will fail, that a strong middle between the polemicists will not emerge. He believes that Rs and Ds have irreconcilable differences, will run to the poles and will threaten the rule of law.
He wrote a book on this topic in 2020 and estimated a civil war’s odds at 1 in 3. Today, he thinks it’s more than 50% and that democracy could fail after the presidential election, no matter who wins.
https://time.com/6991271/civil-war-conflict-ray-dalio/
This is an excellent read, highly recommended. GR, he has an interesting take on class warfare intensifying.
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It’s not exactly provocative to say that democracy will fail. It never has survived for long.
That’s the reason the national government was established as a republic. But the people are catching on that they can still vote themselves largess. That’s, of course, the end of any democracy: When the majority votes for the goods of the minority.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)-
Right, that was Alexander Fraser Tytler, often misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville. “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
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One of my favorite quotes is from Benjamin Franklin (I thought it was TJ but looked it up) when asked at the constitutional convention what form of government the U.S. has. His response:
”A republic, if you can keep it.”
That quote can be read into as acknowledging the massive challenge of maintaining a government founded on the rational apportionment of power.
Our politics turned government into a game of who gets the money. The thing is, that happened many many decades ago. I don’t see a way to halt the momentum outside of revolution, which other than the founders has never worked.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work) -
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