Treme and How To Fix California

The most moving moments of Treme thus far are the small ones - when individual characters decide "I'm staying, and I'm fixing this." I'm thinking of when Lester Freeman tosses out garbage from the bar he commandeers, when Joanie Stubbs pulls a desert out of her purse, or when the skinny pretty black lady defends staying in her bar as her dentist husband tries to get her to move to Baton Rouge. There is something in this - something foreign - I think you may call it fortitude. It doesn't seem common these days - particularly in California. The much more tempting reaction is to quit. To give up. Treme is going for a theme of rebuilding. It makes sense post- The Wire. The Wire is essay on American decay. Treme is the proposal for fixing it. Baltimore became a symbol of American neglect, a second tier city dying day by day - partially because of the drugs, partially by neglect of the middle class, neglect of the schools, etc. Treme is something else altogether.

It makes me think of California - the only place I know as home. The greatest place in the world, if you ask me. I remember applying to East Coast schools when in college and once the applications were off knew in my heart I wouldn't go. I couldn't imagine leaving this place. And California is broken. Not hurricane Katrina broken, but utterly bankrupt and completely ungovernable. This VDH article offers proposals to fix it.

After all, in no particular order, we would have to close the borders; adopt English immersion in our schools; give up on the salad bowl and return to the melting pot; assimilate, intermarry, and integrate legal immigrants; curb entitlements and use the money to fix infrastructure like roads, bridges, airports, trains, etc.; build 4-5 new damns to store water in wet years; update the canal system; return to old policies barring public employee unions; redo pension contracts; cut about 50,000 from the public employee roles; lower income taxes from 10% to 5% to attract businesses back; cut sales taxes to 7%; curb regulations to allow firms to stay; override court orders now curbing cost-saving options in our prisons by systematic legislation; start creating material wealth from our forests; tap more oil, timber, natural gas, and minerals that we have in abundance; deliver water to the farmland we have; build 3-4 nuclear power plants on the coast; adopt a traditional curriculum in our schools; insist on merit pay for teachers; abolish tenure; encourage not oppose more charter schools, vouchers, and home schooling; give tax breaks to private trade and business schools; reinstitute admission requirements and selectivity at the state university system; take unregistered cars off the road; make UC professors teach a class or two more each year; abolish all racial quotas and preferences in reality rather than in name; build a new all weather east-west state freeway over the Sierra; and on and on.

I don't know about all of these things, but they would be a start. I have tremendous contempt for a country like Saudi Arabia - a place blessed with an abundant natural resource - the national equivalent of hitting the lottery and instead of investing in the citizens and building a great, modern country, they pilfering the money away on a stupid oligarchy. California isn't quite the same, but we too, have won the lottery. Blessed with more natural resources and beauty than one could possibly expect, and yet, somehow just through sheer bad management and dumb ideology have put ourselves into a position where we're broke and don't have the ability to fix it. It makes no sense. It's like watching a talented athlete piss away his career.