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In recent propositions aimed at ending social assistance for the children of undocumented workers and the elimination of affirmative-action programs in state institutions, Schrag also detects racial and class divisions that could, he thinks, tear California asunder. One wonders if Schrag is able to recognize that his own apparent unwillingness or inability to find racist tendencies in any but conservative white Americans might contribute to the racial animosity over which he frets. Given the fact that each month some 60,000 men and women are stopped from crossing illegally into the United States from Mexico and that 6 percent of California's population resides there illegally, it's hard to see how concerns about immigration in the Golden State can be regarded as being driven only by racism. And, depending on the neighborhood, in California one finds Cambodians pitted against Mexicans, blacks pitted against Koreans, and, it sometimes seems, everyone against everyone.
Still, Schrag is right to observe that matters racial are of especial concern in late twentieth-century California. As Dale Maharidge starkly announced in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times earlier this year, "Whites are now a minority in California." Whether Californians of all stripes will be able to get along in the future is an open question. For his part, Schrag is not optimistic.
As the worried face captured in the photo on the dust jacket of An Empire Wilderness suggests, Robert Kaplan, like Schrag, has seen the future of the West (and thus of America), and he isn't happy about it. Envision the southwest drifting off into Mexico; British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon drifting off into a separate state called Cascadia; electronically mesmerized lower-class kids who munch candy for breakfast drifting off, en masse, into street gangs; parents who are too poor to eat well but not too poor to own a satellite dish, drifting off to sleep in front of their televisions, unconcerned about their kids' reading abilities; the upper-middle class of all ethnicities drifting off to gated, guarded neighborhoods and "private health clubs rather than public playgrounds"—imagine all that and you have a decent handle on Kaplan's vision. "These people were fat for the same desperate reason they gambled," Kaplan says of Mr. and Mrs. Westerner playing slot machines in New Mexico: "the hopeless quest to satisfy gross material desires."
As if the portrait of the West drawn here weren't bleak enough, let us turn to David Colbert's edited texts, which remind us, among many other things, of the disastrous oil spill at Valdez, Alaska, in 1989, when "Millions of gallons of crude oil gushed into Prince William Sound." And how about those Los Angeles riots? Edition 1964: "Little kids was all out on the streets. People were shooting guns, and the sky was just black, like the world was going to come to an end." Edition 1992: "Prosecutors have contended that [police officer Laurence] Powell can be heard on a police radio tape laughing about the beating, and that he mocked [Rodney] King in a hospital emergency room after the incident."
There's lots more. The Oklahoma City bombing and Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; space aliens in New Mexico and Bill Gates in Seattle; Quetzalcoatl and the Zimmermann telegram; Booker T. Washington and Harold Ickes; Clarence Darrow and Mark Twain—Corbett includes them all and thus provides proof that, for most people, the West has never really been a paradise but more an ever competitive, rowdy, individualistic, and demanding place. When the Okies went to California during the Great Depression, they weren't looking for heaven but only a job and a little property. "The Californian doesn't know what he wants," John Steinbeck wrote in 1936. "The Oklahoman knows exactly what he wants. He wants a piece of land. And he goes after it and gets it."
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