Oct
11
California: Fear, Fugue and Fantasia
Filed Under Uncategorized |
by Michael WinshipLOS ANGELES — There is an unnaturalness to much of California’s geography that makes a born-and-bred Easterner like me nervous.
It’s not just the seismic fault lines that shear the landscape and make the dropping away of a sizable chunk of the state a real possibility, like a big piece of gaudy birthday cake sliced and hurled to the ground.
Nor is it the beautifully cataclysmic coastline or the make-believe architecture that parallels the product of Hollywood’s dream engine, all stucco and design with insufficient heft. As Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe observed, “About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the door.”
California’s just plain weird. And a bit unreal.
Admittedly, my feelings are mixed. There are good friends here and boundless creative energy, great food and intriguing, unorthodox ideas. D.H. Lawrence echoed just my blend of ambivalence in a letter to a friend in 1923. “California is a queer place,” he wrote. “In a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort… It’s sort of crazy-sensible.”
And so, over the Columbus Day weekend, my girlfriend Pat and I found ourselves motoring northeast several hours from LA to the Sierra Nevada — spectacular mountain vistas topping barren sagebrush desert. We went to visit my friend Louis Fantasia, who this summer became president of Deep Springs College, an alternative institution of higher learning nestled in a valley between the White and Inyo Mountain ranges.
Deep Springs is a remarkable place, a working cattle ranch and alfalfa farm as well as a school, albeit one with only 26 students, all male. Over the course of a two-year curriculum, they work the ranch and pursue an intense, classical course of study, all of it in magnificent isolation. Communication with the outside world is limited, visitors are few. And yet competition for admission is fierce. To earn a place at Deep Springs is to enter an order of fine, young, unusual — even eccentric — thinkers.
On a ranch and farm such as Deep Springs, the Four H’s don’t stand for Head, Heart, Hands and Health, but Heidegger, Hegel, Hannah Arendt and Husserl, the German father of phenomenology. Conversation over dinner can revolve around a discussion of John Locke and Thucydides as easily as it can be about a mare due to foal or a truck’s busted carburetor. Our weekend visit prompted debate among some of the students as to whether we were the human embodiment of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle — was our very presence there as observers altering the Deep Springs ethos? Of course.
There’s an element of California fantasy to this rarefied isolation. For all its academic excellence, for all its merit and intrinsic value, in some respects, Deep Springs is almost as much a scene of make-believe as the nearby town of Lone Pine, California. Using the surrounding spare and rocky terrain for exteriors, hundreds of Hollywood westerns and such films as “Gunga Din,” “Star Trek V” and “Gladiator” have been made there. At the town’s Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Film History, there’s a vibrant array of movie posters and cowboy hats, the monsters from “Tremors,” the car Humphrey Bogart drove in “High Sierra.”
But during World War II, while Deep Springers herded livestock and learned Heraclitus, while movie cameras ground away filming Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, there was something else happening nearby that was very real. On our way back to Los Angeles, driving through Owens Valley, we stopped at the Manzanar Relocation Center.
In 1942, fearing espionage and sabotage in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the United States government ordered the removal of 110,000 Japanese from the Pacific Coast states and transferred them to internment camps. All they were allowed to take with them was what they could carry. Manzanar housed 10,000 of them, crowding men, women and children into hastily constructed barracks through which the cold winds whistled and duststorms spread a never-ending layer of grit.
We visited the National Park Service interpretive center there, housed in Manzanar’s former auditorium and gymnasium. We watched a short film about the camp. The image that most startled me was home movie footage of a group of little Japanese kids dressed like the Founding Fathers, in knee pants and powdered wigs made of cotton wadding, holding a patriotic pageant despite their imprisonment.
It was a reminder of today’s reality, when once again we debate the limits of surveillance and the fairness of unlimited detention and secret prisons. Once again, civil liberties — the constitutional guarantees those little kids were celebrating in their pageant — are threatened in a time of crisis, uncertainty and hysteria.
Not a single one of the Japanese detained was ever convicted of an act of treason or terror. We look back at how they were treated in horror and dismay. Chances are, one of these days we’ll realize that in the name of security we’ve done it once again — to ourselves, our freedoms and our values — and be just as appalled. We’ll see that much of our current fear is as unfounded as the fright that sixty-five years ago fueled paranoia about “The Jap Peril,” that we’re basing our trepidation and panic on a scenario as phony as any Hollywood fantasy.
As we left the Manzanar interpretive center, a Park Service employee at the gift shop was swearing in a young Japanese-American boy, making him an official Junior Ranger. She handed him a gold badge. He was shyly proud. All of us applauded.
copyright 2007 Michael Winship
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