Welcome
to ‘Hotel California’ | The American Spectator
When I was a kid growing up in
New York, California beckoned as an idyllic place of beaches, wine, wildflowers,
and beautiful people. It was the land of “good vibrations,” “surfer girls,” and
little “deuce coupes.”
I distinctly recall watching the Rose Parade from a
cold couch in the winter of 1978, wondering where on Earth they had gotten all
those flowers. Years later, after driving cross country in my 1992 Suzuki
Samurai, I sat atop a sand dune in Malibu and thought I had reached
paradise.
I took in the natural wonders of California like air:
Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Redwood Park, Death Valley, Half Dome, Monterey, Napa,
China Beach.
On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas rising up through the
air*
There are parts of the Pacific Coast Highway that
routinely move me to tears, particularly at sunset, when the evening tide bathes
the beach heads in a brilliant palette of pink and vermillion. This is a place
of astonishing beauty, but I’ve come to realize that it is also “a terrible
beauty,” to quote W. B. Yeats.
Up ahead in the distance,
I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my
sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night.
After more than 20 years here, the landscape has
changed. Rarely does a day pass when I do not encounter the genderless homeless
and their dogs encamped at a traffic signal or in the littered brush at the edge
of a parking lot. Errant shopping carts routinely make their way from local
markets to freeway underpasses, where they function as the support columns for
an endless tract of tent homes. Sleeping bags, plastic bags, poly tarps, and
cardboard are the cooperative building materials of the street.
With a burgeoning homeless population of some 50,000, Los Angeles now boasts one
of the largest unsheltered communities in the United
States. It is a rough group of heroin addicts, prostitutes, the mentally ill,
and folks who are simply down and out in Tinseltown.
There she stood in the
doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself
“This could be heaven or this could be Hell”
According to the Los
Angeles Times, the city’s homeless population has surged 75 percent in six years, and it’s evident
everywhere. This notoriously hip, rich, and progressive place has an ugly
underbelly of filth and disease. Residents walk their dogs with pet boots in
downtown L.A., not because it’s trendy but to protect them from Hepatitis A,
which has blanketed Skid Row. The unsightly settlements have become as much a
part of the California scene as wet suits and board racks.
“Welcome to the Hotel
California
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face.”
One UN housing official who visited homeless sites in
both L.A. and San Francisco was so shocked by the conditions, she suggested that
California was in violation of international human rights law. It’s an
astonishing assertion for a state that is home to places like Atherton, where
the median price for a house is upwards of $10 million and reserved exclusively
for the likes of tech tycoons like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and former
Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Her mind is
Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes Benz
She got a
lot of pretty, pretty boys that she calls friends
It’s no secret that the “City by the Bay” is also
littered with trash, needles, and feces. Other parts of the Golden State are
plagued by gangs, drug trafficking, illegal immigration, child prostitution, and
people smuggling. Violent crime in California has increased
over the past two years, and in some cities, like Sacramento, murder, robbery and rape are
rising at twice the national average.
How they dance in the
courtyard, sweet summer sweat
Some dance to remember,
some dance to forget
So, where are the resources? Where is the money?
Where are the priorities? And, most important of all, where is the outrage?
They livin’ it up at the
Hotel California
What a nice surprise, bring your
alibis
Make no mistake, this is a one-party state. The
Democrats have presided over the California Legislature for 40 years. The State
Controller has been a Democrat for over 44 years. There has not been a
Republican senator elected from the state in over 25 years. There has not been a
Republican attorney general or a Republican state treasurer in over two
decades.
So I called up the
Captain,
“Please bring me my wine”
He said, “We haven’t had that spirit here since
1969”
Clearly, the charade of inclusiveness has proven to
be a brilliant disguise for political power. Caring more about those who “live
in the shadows” than those who “live in the streets” has won elections.
Politicking by identity has kept homogenous groups within their respective
sanctums for maximum exploitation as the rush to the moral high ground has left
countless Californians in the gutter.
Mirrors on the
ceiling,
The pink
champagne on ice
And she said, “We are all just
prisoners here, of our own device”
Ironically, the Free Speech Movement was born in this
state more 50 years ago. But in 2019, it has been choked off and muzzled. There
is no healthy debate here — no passionate discourse, no differing opinions, and
no democratic process. California is in the throes of the greatest economic,
political, and public monopoly in the history of this country. And it’s failing
miserably.
And in the master’s
chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast
As a conservative living in Los Angeles for the past
20 years, my vote has had little impact — and yet election after election I have
religiously cast it, in the hopes that one day the partisan stranglehold will be
broken. The dupe of victimization runs deep, however. The outrage mobs, the
oppression orthodoxy, and the redistribution of sound judgment have kept all of
us in shackles.
From a gallon of gas to a gallon of water, the cost
of living is scandalous. We find ourselves in a grossly overpriced one-star
hotel from which residents are checking out and leaving en masse — to Arizona, Nevada, and Texas to escape
high taxes, unsafe neighborhoods, failing schools, a wall of debt, a pension
crisis, and a political ruling class that has neither the guts nor the will to
effect change.
Last thing I remember, I
was
Running for the door
I
had to find the passage back to the place I was before
The bright lights of family, civility, and
entrepreneurship are flickering. Opposing voices are consistently cast into the
wilderness, and even the Rose Parade doesn’t look or sound the same.
“Relax,” said the night
man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!”
Ballot after ballot, proposition after proposition,
the names and the dollar amounts change, but the policies stay the same — as the
splendor of the cityscapes, the vibrance of the coast, and the allure of the
once-beautiful rustic towns and communities slip into a steady chorus of
deterioration, degradation, and decay.
“Welcome to the Hotel
California….
We are
all just prisoners here of our own device.”
The greatest tragedy, of course, is that it doesn’t
have to be this way here — or anywhere else in America.
*Songwriters: Don Felder / Don Henley / Glenn Frey.
Hotel California lyrics © Universal Music Publishing
Group.
