It’s Great to Be Back Home but It’s the Same Old Story

To quote from a nearly forgotten Paul Simon song, “Gee, but it’s great to be back home.”

Spend five days in a motel room in Pittsburgh, awaken to drizzle and gray skies and then be held captive by the Clarence Thomas hearings on television, and you wonder why Pittsburghers left and right weren’t leaping off bridges into the Ohio, Monongahela and Allegheny rivers outside Three Rivers Stadium.

Not even clean towels and sheets every day could break a pall like that.

It looks like a cold winter in Pittsburgh. The Pirates are losers, the economy is struggling, the papers talked of a local tax revolt and union workers at one company were trying to decide whether a strike would save them or kill them. The owners of a large apartment complex were accused of racial discrimination against prospective tenants and, of course, there was the usual assorted mayhem of people versus people.

But, hey, that’s the East. Anyone who lives west of Chicago knows those civilizations are dying, if not dead. We westerners smugly tell ourselves that their efforts at trying to create any semblance of a workable society were overwhelmed long ago.

There’s an intensity and vague suggestion of grimness back East that is palpably different from what you feel out here. Pittsburgh surely doesn’t represent that intensity at its fullest--you have to keep moving east to continue absorbing the incremental escalation of tension--but you definitely know you’re not in Mission Viejo. And so, while you’re back there, you convince yourself there must be something to this westward migration, as if the historic following-of-the-sun transmigration from East to West does soften the soul as well as give people a chance to re-create themselves and avoid mistakes of the past.

The European settlers were certain they were going to create a better society in the colonies; similarly, the colonists were going to better their lot as they headed for the Midwest; the plainsmen were going to create a brave new world in the West. The mistakes of the past had been laid out for them to examine; their task was to finally get it right.

And so you touch down at LAX and instead of the slate-gray skies of the Steel City you have the sunshine and promise of California. You picture the waves of newcomers to California in generations past and realize that while they felt limited in the East and Midwest, they undoubtedly felt freer and less fettered in the West than they ever had in their lives.

If there was ever a place to build a society and finally perfect it, California had to be the chosen land. And Southern California even got a bonus opportunity: that is, even if Los Angeles couldn’t get it right, Orange County would. We could watch Los Angeles, see what it had done wrong and perfect life to the nth degree.

And then you get your feet solidly on the ground and take a look around at this great new society that is unfolding around us.

Here are some of the manifestations of Orange County life, just culled from a week or so of recent headlines:

* A teen-age skinhead is sent to jail for beating up an Chinese-American and two of his friends. The skinhead, one of a large group who attacked the other three, is an unabashed neo-Nazi devotee.

* A man is sentenced for swinging a baseball bat at gay demonstrators.

* A half-million dollars’ worth of drugs is seized in Fullerton.

* A man is charged with fatally poisoning his then-wife.

* A woman is convicted of running over her stepdaughter’s husband with her car.

* Two 14-year-olds are arrested in the accidental shooting of a friend.

* A woman shoots her two young daughters in their beds.

* Santa Ana police are looking for the latest suspects in a gang drive-by shooting.

* A woman in Anaheim is clubbed in the head, then set afire.

Yes, these are the exceptions, the evil or tormented misfits in our society. But how many of them can we endure and still claim that we live in a civilized world?

Even though we can gaze longer and into a brighter sun here in the West and still talk of opportunity and our boundless enthusiasm for the future, the day is past when we have any claims to social superiority on our eastern brethren. We monitored their slide toward unlivability, fled from it and then watched as history repeated itself right under our noses.

The worst part of all is that when you look westward from here, perhaps seeking one final place to go where we can finally get it right, you see this big blue body of water. You realize your back is to the wall. This is as good as it’s going to get.

And you ask one last question: Is it too late to volunteer for Biosphere II?