Recall gives the East Coast yet another excuse to snipe

As if dreadful summer weather, a mid-August blackout and the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were not depressing enough, the East Coast media must be about to apply for a collective prescription of Prozac now that the California gubernatorial recall campaign is winding down.

The heavyweights on the Hudson have long taken special delight in ridiculing what they variously call “the Left Coast,” “La-La Land” and “the land of fruits and nuts,” and the recall has given them their biggest opportunity to poke fun at us since -- well, since Ronald Reagan first ran for governor.

All summer, recall stories emanating from the East Coast have been filled with words like “outrage,” “embarrassment,” “car wreck,” “circus,” “freak show,” “farce” and “guffawing.”

Now, thanks to Tuesday’s federal appeals court decision, there are only nine more sniping days till Christmas ... er, election day.

To be fair, the recall is something of a farce, and many of the candidates are worth a guffaw or two. I mean, when was the last time a candidate for the governorship of anything used the slogan “Finally, a governor you can get drunk with”?

Even California news organizations -- The Times among them -- have been unable to resist pointing out, in various ways, that this campaign more closely resembles the theater of the absurd than an election for the leader of the world’s sixth-largest economy.

But the Eastern media made a habit -- an obsession -- of ridiculing California long before anyone ever heard of Gary Coleman. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, in particular, has practically made California-bashing a regular feature.

“You know you’re in trouble when the folks out in California start making sense” is the way one 2001 editorial began.

“A Los Angeles County official has given new meaning to the term space cadet” was the first sentence of another.

The Journal is an equal-opportunity basher when it comes to California, pillorying Gov. Davis, the University of California Board of Regents, the Coastal Commission, the California Supreme Court, movie studios, “the People’s Republic of Santa Monica” and the Public Utilities Commission -- among many others -- with indiscriminate abandon.

During the energy crisis of 2000-01, the Journal consistently editorialized that it was all the fault of Gov. Davis and other state officials, conveniently excusing the far greater role played by energy companies like Enron.

“Enron’s traders were merely taking advantage of the opportunities that California’s regulators gave them,” one Journal editorial said.

In another editorial during that period, the Journal called California “the Alfred E. Neuman state,” “the state that gave us the Beverly Hills diet” and a state that “has come to look like a hapless banana republic.”

Hot tubs, gold chains

Given the liberal tilt to California politics in recent years -- and the positioning of the Journal editorial page just to the right of Attila the Hun -- it’s probably not surprising that the Wall Street editorialists would lash out at us so frequently and so venomously. But the New York Times serves a generally liberal audience, and even before the recall, the Times also enjoyed jabbing California -- and Los Angeles in particular.

Charlie LeDuff came to the paper’s bureau here about this time last year and was quick to open fire. Los Angeles, he wrote, was “an insipid backwater” with rush hour 24 hours a day and a heartless attitude toward the homeless.

New York-based magazines and television networks have long made a cottage industry of dumping on Los Angeles. I can remember David Browning, then senior producer here for the “CBS Evening News,” telling me a number of years ago that most New York news executives thought, “You people are all sitting in hot tubs, wearing gold chains around your necks and eating alfalfa.”

Of course, every February -- when the weather is cold and snowy in New York -- these same executives quickly find an excuse to come to Los Angeles to review their troops and examine firsthand the latest trends. They insist that their local bureau chiefs arrange for them to have dinner at Spago with a couple of movie stars and then they “go back to New York and talk about how shallow we are,” as Peter Greenberg, a former Newsweek correspondent here, once told me.

So what is it about California -- and Los Angeles -- that so troubles New York journalists?

Well, for one thing, we are -- sometimes -- easy to laugh at. This city and this state have had more than their share of kooks and of kooky trends. But so has New York. You want bizarre exotica? How about a former governor of New York, the scion of one of the richest and most famous families in American history, dropping dead in the midst of sex with a mistress almost 50 years his junior? How about the city banning soft drinks from the schools, then making Snapple -- which has more calories and more sugar than most soft drinks -- the city’s official beverage ... and agreeing to sell it in the schools.

The most obvious explanation for the journalistic jibes tossed our way is, of course, envy. Our weather is better than New York’s. So are our colleges and universities. We have a greater entrepreneurial spirit and a culture that is less regimented by tradition. Our population is greater, our women are prettier -- and, most important of all, we are the future.

New York is a wonderful, exciting city, and it’s long been the financial, communications and cultural hub of the country. I’ve spent more time there than in any other city in the world outside Los Angeles. But New York is an old city, having drawn largely on Europe for its inspiration and its immigration. I say that as a committed Europhile -- committed but not blind. Ultimately, Europe is yesterday; Asia and Latin America are tomorrow -- and California is the gateway to (and from) both.

But I’d be as guilty of chauvinism as New Yorkers are if I ascribed their denigration of Los Angeles and California primarily to envy. A better explanation might be the arrogance, solipsism and parochialism for which New Yorkers are justifiably well known.

A longtime friend who lived here for nine years before moving to New York demonstrated this attitude recently over dinner in New York, when the success of the annual Festival of Books here was mentioned.

“Of course, a lot of people go to it ... and buy books there,” my friend said. “There’s nothing else to do in L.A. And there are no bookstores there.”

Right.

If we can make it here

A couple of weeks ago, I asked R.W. (Johnny) Apple, the longtime political reporter and globe-trotting cultural correspondent for the New York Times, why he thought New Yorkers take such pleasure in mocking us.

He attributed it to a blend of envy and arrogance that he chose to call “resentment.”

“New York is not the No. 1 state in population anymore, and it drives them crazy,” he said. “It’s hard for New Yorkers not to think of themselves as being -- and having -- the biggest and best of everything.”

Besides, Apple said, New Yorkers have long felt “people who make it in California, especially Southern California, are not to be taken seriously because they’re really buffoons.”

Apple traces this perception to the early movie days of Samuel Goldwyn, whose malapropisms were almost as numerous as his successes. (Goldwyn is widely credited with such observations as “That makes me so sore it gets my dandruff up,” “If I could drop dead right now, I’d be the happiest man alive” and “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”)

Over time, Apple said, the movie business itself became a major factor in the resentment that many New Yorkers feel toward Los Angeles.

“It’s glamorous,” he said, “and glamour is one of the big things that New York sells, and believes, about itself.”

That’s why New Yorkers have singled out Los Angeles for abuse. No one has ever said Chicago, for example, was glamorous, and Chicago has never really seen itself as a competitor to New York -- hence its longtime self-designation as “The Second City.”

Maybe if Woody Allen ran for governor of New York, the Eastern media would feel better -- and leave us alone.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.