| War-torn Iraq
has about 26 million residents, a peaceful California perhaps now 35 million.
The former is a violent and impoverished landscape; the latter said to be
paradise on Earth. But how you envision either place to some degree depends on
the eye of the beholder and is predicated on what the daily media appear to
make of each.
As a fifth-generation
Californian, I deeply love this state, but still imagine what the reaction
would be if the world awoke each morning to be told that once again there were
six more murders, 27 rapes, 38 arsons, 180 robberies, and 360 instances of
assault in California - yesterday, today, tomorrow, and every day. I wonder if
the headlines would scream about "Nearly 200 poor Californians butchered
again this month!"
How about a monthly media dose
of "600 women rap ed in February alone!" Or try, "Over 600
violent robberies and assaults in March, with no end in sight!" Those do
not even make up all of the state's yearly 200,000 violent acts that law
enforcement knows about.
Iraq's judicial system seems a
mess. On the eve of the war, Saddam let out 100,000 inmates from his vast
prison archipelago. He himself still sits in the dock months after his trial
began. But imagine an Iraq with a penal system like California's with 170,000
criminals - an inmate population larger than those of Germany, France, the
Netherlands, and Singapore combined.
Just to house such a shadow
population costs our state nearly $7 billion a year - or about the same price
of keeping 40,000 Army personnel per year in Iraq. What would be the image of
our Golden State if we were reminded each morning, "Another $20 million
spent today on housing ou r criminals"?
Some of California's most recent
prison scandals would be easy to sensationalize: "Guards watch as inmates
are raped!" Or "Correction officer accused of having sex with
under-aged detainee!" And apropos of Saddam's sluggish trial, remember
that our home state multiple murderer, Tookie Williams, was finally executed in
December 2005 - 26 years after he was originally sentenced.
Much is made of the inability to
patrol Iraq's borders with Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and
Turkey. But California has only a single border with a foreign nation, not six.
Yet over 3 million foreigners who sneaked in illegally now live in our state.
Worse, there are about 15,000 convicted alien felons incarcerated in our penal
system, costing about $500 million a year. Imagine the potential tabloid
headlines: "Illegal aliens in state comprise population larger than San
Francisco!" or "Drugs, criminals, and smugglers given free pass into
California!"
Every year, over 4,000
Californians die in car crashes - nearly twice the number of Americans lost so
far in three years of combat operations in Iraq. In some sense, then, our badly
maintained roads, and often poorly trained and sometimes intoxicated drivers,
are even more lethal than Improvised Explosive Devices. Perhaps tomorrow's
headline might scream out at us: "300 Californians to perish this month on
state highways! Hundreds more will be maimed and crippled!"
In 2001, California had 32 days
of power outages, despite paying nearly the highest rates for electricity in
the United States. Before complaining about the smoke in Baghdad rising from
private generators, think back to the run on generators in California when they
were contempla ted as a future part of every household's line of
defense.
We're told that Iraq's finances
are a mess. Yet until recently, so were California's. Two years ago, Governor
Schwarzenegger inherited a $38 billion annual budget shortfall. That could have
made for strong morning newscast teasers: "Another $100 million borrowed
today - $3 billion more in red ink to pile up by month's end!"
So is California comparable to
Iraq? Hardly. Yet it could easily be sketched by a reporter intent on doing so
as a bankrupt, crime-ridden den with murderous highways, tens of thousands of
inmates, with wide-open borders.
I myself recently returned home
to California, without incident, from a visit to Iraq's notorious Sunni
Triangle. While I was gone, a drug-addicted criminal with a long list of
convictions broke into our kitchen at 4 a.m., was surprised by my wife and
daughter, and fled with our credit cards, cash, keys, and cell phones.
Sometimes I wonder who really
was safer that week.
©2006 Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a Professor
Emeritus at California University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated
columnist for Tribune Media Services.
He was a full-time farmer
before joining California State University, Fresno, in 1984 to initiate a
classics program. In 1991, he was awarded an American Philological Association
Excellence in Teaching Award, which is given yearly to the country's top
undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin.
Hanson was a National
Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the
Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992-93), a visiting professor of
classics at Stanford University (1991-92), a recipient of the Eric Breindel
Award for opinion journalism (2002), and an Alexander Onassis Fellow (2001) and
was named alumnus of the year of the University of California, Santa Cruz
(2002). He was also the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S.
Naval Academy, Annapolis , Maryland (2002-3).
|
