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 raped 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 our 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 contemplated 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).
