“I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that,” Roy says, surveying his suburban idyll in Orange County’s great master-planned community. “You’ve gotta find your Irvine.”

Nyles, who is in existential despair, is dubious. “I don’t have an Irvine.”

“We all have an Irvine,” Roy says.

The apocalypse, for Roy and Nyles—characters in the genre-bending sci-fi comedy film Palm Springs—is the result of wandering into the wrong cave in the Coachella Valley, after which they find themselves stuck re-living the same day over and over again. Roy, who bitterly blames Nyles for their “Groundhog Day” predicament, at first spends this endless time loop traveling from Irvine to the desert, where he tortures and kills Nyles, over and over again.

But late in the film, Nyles for the first time goes to Irvine, where he finds Roy unexpectedly content. Roy explains that he has overcome his homicidal impulses and learned to accept his strange existence. His peace of mind comes from embracing the chance to re-live the same day with his wife and twin children.

Do we all have that place, our own Irvine? And if so, how can we access it?

Those might be the great questions of this moment. What does it take to find some space and contentment as the world collapses around us? How does one find solace as basic social structures melt down?

It’s hard to be optimistic. After all, few of us could afford the real Irvine—where the median home price is north of $900,000, and the average monthly rent is approaching $2,500—even before COVID scrambled our lives, jobs, and schools. For Californians, the struggle to hold on to whatever meager piece of this state we currently have is an exhausting one.

Indeed, the version of the human predicament that Palm Springs offers us—stuck in a never-ending day of anxiety, phony love, violence, and bad weddings—is frightening, but nowhere near as scary as California’s future prospects.

Earlier this fall, the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank, constructed four future scenarios based on workshops and extensive study. The visions are pretty dark.

The map and documents produced by the institute describe California, and American society more broadly, as stuck in its own endless loop. Our public spaces have been privatized and commercialized, undermining the civic sphere. Our educational institutions may produce some skilled workers, but not well-informed citizens. Our culture has been consumed by celebrity, and polarized. The health system is wasteful, expensive, ineffective, and unequal. Skepticism has been weaponized against science. And our political system is devolving into authoritarianism.

The pandemic has exposed these failures, and deepened them, laying bare the underlying fragility of our institutions. Our economic losses have erased the last decade’s growth, and our job losses are likely to be worse than other states’. Inequality is growing under COVID and our social fabric and supply chains are breaking. California’s ability to recover is deeply dependent on a robust and thoughtful pandemic response from our politically divided national government.

Even the more optimistic of the Institute for the Future’s four scenarios are dark.

The “Growth: Saving Capitalists” scenario shows fiscal stimulus restoring much of the economy, but without badly needed structural change. Employment would be slow to recover, in part because companies would turn to job automation rather than re-hiring workers. Educational and income divides would grow, and the benefits of the recovery would predominantly go to rich people and politically powerful sectors, like the tech companies and airlines. Low-wage workers would be shadowed by greater debt, mental illness, and unstable employment.

A “Constraint: Germ Pods” scenario envisions the reorganization of society around data systems and algorithms that entrench existing wealth and racial inequalities, and introduce new inequalities. This would be a segregated health dystopia. Under the guise of protecting people from disease and new pandemics, society would segment into geographic and digital clusters, or “germ pods,” separating those with access to testing and treatment from those without. The resulting discrimination—with separate schools, jobs, and public facilities based on your health status—would be justified on the basis of protecting public health and safety.

That sounds like paradise compared to the darkest scenario, “Collapse: Ungoverning,” in which military-style confrontation becomes routine in our streets. COVID-19 triggers more systemic collapses across the country, and the battle lines are drawn: “Red Hats against Blue Masks, militant police against unprecedented numbers of protestors, armed vigilantes against all calls for unity and a new order.” Mass deaths becomes acceptable, and with Red Hats dominating government, every city sees blue guerilla warfare. Police and military organizations divide, and fight each other.

“By 2030, the union is mortally fractured along political lines: cities, states, and regions are governed not by a single sovereign nation, but by a thicket of tenuous inter-jurisdictional agreements and looming violence,” the scenario map document reads.

The only ray of light comes from the “Transformation: Social Solidarity” scenario, and it feels improbable. Under this scenario, systemic breakdowns during the pandemic inspire a renewed public commitment to broad social agendas, and to greater collective well-being. The mutual aid arrangements of today evolve into new income and health supports, and society begins to transform and redesign its broken systems. Public education is reinvented around experiential learning, while new digital governance structures, including data unions, protect privacy and marshal digital power for civic purposes.

By 2030, a Global New Deal has emerged around “universal basic assets—every human’s right to the core resources that are essential to well-being.”

All four scenarios suggest that the future will turn on how we address our broken systems and faltering institutions. And the Institute for the Future argues for replacement over repair of systems. “Whether we simply shore them up as best we can or make major structural changes, will largely determine whether we see a decade of renewed growth or collapse, a reckoning with long-term limits to growth, or a deep shift in both economy and culture,” reads the Institute’s map of the scenarios.

The next decade, the map adds, “will call on us to find our way through the multiple collapsing systems.” And as these systems fail, “they also open pathways to something new—to truly bold visions of transformation that reinvent the way we work as a society, as an economy, and as friends and neighbors.”

California does have success in creating master planned communities, like Irvine. Now we need a plan for recreating essential social systems. In other words, our Irvine isn’t just sitting out there waiting for us to find it. Instead, we’ll have to imagine and build new Irvines for ourselves.

The post ‘We All Have an Irvine’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California has a peculiar peril: Our state is becoming too rich for its own good.

For evidence, just look at Orange County.

The dangers of too much wealth have not been much of a topic this fall as the county of 3.2 million—more than the population of 21 states—hosts a national political war over control of Congress. But they should be. Because, for all the conversation about our state’s considerable problems with poverty, today’s wealth may be a greater threat to California’s future.

By the statistics, Orange County looks as flawless as any of the toned bodies on the beach at Corona del Mar. It has a GDP greater than that of smaller European countries like Greece or Portugal; unemployment is at just 3 percent; and the median income approaches $90,000—which is $25,000 higher than the state figure.

But O.C.’s economic beauty is only skin deep. Beneath the surface lies a heart that is old and beating too slow. Orange County’s comfortable wealth may be robbing it of its dynamism.

The wealth we hold in our housing is central to the problem. Orange County, like California itself, should be a place where everyone wants to live. But it’s so expensive to live there that, for most of the last two decades, more people have been leaving the county for other parts of the U.S. than have been moving into it. Orange County is also a place where you should want to raise your kids; the schools are good, and dropout rates are low. But, with the high cost of living and declining births, school enrollment and the number of young children have fallen.

One result: Orange County is in danger of getting dumber. Some regional analysts have warned of a “brain drain,” as the county’s millennial population shrinks. That means Orange County is not developing its next generation of residents and workers—and is in fact losing many of the young people who graduate its universities with technical degrees.

The problem is not a lack of jobs. To the contrary, the labor market is impossibly tight, with employers in surveys complaining about the extreme difficulties of hiring educated workers with the right skills. A workforce report released late last year by the Orange County Development Board and the Orange County Business Council warned: “A less robust workforce talent pool could make Orange County a less attractive destination for businesses.”

In some ways, there may be too many jobs there. National political reporters, as they descend on the political battleground, lazily call Orange County a giant suburb, but it actually profiles more like an urban job center. While spending considerable time in the county recently, I was struck by all the office space under construction: more than 1.5 million square feet.

The nature of those jobs contributes to the county’s problems. Orange County hasn’t developed the robust and innovative tech sector of other wealthy American places. Instead, what distinguishes Orange County is the high percentage of its workers who are in high-paying professional services posts, from finance to accounting. But those higher-paying job categories are stagnating, while there is robust growth among much lower-paying job categories—in tourism, leisure, construction, and, to some extent, healthcare. The real growth in jobs in Orange County in the next decade, according to state projections, will be low-paying ones in food preparation and service, personal care aides, and retail sales.

Already, many of those workers can’t afford to live in Orange County, so they commute in from neighboring, and cheaper, Riverside and Los Angeles counties. Earlier this year, the UCLA Anderson Forecast found that, for the first time on record, Orange County has more local jobs than it has people to fill them. (Orange County is hardly alone in this; Silicon Valley faces the same problem.)

And that puts pressure on a major Orange County weakness that also hasn’t been much of an issue in this fall’s political campaigns: transportation. Orange County, despite being a job center and a crossroads between counties in Southern California, has been irresponsibly cheap when it comes to building its infrastructure. Orange County residents declined to build an international airport at El Toro when they had a chance. The limited train service in the county doesn’t connect the different parts of the county well, and even its freeways mostly run north-south. It’s nothing close to the center of transportation it should be.

Lack of connection contributes to a divide. Jerry Nickelsburg, the director of the Anderson Forecast, says that Orange County is not one economy but two. There is the low-paying leisure and hospitality economy dominated by Disney on the north side of the county. The other involves finance, aerospace, and some tech around Irvine and Newport (with a branch in Seal Beach).

That north county economy has been getting national attention, via political and union organizing to raise the wages of people who work in and around the Disney complex. But Orange County’s richer southern precincts are aging rapidly into irrelevance. Those communities struggle to find enough construction workers for building projects, especially those that serve the surging population of senior citizens.

Such trends, if not reversed, do more than explain today’s political divisions. They foretell a more divided future for one of California’s most beautiful places. How can the poorer north county get the resources it requires when O.C.’s politics and economy are dominated by the richer south? And what kind of representation is possible when more of the people who do the work in Orange County don’t live there?

A recession could further darken the picture, especially if it cuts hard into the professional services sector. Economic slowdown would probably further hurt manufacturing (of things like aerospace parts and nutritional supplements) and local government sectors that have seen declines in employment.

Automation in retail, a major industry for a county with fantastic malls like Fashion Island, also looms as a threat. Even tourism has shown some vulnerability, with hotel occupancy rates and the number of passengers at John Wayne Airport leveling off. (Perhaps Galaxy’s Edge, the new Star Wars-themed land scheduled to open at Disneyland next summer, could spark new growth and a more futuristic local outlook.)

A more fundamental problem is the lack of dynamism. The rate at which Orange County creates new businesses has been on a long-term decline. This reflects aging and slowing immigration in the county. Since those same trends exist across the state, California could become much less vital and entrepreneurial, too.

So while it’s interesting that so many young activists and political operatives from across the country have come to Orange County for campaign season, it would be much better if they could stick around, and start new families and new enterprises.

The post Is Orange County Too Rich For its Own Good? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ethnic enclaves are commonplace in the United States, but this announcement felt like an epic diplomatic triumph against all odds, because it put the name “Saigon” back on the map. Several months after the city fell to the communist North Vietnamese Army in April 1975, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, after the communist revolutionary leader. In Westminster, surrounded by flags no longer flown in Vietnam, most of the 400 Vietnamese-American attendees, well aware of the external intervention necessary to preserve their exiled collective memory, were elated to finally see their former capital city’s name on a road sign. “Only in America is Saigon being resurrected,” said local politician Van Tran.

It was perhaps only in a place like Westminster, a town of less than 100,000 located just minutes from Disneyland, that “Little Saigon” could become a reality and sustain itself well into the post-Cold War era, with its culture and memorials dedicated to a conflict that most Americans would rather forget.

Tran’s statement, while true, would have been unthinkable 15 years prior, before refugees transformed the 9000 block of Bolsa Avenue from a mostly white, semi-rural strip into the unofficial capital of the Vietnamese diaspora. Just as importantly, in American culture at large the very idea of “Vietnam” had been consigned to the Dark Age of American history, so that refugees had to be careful celebrating even benign occasions like the Tet lunar new year on U.S. soil. Little Saigon’s social history speaks volumes about the complex bonds and activism at the local level in Orange County that were needed to build and maintain an ethnic enclave synonymous with exile politics.

But by 1988, with the blessing of the governor, Vietnamese Americans were suddenly in a position to transform a local celebration into a symbolic statement suggesting that maybe they really had won the Vietnam War. Or at least its aftermath. These nominal losers of the war itself had learned to affirm a tragic past by rewriting it. In their own way, they were simply becoming American.

We normally don’t associate exile politics with becoming American, thinking of refugees as sojourners rather than settlers. But the history of the Cold War made the fusion of exile and American identity totally feasible and virtually inevitable.

This fusion resulted from a decision by the United States—starting with the 1948 Displaced Persons Act—to defy the international community by defining refugees in such a narrow way that 90 percent of those admitted during the Cold War hailed from communist republics. In their classic book Calculated Kindness, Gil Loescher and John Scanlan argued that such a strict admission policy was politically designed to highlight global disapproval of the Soviet way of life. It also had an impact domestically. Since the vast majority of refugees from Soviet Bloc countries were adamantly anti-communist themselves, they were free to write their own pre-Cold War national histories onto their new American lives.

Ukrainians, the single-largest beneficiary of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, befriended Columbia University history professor Clarence Manning, who wrote nine books on their pre-Soviet culture. It took only eight Hungarian Americans to successfully petition the Denver city council in 1963 to dedicate a park to those who perished in the short-lived revolution of 1956. Because of the politics of Cold War migration, it did not take long for Florida’s Cuban population to become ideologically homogeneous. That the United States operated anti-communist media like Radio Martí that employed some Cuban refugees made it clear that there was no contradiction between being an exile and becoming American.

By the time the Vietnamese refugees arrived in mass in 1975, a pattern was established whereby entire ethnic enclaves functioned as transnational opposition parties to America’s communist adversaries. Because Cold War tensions poisoned most attempts to establish formal diplomatic ties with many communist states, refugee communities could often proudly and publicly espouse their claim to the lost homeland with near impunity, protected not only by the First Amendment, but also the unofficial blessing of Uncle Sam.

Thus, these Cold War traditions led to generations of Vietnamese in the refugee diaspora standing at attention to a flag, an anthem, and other symbols no longer associated with an existing nation-state. They could be assured that hardly any Vietnamese or Americans would point out the contradiction.

For a nascent neoconservative movement in the United States, regime change replaced détente as the foreign policy objective. During his 1976 bid for the presidency, neoconservative upstart Ronald Reagan audaciously met in Florida with exile leaders from Panama and Cuba hoping to plot another invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Though he failed to win his party’s nomination that year, Reagan’s hardline rhetoric pressured the incumbent Gerald R. Ford administration to jettison any plans to normalize diplomatic relations with the Hanoi government.

After the Cold War ended, exile politics shifted—and were reinvigorated—by a new threat: Globalization was transforming Little Saigon into Little Ho Chi Minh City. The refugees still had numbers in their favor, especially with the influx in the 1990s of more than 100,000 former political prisoners from Vietnam. But they had to contend with a post-Cold War world in which Vietnam had become America’s newest trading partner. In liberal-leaning Seattle and Boston, Vietnamese political prisoners longing to enjoy in exile the cherished cultural symbols and practices banned in their home country were met with disappointment.

The shift in politics became clear in 1995 when Westminster attempted to erect a Vietnamese-American Veterans Memorial. It was Westminster city councilman Tony Lam, famous for being the first American elected official of Vietnamese descent, who proposed building a special statue to honor the sacrifice of both American and South Vietnamese soldiers during the war. Internal divisions among Vietnamese people in the city stalled the project. Then the Anglo population was reluctant to get behind a project that placed Vietnamese soldiers—whom most Americans collectively remember as inadequate allies at best—on an equal footing with the U.S. military.

This was not a new objection. Six years before the monument was proposed, Westminster city councilman Frank Frye convinced the city to reject a parade honoring South Vietnamese soldiers, whereupon he proceeded to lecture the refugee organizers by telling them, “It is my opinion that you’re American, and you’d better be American. If you want to be South Vietnamese, go back to South Vietnam.”

Ironically, Frye’s reputation for such politically incorrect statements gave the new plans for the memorial a boost when, as Mayor of Westminster in 1996, he embraced the project and began convincing white conservatives that it was a good idea. When a protest against a shop owner who displayed a photograph of communist hero Ho Chi Minh energized the Vietnamese community, it became the impetus for a series of concerts to raise the $1 million for the project.

But the momentum for the monument inspired its own backlash. Despite the benefits that Vietnamese businesses provided to Westminster, the majority-white city council, as epitomized by member Margie Rice, had grown weary of exile politics. “I feel like (the Vietnamese) are taking over our city, plain and simple,” Rice said. “I would think that after 20 years or so of being here and being given the freedoms that they want, they would calm down. By God, how long can you go on fighting this war?”

But once the Hanoi government demanded that the city erect a statue featuring American and North Vietnamese (i.e. communist) soldiers shaking hands in the spirit of reconciliation, the city council dropped its objections. Whatever problems that conservatives whites had with rewriting the past to portray South Vietnamese as equal partners with the United States were trivial compared to a much more radical rewriting of the past depicting Americans soldiers and communists seeing eye to eye.

On July 13, 1999, with more than 100 citizens present, the city council voted unanimously to approve the refugee version of the war memorial, which was finally unveiled in April 2003. Social worker and music industry insider Nam Loc Nguyen, who mobilized the community to raise the required funds, considered that effort his proudest accomplishment as a Vietnamese American. As he told me in an interview, “There were 400 Vietnam War memorials, but none of them talked about the Vietnamese soldier. So my dream was to build a memorial for them. All I want is to bring their soul here, so I can look at the memorial and see my friend. And a wife can come pray for her husband.”

And this was but one expression of how refugee identity was not a refusal to assimilate, but rather another way of becoming American. In this case, a refugee American.

The post How the Cold War Fused Exile and American Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the question that occurs after the county government made two recent decisions so stinky that it could be years before the smell wears off.

First, county supervisors voted to oppose state sanctuary laws that provide some peace of mind to the immigrants upon whom Orange County depends economically and socially. In the process, the county aligned itself with President Trump, who has targeted California in a campaign of lies and mass deportation, and against many of the county’s own families.

Second, the county abandoned a plan to house hundreds of homeless people in temporary shelters in Huntington Beach, Laguna Niguel, and Irvine, after protests from people in those cities.

Protecting its own immigrants and providing housing for its own people shouldn’t be a heavy lift for a wealthy county with 3.2 million people—more than the populations of 21 states. After all, Orange County, the sixth most populous in the United States, is one of the richest jurisdictions on earth, with a GDP greater than that of Greece or Portugal, the best shopping anywhere (from South Coast Plaza to Fashion Island), and pioneering master-planned communities. It is a headquarters for Fortune 500 firms and biotech startups. It’s also home to brands that define California style (Oakley and PacSun) and food (In-N-Out), while boasting amenities as awesome as Irvine’s schools, Huntington Beach volleyball, Crystal Cove’s sands, and two Disney parks.

But the recent decisions to abandon the local duty to protect immigrants and the homeless weren’t really news—or even a departure. Orange County has an especially bad case of a California malady: Our local governments simply can’t meet the challenges and standards of our diverse and globally oriented communities. And in no place is the gap in sophistication between government and a locality wider than in Orange County.

“We think of ourselves as Mayberry,” says my friend Fred Smoller, a Chapman University political scientist who is an expert in local government and Orange County, “when we really are closer to Gotham City.”

The Dark Knight’s hometown might seem a strange parallel for a sun-splashed county known for its religiosity, from the late Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral (now headquarters of the Roman Catholic diocese) to Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. But the decisions on immigrants and the homeless reflect Orange County’s fundamental confusion about itself.

The protests against housing for the homeless were particularly jarring, with one organizer quoted as suggesting that the county relocate the homeless “maybe somewhere else in California.” The abandonment of the homelessness plan came the same week the county opened a new $35 million, state-of-the-art shelter for animals, complete with air-conditioned kennels. (The city of Irvine, whose residents have fought against a homeless shelter, also recently announced plans for a new animal shelter.)

Fundamentally, this is a county that is lying to itself, and twisting logic into the pretzel shape of its curviest roads. In opposing the immigrant sanctuary laws, the county supervisors portrayed themselves as patriots honoring federal supremacy—even if it means collaborating with the Trump Administration’s punitive mass deportations that are increasingly targeting non-criminals. But in the next breath, as supervisors dropped the homeless plan, they suggested that they were standing up for local sovereignty in the face of demands by the same federal government: A U.S. district judge has pushed the county to address the homeless issue.

In this and other cases, Orange County officials have portrayed themselves as weak, playing the victim. In the immigration case, they saw themselves as the targets of a state somehow bullying them to protect their own immigrants. In the homeless case, the pretense is that Orange County can’t afford to house a few thousand homeless people. In Costa Mesa, where the city council also opposed new housing for the homeless, Councilman Jim Righeimer declared that, “There’s not enough money, anywhere—anywhere—to take care of people who do not want to take care of themselves.”

Cry me a Santa Ana River.

There is another danger of the county’s Mayberry complex. By clinging to its old image as a collection of NIMBY-ish small towns, and by failing to acknowledge that it has become a sprawling, diverse, heavily urbanized region with big city headaches to match its big city amenities, Orange County has made itself profoundly vulnerable to sophisticated mismanagement and persistent corruption.

Two decades ago, local officials seemed powerless to stop treasurer Robert Citron until his bad investments had bankrupted the county. More recently, the county has been unable to build the infrastructure of a major American urban region, most notably failing to develop an international airport.

And the county has consistently failed to confront public official corruption in its law enforcement structure, even after its previous sheriff went to prison. A long-running scandal has shown that both the district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department “secretly operated unconstitutional scams with jail snitches to win convictions, hid exculpatory evidence from defendants and juries, and, when necessary, committed perjury in hopes of masking the cheating,” as the OC Weekly put it. Judges have condemned the misconduct, which has led so far to the dismissal of 18 cases.

But the district attorney and sheriff haven’t lost their jobs. Instead, these same county law enforcement agencies now claim to be defending California from criminals by siding with the Trump administration’s mass deportation strategies. It’s right to be cynical about this. Is Orange County using the immigration issue to distract from its law enforcement’s own troubles? Or, even worse, are the sheriff and the district attorney trying to curry favor with the federal authorities, and thus blunt federal investigation into their own misconduct?

The county’s Mayberry complex doesn’t just hurt people caught up in the criminal justice system, or the homeless or immigrants. It has given Orange County a government that’s out-of-step with the desires of the people who live there. In a new Chapman University survey of 706 Orange County residents, 83 percent of respondents said they wanted to find a way for undocumented immigrants to stay, and 64 percent said immigrants “contribute more than they take” from the economy. The same poll found that assisting the poor and homeless was the second biggest issue in the county among residents (with 24 percent citing it).

California Democrats have fantasies of turning the historically Republican Orange County into a blue place that will support a statewide progressive agenda. That won’t happen, and it shouldn’t. The poll shows that Orange County’s residents are very much in the middle, disgusted with Washington, D.C., and with both parties, and worried about their kids and the cost of housing and living here.

Ideally, Orange County could pursue a moderate path that is true to its people’s real views, which embody a practical California libertarianism: skeptical of costly regulation while championing entrepreneurialism, immigrants, open government, limits on law enforcement, and preservation of its natural treasures.

But that would take a county with new leadership that thinks in ways as big and beautiful as Orange County itself.

The post Orange County Still Acts Like Mayberry R.F.D. It Needs to Get Real About Immigrants and the Homeless appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Away from the immaculate suburban developments down below, cattle graze and there are no rushing cars—just a gust of wind blowing through the bushes. I refer to it as “Vantage Point” because of the view. Others have called it “LA-29.”

I discovered this place when I was in junior high school six years ago. Four of my closest friends and I were exploring in the wilderness behind one of our houses in Brea after his mom told us we needed some fresh air. Once outside, we saw an enormous hill and decided to find out what was at its summit. We made our way through some bushes and followed a dirt trail uphill for about 15 minutes. We stumbled upon a small building that resembled a guard booth at a parking garage. Then, some 30 feet or so beyond, we came upon a water tower, a separate radar tower with a red light, and two freestanding pillars that appeared to be claws reaching out of the ground. About a football field’s distance away was a staircase that led to nowhere.

We realized we were on top of the highest hill in town. At the time, it felt as if we had just conquered Mount Everest. And it felt mysterious, too. When we got back to my friend’s house, we tried to look up where we had been. After many unsuccessful attempts to find it on Google, one of my friends suggested we search the words “Brea Hills Radar.” Sure enough, four links popped up with pictures of the buildings we had discovered. The captions were what really made our eyes grow wide: “LA-29 Missile Site.”

We learned that in 1958 a nuclear warhead capable of destroying a large chunk of California was housed a few hundred feet away from the buildings and pillars we had stumbled upon. During the Cold War, when schoolchildren practiced “duck and cover” drills, the government built 16 missile sites in the L.A. area that made up one of the so-called “Rings of Supersonic Steel.” The government feared an aerial threat from our enemies and installed bases armed with anti-aircraft missiles around populated coastal cities vulnerable to an attack. Each base had approximately 120 soldiers with machine guns and a handful of vicious guard dogs—along with Nike Ajax and Hercules missiles.

In 1971, LA-29 was officially deactivated, as the Army cut back on missile defense systems and talks were underway with the Soviet Union to reduce missile stocks. By 2000, all the L.A. Nike sites had been demolished. Today, LA-29 is an oil field that also hosts cattle and commercial beehives. Where the missile silos used to be are just paved concrete lots.

Nobody talked much about these missile sites back when they were operational. My dad, who grew up in Orange County in the 1960s, heard rumors of something related to World War II back there in the hills, but he did not find those rumors credible. My mother had no clue there was a missile base five minutes from our house, and we never discussed such a thing when I was growing up.

After I told my mother about LA-29, she was not very supportive of me going back. But I had to.

This was the place I went to when I had to get away from the stress of school, when I wanted to be alone and read a book, when I wanted to watch the clouds, when I wanted to think things through, when I wanted to listen to nothing but the birds and the wind.

I still go today when I can. It’s easier now that I have a car. But the trip requires climbing up through a drainage tunnel that goes underneath the street because a fence now cuts off the foot trail. Every now and then I kick a beer bottle that echoes throughout the passageway, and I can hear my breath amplified as if it’s going through a loudspeaker. As I step out of the tunnel, I find myself in a trench inside the premises. The dusty dirt path to the top takes another 15 minutes, as I hike by rusty oil equipment including an unmoving “cricket,” or a pumpjack.

The guard tower and the two cement pillars are covered with graffiti on top of graffiti—I know I’m not the only one who comes here to get away from it all. But it’s like we’re all part of the same club. Others have even left behind a rope to make it easier to scale up the side of one of the 10-foot high pillars that I have nicknamed the “hill hands.”

There is no place I would rather be than here, at the top of a concrete pillar, on a nearly forgotten missile defense base. It might be strange to say this because I know I’m at a place that could have participated in World War III, but here’s where I find a feeling of peace.

The post A Nuclear Warhead in Suburban Orange County? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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At the time, I was fascinated with what psychologists call “mental time travel”—the way old family photos or home movies can reanimate an emotion and cause you to re-experience physical sensations you felt at the time. It can also happen with historical events. Images of President Nixon’s resignation trigger a rush of feelings in me—even though I experienced the event as a 10-year-old watching it on television.

August 9, 1974 (Washington, D.C.), 2011, 21” x 18”

Orange County is a fertile site for Nixon time travel. The 37th president was born in Yorba Linda and lived in Whittier and San Clemente. I wondered if, when he visited El Toro, he ever stood on the site of my temporary art studio. When I looked out the window at the rows of newly planted date palms, I tried to picture jets on the runway, Marines in jeeps, and 5,000 supporters pressed against a chain-link fence waiting for the president to descend from the sky—to time travel to that unforgettable day in 1974 when Nixon landed here, a few hours after flashing his famous “V” sign and boarding his helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House for the last time.

I decided to see if I could trigger people’s “involuntary memories”—memories evoked by cues rather than conscious effort. I wanted to know if the former base was haunted for others, too. So every Sunday for seven months, I went to the park to hold “open studio” hours and asked people to tell me their memories of Richard Nixon. As people visited with me and told me stories, I worked on large pen and ink drawings based on well-known images from the Nixon presidency, and I made drawings to illustrate the personal stories I had collected from park visitors over the previous weekends.

The Vietnam War figured into many of those conversations. Every American man over the age of 60 told me his draft number and how he either served or avoided the war. People also told me about the antiwar protests at nearby UC Irvine, which surprised me. I taught in the university’s art department for five years and never heard anything about student protests.

October 4, 1965 (UC Irvine Science Lecture Hall), 2012, 25” x 38”

In fact, I had an impression of Irvine as a placid postwar utopia. In conversations with park visitors, I heard about neighborhoods where you “felt like you were in the best place.” People told me about growing up in the newly built housing tracts of the planned community and described how the town smelled of the Eucalyptus trees planted as a windbreak between the orange groves and lima bean fields.

Irvine was a lima bean farm until 1960 when the University of California bought 1,000 acres from James Irvine for $1. At that time, California had a problem: The children of the postwar baby boom were reaching college age and would soon overwhelm the state’s educational institutions. UC Irvine was one of three new campuses to open between 1960 and 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson presided at the UC Irvine dedication.

The layout of the UC Irvine campus and an adjacent community planned for 50,000 residents was designed by William Pereira, the architect who drafted the master plan for LAX. In photographs that ran in the September 6, 1963 issue of Time magazine, a dashing Pereira gestures to his blueprint of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs—“the perfect place to live, work, shop, play, and learn,” as described by Irvine Company literature.

University of California, Irvine, First Increment (Irvine, Calif.), 1968, Julius Shulman. Getty Research Institute.

How did the Vietnam War transform this brand-new utopian campus? Inspired by my interviews at the park, I decided to investigate in the UC Irvine Archives and Special Collections at the Langston Library.

A sleeve of 35mm slides from October 4, 1965, opening day of the University of California, Irvine reveals many buildings still under construction, and bare ground dotted with fragile saplings staked to posts. Smiling girls with bouffant hairdos and boys with crew cuts carry armloads of books through William Pereira’s vision of the perfect future—all space age cement curves and expressionistic patterned facades.

Just a year and a half later, the students don’t look as happy. In a fat folder of slides from January 23, 1967, I find young people assembled with unmistakable seriousness on the steps of the Gateway Plaza to protest the firing of UC President Clark Kerr for his lenient treatment of Free Speech Movement activists (at the urging of recently elected Governor Ronald Reagan). The students are holding hand-lettered signs that say: “In Memoriam Clark Kerr” and “R-E-A-G-A-N Doesn’t Spell FREEDOM.”

I see the students becoming more radicalized in dress and demeanor year by year. In bound volumes of The New University, the student paper, I read about how the campus participated in the nationwide Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in October 1969. In faded slides, the clean-cut boys of 1965 are now shaggy-haired and shirtless. Girls have ditched their curlers for straight hair parted in the middle like Joan Baez, and they’re wearing jeans. They wear black armbands, and many students are barefoot. The crowd has swollen, completely filling the stairs, and legs are dangling from the library balcony.

Visitors to my Great Park studio had described their memories of April 30, 1970, when President Nixon appeared on television with a giant map of Southeast Asia to announce his expansion of the war into Cambodia. In response, students at over 400 colleges and universities went on strike. In a photo from May 4, 1970, the UCI plaza and library are occupied, and no one is smiling anymore. In one photo, a crowd holds signs that read: “Did Dick Ask Us?” and “Does your government represent YOU?”

I don’t think the protestors know it yet—the 24-hour news cycle hadn’t been invented— but National Guardsmen in Ohio opened fire on an unarmed crowd at Kent State University at 12:24 p.m. that same day, killing four students and injuring nine. Based on the angle of the sun and shadows on the plaza, the massacre in Ohio has already happened. It’s a weird feeling to know this has happened when the students in the photo do not yet know.

February 8, 1965 (Irvine), 2013, 31” x 43”

The speed of the transformation at Irvine is what affects me the most. In the five years since 1965, these brand-new buildings became symbols of an establishment the students felt had betrayed them. The students rejected the utopia that was created for them, not in a symbolic sense, but literally—this utopia was created for them.

The story of war protest at UCI may not be as historically significant or well-known as the protests at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University. But it is a microcosm of the rise and fall of the postwar American Dream.

May 4, 1970 (UCI Library), 2013, 25” x 40”

I think about Pereira’s vision for a college campus as a tranquil utopia in an orderly, planned Southern California city, and try to reconcile that idea with images of Ohio guardsmen positioning their M-1 rifles in front of the pagoda on a picturesque campus 2,000 miles away. Tear gas blurs the silhouettes of students fleeing the Modernist cement buildings of Kent State, and in other pictures students crouch in a parking lot over the fallen bodies of their classmates. I guess it’s hard to “master plan” for some futures.

I put my folders back on the cart to be reshelved, wondering how long it will be until someone else asks to look at them. I emerge from the library into the late afternoon sun, blinking with the disorientation of a time traveler. I half expect to see picket signs and girls in ponchos. The Gateway Plaza is swarming with students, but they are of all different ethnicities, not the primarily Anglo students of the late 1960s. They are not shaggy but groomed and gelled. They’re texting on smartphones as they race purposefully to class. They have skateboards and backpacks, and it’s hard to imagine them protesting anything—not because they seem apathetic or indifferent, but because they’re so diverse it’s hard to imagine a single cause that could galvanize all of them.

The campus bears so little resemblance to the master plan that it’s hard to locate all eight original Pereira buildings amidst the expansion and constant construction. When I find them, the Brutalist buildings look dated and a little cartoony, dwarfed and crowded by giant glass and steel laboratories. The products of more recent architects—and their visions of an entirely different future—colonize every square foot of available space.

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No Independence Day was more important than July 4, 1904, when the city held its very first Fourth of July parade. That day saw the arrival of the city’s very first electric passenger train. About 50,000 people were on hand for the event—far more than the population at the time. The train literally opened up Huntington Beach to the rest of Southern California, establishing a crucial link to the neighboring cities of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

This was also the moment that gave Huntington Beach its name. Originally called Pacific City, the area was rechristened in honor of Henry Huntington, who owned the trains. He deserved the honor. Huntington knew that a railway to Huntington Beach would not have enough riders to be consistently profitable, but he built one anyway, on the theory that those people who did take the ride would purchase property that he and others owned in the area. A visit to today’s Huntington Beach is all the evidence you need to know that Huntington was right.

In the 110 years since the railway’s arrival, Huntington Beach has acknowledged this anniversary by building up its Fourth of July parade into an essential Orange County tradition. Since the beginning, the parade has mixed the customs of small-town parades—tug-of-wars, beauty contests, airshows, eating contests, horse races—with more spectacular attractions. One unforgettable such special offering, in the 1930s, featured Fire Chief Bud Higgins, who wore a fire suit, slathered his face with petroleum jelly, covered his entire torso with alcohol and then lit himself on fire—all before diving from a 50-foot platform above the pier into the ocean. Talk about a showstopper.

For a half century, the train powered Huntington Beach year-round. In the 1940s, Los Angeles had more than 900 Red Cars that traveled over 1,100 miles throughout the Southland. In Huntington Beach, there was a big depot located right at Pacific Coast Highway and Main Street. Three lines came to Huntington Beach—the La Bolsa Line, the Santa/Huntington Beach line, and a line that connected to Seal Beach and Newport Beach—and the stops defined neighborhoods.

But by the early 1950s, the car took over Southern California, and the depot was little used. Later, it was torn down. The last Red Cars in L.A. stopped running in 1961.

Today in Huntington Beach, you’ll find remnants of train tracks on the beach, as well as a stretch of “right of ways” (the actual paths that the trains ran on) for the La Bolsa Line. The tracks may be gone, but narrow grass medians mark where the trains once creaked along from First Street and PCH all the way to Ellis Avenue between Gothard and Huntington. To feel what Huntington Beach once was, you can go to the Red Car Museum in Seal Beach or ride an old Red Car in San Pedro, where there’s a 1.5-mile vintage trolley line.

Of course, the best way to understand Huntington Beach, and connect to its history, is to drop by on Independence Day. The trains may be gone, but the parade goes on. Huntington Beach now boasts the longest-running July Fourth parade west of the Mississippi.

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I grew up a few short miles from Los Alamitos Race Course in Garden Grove in Orange County in the 1960s and 1970s. My earliest memories of the modest track—now in the news as the unlikely home of Kentucky Derby winner California Chrome—are seeing it from the back seat of my mother’s car as we drove down Katella Avenue to the Pasty House for Cornish meat pies. Who were the people, I wondered, that frequented the Starting Gate Bar or stayed at Don’s Turf Motel?

When I was around 9, Los Alamitos began to take some hazy shape in my mind, as rumor spread that a family on my street spent their nights at the track. The idea that people left their houses and glowing television sets after dinner was incomprehensible to a young boy who had dinner at home—5:30 sharp every night of the week as soon as Dad pulled into the driveway.

It was years later when I realized what a glorious place Los Alamitos was. At barely 16, my best friend Dave and I would put $3 of regular into his brown Ford Maverick and head to the old Cypress golf course, where you could play 18 holes for less than $10. A few of the back nine holes were behind the barns on the track’s property, and we always got a great view of the infield lake and the grandstand that stood empty during the day. All the action would come under the lights, beginning at 7:30 p.m., when the quarter horses and harness racing began.

Which is what I discovered when I lumbered over legal drinking age. Or maybe I was nearly at drinking age when my friends and I finally took advantage of our proximity to this track and its welcoming attitude toward beer coolers for the quarter horses races. Quarter horses are literally a breed apart—they sprint fast and run shorter than the thoroughbreds, turning their races into seconds-long bursts of excitement. There is nothing quite like it. My friends and I relished, too, the contrast between Los Alamitos and Disneyland, where we were working summer jobs. Every night, they’d scrub the theme park down and repaint it. But the track always smelled like rot and decay.

The Los Alamitos of my youth was a small track, and it’s still a small track—though without the frame of reference of bigger venues, it didn’t seem small to me then. Bets were made, and races won and lost, but what stood out for me were all the characters you’d see at the track. My buddies and I bet for fun; the people around us—mostly men, from all kinds of backgrounds—placed their wagers with the faces of those making life-or-death decisions. Kids roamed around picking up betting slips off the ground to sort through later, looking for a discarded winner. The sights and smells of the place did not fit my cloistered upbringing.

My mother still lives in the house I grew up in, though my childhood friends and I have scattered. But the track is still in me. I’ve dabbled in owning thoroughbreds over the years. And I still go to races with friends, though they’re not the same friends, and it’s not the same track, either; living in L.A., Santa Anita is now the destination. Los Alamitos, always the little track in the O.C., seems even littler.

But give Los Alamitos this much: It’s outlasted Inglewood’s Hollywood Park—originally the horseracing playground of the movie elite—which shut down in December. The fact that Los Alamitos has held out is a testament to its current owner, Dr. Ed Allred, who is also well-known as the co-founder of Family Planning Associates Medical Group, an abortion services provider. Some say that the track will only last as long as Dr. Allred does.

Los Alamitos is currently undergoing millions in renovations needed to accommodate a mile-long track for thoroughbred racing. Perhaps I’ll finally stop by the Starting Gate Bar for a quick one on my way to first post next season.

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I grew up in Westpark, the neighborhood between Culver and Warner avenues a few miles north of where the 5 and 405 freeways meet. My first-grade classroom and my undergrad lecture hall at University of California, Irvine are only about 4 miles apart.

“Don’t you want to leave? Why didn’t you go away for college?” people ask when they hear that I got my bachelor’s degree last year from the university in the same Orange County city where I grew up.

The simple answer is: I like Irvine. Irvine is green every day of the year. Potholes don’t exist, and power lines are neatly tucked underground. The cops sitting on street corners catch rolling stops, because what else is there to do? Fight crime in one of the safest cities in America? There is but one registered sex offender for every 9,533 people living in Irvine; the rate in nearby Los Angeles is eight times higher. Irvine also has a central, convenient location—my family’s house is 3 miles from the 5 Freeway, 2.6 miles from the 405 Freeway, and 5 miles from John Wayne Airport. Irvine was (and still is) the perfect suburb to settle down in—a nice slice of sterile reality.

My parents moved here 15 years ago for all of those reasons. Plus, they felt that purchasing a house in Irvine was a better investment than staying in Orange, where they had bought a smaller house as a stepping stone up from their small Long Beach condo, and sending my little brother and me to private school. Irvine at the time was wrapping up a development boom: The city was still building the new neighborhood school when we arrived, so I spent half a year at College Park Elementary School before starting second grade at the brand-spanking-new Plaza Vista School.

I admit I live in a bubble. For the longest time, I fed people excuses about why I haven’t left. “I only applied to UC Irvine because I wanted to live at home,” I’d say. And if they were really interested I’d add, matter-of-factly, “Because I didn’t get in anywhere else.” That’s a lie, but people accept the answer: They can’t understand why the city of Irvine is, in and of itself, enough of a reason for me to stay for, and now beyond, college.

Many Irvine residents, especially college students from out of town, feel suffocated by the repetitive faux-Cape Cod- and Mediterranean-style communities. The nightlife is nonexistent, and even the stores feel redundant, with two Targets less than 2 miles apart. But what some see as a lack of character is to me a chance to search for one. Being boring is a character—and one that a lot of people seem to relate to.

There was this house party in college where someone made a constipated face when I told her that I religiously watched The Real Housewives of Orange County on Bravo. (The show is centered in Coto de Caza, a private community in southern Orange County, but they have filmed at the Irvine Spectrum outdoor mall from time to time.) While The Real Housewives franchise has expanded to include New York, New Jersey, Miami, Atlanta, and Beverly Hills, Orange County is the star branch. Unlike New York or Beverly Hills, where landmarks are their own kind of celebrity, writers have to pull something extraordinary from the ordinary in Orange County. A scene at a Happy Nails salon at the Irvine Spectrum leads to an intense narrative between a mother and daughter over what to do about prom night, which is something anyone in any suburb can relate to.

People seem to assume that this kind of boringness makes me ill-equipped for the world outside. It didn’t. Irvine made me curious. And not in the Disney Princess Ariel kind of way, where the world is full of rainbows and sunshine, but in an “I have to poke at the world” kind of way.

It requires me to dig a little deeper and ask better questions. On Friday nights, I have to get off my ass and look for experiences outside of Irvine, whether it’s getting lost in the one-way streets around Colorado Boulevard to find the Green Street Tavern in Pasadena or waiting in line till 1 a.m. for M&M’s glorious blueberry doughnuts in Anaheim.

And then there’s my interest in unconventional career paths. The folks in my neighborhood all have conventional jobs: teachers, accountants, real estate agents. The story of people following their passions felt like a myth in a land where SAT test prep is a big business and art classes were simply a hurdle between my high school diploma and me.

For my journalism workshop project in college, I talked to a Buddhist monk, Bishop Daigaku Rumme, who was the son of a Christian missionary. I learned that, in grade school, his family moved to Japan so his father could spread the word of God. But Rumme, who went by David then, didn’t understand why the Japanese needed saving when at home in America the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War needed attention. So after graduating from college in the U.S., he moved back to Japan and entered a Buddhist monastery. I read through the books Rumme wrote, watched YouTube videos of life at the monastery, and spied on his Iowa college campus on Google Earth. I drove an hour through downtown L.A. traffic to meet him in Little Tokyo on four hours of sleep during midterms, and I had to find the guts to ask him if he still didn’t believe in God. It took me eight weeks of hard work to learn what it means to live with passion.

But now I’m ready to leave. As a fresh college graduate without debt or mouths to feed, it’s time for me to take a jump and experience a few face-plants while I can still rebound. I want to meet more people with unconventional passions, and I want to see what trouble in the city looks like. I’d like to start with the closest metropolis—Los Angeles, just 50 minutes away. I want to learn to travel on a public transit system and also master the freeway traffic at rush hour. I want to know what it feels like to live in a city with nightlife that makes you hide from the daylight, and I want to be able to eat a fantastic burrito from a different taco truck every day of the week.

I’m not trying to escape Irvine. I don’t think a person has to leave Irvine to understand the world. But Irvine has made me comfortable with being uncomfortable. So when someone asks now, “Don’t you want to leave Irvine?”, I say yes, but not for the reasons you might expect.

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