What is California?

Even apart from my intellectual convictions, there was this whole matter of California. As a transplanted Easterner, I felt duty-bound not to take anything in California very seriously. I certainly felt no need to understand California; I simply allowed myself to record the usual impressions: millions of Americans breaking away from reality, looking for a dream; everything to excess; Forest Lawn Cemetery (which I never visited); the charm of San Francisco, an American island in time; the giant trees, the thunderously rugged coastline, etc. When natives told me this was where it was "happening,” when they said California was the future, I was quite ready to believe them simply because I had no real hopes for the future anyway. To me, California was a place desperately lacking in the experience of limitation, a dream factory in every sense of the word. No wonder all these cults and sects were flourishing there.

I still do not claim to understand California, but I am certain that it cannot be taken lightly from any point of view. Sooner or later we are going to have to understand California – and not simply from the motive of predicting the future for the rest of the country. We are going to have to stop thinking about it simply as a phenomenon of people leaving reality behind. Something is struggling to be born here amid all the obvious absurdity and grotesquery.

Jacob Needleman
The New Religions