Anti-California Arnold-Backlash?
On Friday night I was listening to the replay of the Brian Lehrer radio show on WNYC. It was a guest host that day, though I was too sleepy to catch his name. Apparently the final topic of the call-in show was something like "California Culture: Is it an Oxymoron?" Most of the callers relied on all the cliches and talked about how New York is so much better than California, except for one woman from Northern California who said she never quite understood why New Yorkers and Northern California types devoted so much passion to hating Southern California.

Those of you who haven't spent much time in Southern California - and I'm not talking about you folks who fly out there for six months and never leave West LA except to get to Hollywood via Sunset - might not know this, but SoCal people are entirely oblivious to the fact that Northern California and New York hates them.

I grew up in Bakersfield, which is at the southern tip of Central California. If you divide the state in half, we're aligned with Southern California. We watched LA TV stations, got the Sunday LA Times and drove south to go to concerts or for vacations. Just slightly to the north of Bakersfield, the rest of the Central Valley allies with San Francisco.

That's the reason I spent my first 17 years completely unaware that Northern California hates Southern California. Then I started college. Sitting in my dorm's cafeteria one evening, one table started yelling "NoCal!" No response. Then again "NoCal!" And again. And again. Finally someone shouted back "SoCal!" Then the NoCalers let loose, finally getting their hoped-for reply - with "NoCal!NoCal!NoCal!" That was when I learned of the rivalry.

It wasn't until years later when I moved to New York that I learned New Yorkers really look down at LA. I had just figured the media people back here were too stupid to read the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News to learn the West Cost papers were breaking news all the time that the East Coast media elite would jump on days/weeks later and declare their "exclusives." I didn't know the NY papers were pretending to ignore LA with nasty intentions. Regardless, LA just always shrugged that stuff off and moved on to other things.

I've lived here nearly five years and I'm still not entirely sure why NY and NoCal has such a passionate contempt for LA, though with Northern California, I've always suspected water rights was a key. But this radio show on Friday night got me wondering about it again. I was really surprised how anxious these callers were to call up and bash on California over the election. Are they mad the attention is focused elsewhere? Does it make them question their beliefs about their own status? I just don't get it.

As for me, I'm still a Southern California girl at heart though I think New York is indeed the best city in the world. So New Yorkers, give it a rest. The recall election will be over in two months. And with any luck, Arnold will drop out of the race early and everything will be back to normal by Labor Day.

UPDATE: There is a discussion of this post on Matt Welch's site.
- posted by Amy @ 8/11/2003 11:32:00 AM