The following is a very interesting perspective about our "Drive by Media."
Victor Davis Hanson is a professor at Fresno State.
August 3, 2006
Eye of the Beholder by Victor Davis Hanson
The American Enterprise Online
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 , Fre
sno , 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 (2002-03).
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Columbus Townhall > Forum > Politics > MediaWatch! (Moderators: Peter, CTH Public Relations)
Topic: California v. Iraq
