Great Awakening
John Burger
National Catholic Register
(July 6-12, 2008)
Ah, California! The state Americans love to hate. Political conservatives
like to call it the Left Coast. And with good reason.
How a place founded by a Spanish missionary came to be a haven
for all kinds of aberrations and perversions, many enshrined in
law, is the subject of a romp through history called “What’s
the Matter With California?”
The subtitle, “Cultural Rumbles from the Golden State and
Why the Rest of Us Should be Shaking,” offers a hint as to
how author Jack Cashill organizes his study.
Cashill compares the state’s racial, political, economic and
sexual interest groups to the tectonic plates whose constant movement
threatens the kind of cataclysmic earthquake that destroyed much
of San Francisco in 1906.
For Cashill, the cultural “plates” have become so hardened
in their self-interest that clashes are inevitable. The book describes
the kind of balkanization that many Americans rightly fear is happening
to their country.
Along the way, Cashill paints portraits of the characters that
have given California its colorful history.
Some of that history is sordid, and readers are cautioned that
the book contains some pretty graphic details, such as the way a
famous filmmaker liked to bed underage girls. And get away with
it.
But if reading the book is more nightmare than California dreamin’,
the author ends on a hopeful note. The state has a chance of finding
redemption from its own imprisonment to politically-correct ways
of thinking. This is because in the early 1970s, while others were
embracing ideas and practices that would doom them, a small group
of Catholics staked out a plot of land in a town named for Christianity’s
most famous convert and planned a college named for one of the Church’s
greatest thinkers.
After a house-of-horrors tour of the state, Cashill’s description
of his stay at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula is like waking
up on a sunny morning after a storm.
“The students spoke concisely and to the point,” he observes.
“I saw none of the empty grandstanding that passes for student
participation in too many college classrooms.
He muses about what might happen if the Thomas Aquinas model —
not only the college but the students’ way of life and the
culture of the surrounding town — were somehow replicated throughout
the Golden State.
“Tattoo parlors would go out of business. … Pimps and
pornographers would just about close up shop. … So would divorce
lawyers.”
It’s a dream, but hey, California has always been a place
for dreamers.
The author hints at some of the ways the college’s vision
has clashed with the state’s PC-informed regulations on race.
The reader is left wondering how the college “stared down”
the state authorities and prevailed.
But he wraps up the book with a hopeful expectation of a “third
great awakening” in the United States. Like the second great
awakening, which saved the Scotch/Irish of Appalachia in the 19th
century, it would be a return to Christian principles and the only
way to save California and the nation.
He asserts, albeit without explanation, that this must start in
the prisons.
Cashill is also clear that Hispanics will determine the state’s
future. Christians had better catch up with the unions, merchants
and multiculturalists who are vying for the Hispanic soul, he warns.
Hispanics are naturally docile to the Christian message, so to fail
to spread the “spirit of Santa Paula” among them would
be a tremendous opportunity lost.
|
