SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gray Davis performed an awkward rhetorical dance the other night. He wrapped his annual State of the State address in repeated references to Sept. 11, straining to make the case that California has been in the thick of things on the terror front.
"All four hijacked planes were bound for California," Davis told the assembled lawmakers at the outset of his lengthy address. "More than 100 fellow Californians paid the ultimate price for our freedom."
Dressed for patriotism in a red tie and royal blue shirt, with an American flag pin shining from his lapel, the governor described how he'd dispatched the National Guard to protect airports, bridges and dams. With thinly veiled humility, he declared that "no state has done more than California to protect its citizens and vital assets since the terrorist attacks."
Eventually the governor did get around to other topics--the now all but forgotten (yet still unresolved) energy crisis, education reform, the impending state budget deficit, those sorts of things. Still, the state of the state, as Davis painted it Tuesday night, was that of a California on wartime footing.
And here--despite a powerful urge to lampoon a state politician trying to promote himself to commander in chief--the point must be made: Davis was not wrong. There is, obviously enough, a war going on, and California is as much a part of it as any of the other 49 states. And while the governor might have overreached a bit in his martial rhetoric, he conversely would have been accused of gross disrespect had he not mentioned the conflict at all, cutting instead straight to his thoughts on drug discounts for seniors.
The trick is one of balance--just how much "normalcy" is appropriate for these abnormal times? And I suspect it will not be mastered by Davis--or California as a whole, for that matter--for a long time. It's by now a cliche to suggest the world changed on Sept. 11. So let me put it this way: On that day, the United States, and California, discovered it was part of a world that has been changing, and changing fast.
In "The Coming Anarchy," a collection of Atlantic Monthly articles published in 1994, Robert D. Kaplan described early and well how the old world map of nation-states appears to be in the process of being "replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms."
