The Way Things Used To Be

I'm 44 years old.

I was born in Carmel, California in 1964 and circumstance kept me there for half of my life. I was lucky to live there, it is a physically beautiful place and was once populated by a variety of diverse and interesting characters. Carmel is 99.99% white. It was once a mix of blue-collar industry (lumber mills, dairies, blacksmith, brick making and knife making) and artistic folks (Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, Edward Weston etc.) who lived in small houses and cottages that were built upon small lots. It became an eccentric place where cottages were designed much like something from Hansel & Grettel and one mayor dreamed of erecting a stone wall to isolate the city from the outside world. During WWII, Carmel became home to the wives of Army officers serving in the Pacific with the 7th Infantry Division as well as Naval Officers who were taking flight school in Monterey. Even General Joseph Stillwell stayed with his sister in 1941 while he oversaw the construction of Fort Ord and the organization of the 7th Infantry Division. After the war many veterans chose to stay in Carmel and make it their home and they were welcomed and they added a common sense approach to developing the town while protecting it from unwanted outside influences. Carmel was one of the first small towns to enact strict zoning laws against gaudy architecture and deemed that no commercial businesses be built near the ocean. Carmel had been home to many artists who were broke during the depression and to protect them from leg-breaking bill collectors the city simply decided not to have street addresses. This meant that everyone in Carmel had a post office box and went to the post office to collect their mail every day. The by product of this was Carmel became a very socially integrated community, a place where the guy who fixed cars at the service station chatted with the president of a large Central Valley agricultural company and a legendary science fiction writer could get advice from his vacuum cleaner repairman. The unique decision not to have street numbers bound the citizens of Carmel together in a special way that you might only find in 19th century America.
The surrounding area also reflected this picture. Carmel Valley and Big Sur offered isolation that meant that you needed to count upon your neighbor to help in times of trouble. New comers to the area who embraced this philosophy would soon be accepted into the local social scene while those who thought that they were above such concepts found themselves isolated from the community and most of the time they would move away to some other place. Carmel by the early 1970s was mostly home to retired people and young families. Carmel River School had a student body of around 400 children so the classroom usually held 20 students each. The children of blue-collar parents attended class with the children of doctors and architects and they all got along. Hippie-painted VW buses shared the school parking lot with Mercedes Benz sedans and parents from different world chatted as they waited for the final bell that would send their kids bouncing out of the school. Looking back I find it hard to believe that this kind of communal perfection would not last. The idea that the people of Carmel would allow new comers who rejected being a good neighbor into the fold baffles me and will continue to do so to the end of my days.

I don't live in Carmel anymore.

Today I live in Castroville, a small farm town 18 miles north of Carmel. Castroville is mostly Hispanic and industrial. It's a small spur on Highway 156 between 101 to the east and Highway 1 to the west. One of thousands of such towns that most Americans drive through or past on their way to somewhere else. I moved out here in 1988 but I continued to work in Carmel until January, 2001. I have not returned to Carmel much since I began working outside of Carmel. These days I do not wish to either.

The reasons that I do not desire to return to Carmel will become the foundation of this blog. I don't like going to Carmel today because I don't recognize it. It's not that the buildings are gone (although that is part of the problem) it's that the people who made Carmel special are almost all gone. Gone with them is the unique spirit of the town and it has been replaced by tackiness of the highest order. Carmel has become a suburb of Southern California. A picturesque septic tank filled with the "Nouveau Riche", a sub-race of human that has a lot of money and measures everything and everyone by monetary worth and thus assigns status according to a warped social model. They do no smile when they walk down the street, they do not shout "Hey! How's it going?" from their car when they see you on the street. They seem to live inside of a fantasy bubble and refuse to step out of it, refuse to acknowledge their own humanity and worse they refuse to acknowledge yours. Because of them Carmel has become a sad and evil place.

I will explore the descent of the upper class from admirable people who had grace and class to a proto-race of well-dressed Neanderthals. I will also survey the deterioration of my own social strata from honorable, hard working folks to a bunch of finger-pointing cry-babies. If America is headed in the wrong direction it's not because of what happens in Washington D.C. but what has happened in the boardrooms and factory floors. The bile of the "Nouveau Riche" (NR)has fouled not only the workings of Wall Street but also Main Street as their get rich quick and stay rich at any price has ground down the American machine to the point where our economy has become a marionette to foriegn interests. A decsent that can be tracked from 1964 up until now as America raced to plant flags on the Moon and then boarded up the windows of oportunity in the 1970s.

I don't want to make this all sound so serious, I think the whole thing is laughable.

So bear with me as I explore the strange twists and turns of sad rich people and crazy working people.