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Jack Cashill

What's the Matter with California?: Cultural Rumbles from the Golden State and Why the Rest of Us Should Be Shaking Paperback – 1 November 2008

by Jack Cashill (Author)

15 ratings

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There's an unspoken fault line in California. No, not the San Andreas Fault nor any of the geologic ones we all know about. This fault line is cultural -- formed by the waves of ethnic and social groups that have rammed willy-nilly into California and now refuse to get along. Californians today worry about "The Big One," but it's a cultural cataclysm they -- and the rest of us -- should fear.

When writer and columnist Jack Cashill was skewered along with Kansas (despite the fact that he lives in Missouri) in Thomas Frank's New York Times bestseller What's the Matter with Kansas?, he decided to fight back with a riposte from the heart -- an honest, biting, and wickedly funny look at what's wrong with the purplest of blue states: almighty California itself.

The media moguls, multiculturalists, union bosses, and eco-warriors who run California have abandoned liberalism for total insanity. They have transformed the Golden State from America's future into America's Rome. Spectacularly sybaritic and self-indulgent, overtaxed and overregulated, California lives on past glories, and even Conan the Republican cannot muster the will to defend its borders. Now, finally, Jack Cashill is here to rally the right-thinking citizens of the state (and the nation) and rescue this gorgeous chunk of real estate from its increasingly shaky future.

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Product details

Publisher : Threshold Editions (1 November 2008)
Language : English
Paperback : 368 pages
ISBN-10 : 1416531033
ISBN-13 : 978-1416531036
Dimensions : 13.49 x 2.54 x 20.96 cm

Customer Reviews:
15 ratings

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"Wonderful, a thorough, thoughtful, impressive effort.... [Cashill] exposes our blindness, and offers a diagnosis so dead-on, so compelling, that it ought to leave 36 million bewildered Californians scratching their heads, wondering, 'Why didn't I think of that?'"

-- Chris Weinkopf, Los Angeles Daily News

"Far from being a simplistic 'right vs. left' take on California and why the rest of the country should learn from its example, Cashill's book provides a rich tapestry of time and place.... What's the Matter with California? demonstrates what exactly ails the Golden State."

-- Cinnamon Stillwell, online columnist, SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle)

"Thoroughly brave, unsparingly clear-eyed, and absolutely entertaining. Like California, it's an exploration of the sublime and the ridiculous, a juxtaposition of the awful, the titillating, and the hopeful.... Cashill does America a true service by exposing the decay of the country's most dysfunctional state -- and providing real solutions."

-- Ben Shapiro, author of Porn Generation

About the Author

An independent writer and producer, Jack Cashill has written a dozen nonfiction books and appeared on C-SPAN’s Book TV ten times. He also produced a score of feature-length documentaries. Jack serves as executive editor of Ingram’s Magazine. He writes regularly for American Thinker, American Spectator, and WorldNetDaily and has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard. Jack has a Ph.D. from Purdue University in American studies and has taught at a French university under the auspices of the Fulbright program.

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Bill Turner

Whats The Matter With California

Reviewed in the United States on 13 March 2009

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Jack hit this one squarely with one phrase... Fatherlessness. The Golden State has attracted millions for decades who visit or stay. Many abandon traditional views held in their former habitats, and embrace many diverse ideas or movements not found elsewhere.

Summertime energy twelve months of the year may seem like heaven to some, but reality soon jars one to a sense of polarized diversity similar to a tossed salad rather than a melting pot. Divorce, Drugs, Gangs, Infidelity, Alternative lifestyles, etc. may be found elsewhere, but nowhere is it more enhanced or accepted. The old 1970 mantra of "Mr Natural Sez" is alive and well and dragging the Golden to a tarnished Brass. Read this and open your eyes. Great Job Jack Cashill!!

6 people found this helpful

William C Ruediger

A Good Read if You're in the Mood for Political Banter

Reviewed in the United States on 8 January 2017

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Some interesting perspectives on cultural changes in California that eventually influence other parts of the country. Interesting, entertaining and well written. Definitely right-wing thinking.

One person found this helpful

Curmudgeon

Almost spot on

Reviewed in the United States on 15 August 2011

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Like another reviewer, I was prepared to not like the book, because often those outside California who write about this state tend to focus on the outer trappings of the place, rather than the inner lives of the people here. Jack Cashill, to his credit, does go deeper, and he raises insights that a lot of California natives, like myself, overlooked.

Perhaps this is because the book was clearly written as a response to leftist Thomas Frank's "What's The Matter With Kansas?". Frank basically scorns those in "flyover country", who are in Frank's view so hung up on "traditional values" and "the social issues" that they are too stupid to understand that they are "voting against their own self-interests" whenever they fail to vote for Leftists. Of course, Frank's presumption that the proletarian working and middle class people ought to want to become dependent and compliant wards of a socialist nanny welfare state, without any freedom to choose a destiny for themselves, is itself disgusting.

Cashill brilliantly responds to this tendentious leftist dogma by examining what has happened to California, a state that has in large part abandoned traditional values. He points out again and again how "the social issues" have very real bottom-line economic implications. The now bankrupt, moribund state of California, with excessive taxation, excessive costs of living and doing business, and an unemployment rate well above the national average, is seeing the proverbial chickens come home to roost. After all, to quote the author, "If Mom has a nest, and Dad has another nest, California needs a lot more nests than it otherwise would, not to mention more resources to heat, cool, light and water those nests and more gas to ferry the baby birds between them."

And what would happen if more Californians were more traditional in their values and lifestyles?

"AIDS and STD clinics could shift their attention to unavoidable diseases. Emergency Room staffers could focus on victims of accidents and illnesses; shootings, stabbings and overdoses would consume them no more. The police and rescue people could do the same. Drug cartels would have to take their business elsewhere." Like Alcatraz, many prisons could close, "and the prison unions would no longer run the state. Pimps and pornographers would just about close up shop....So would most divorce lawyers and most personal injury lawyers as well. The Crips could shift from larceny and other louche behavior to lawn care and cut the need for illegal immigration along with the grass. The LA school district could sell off its fences for scrap iron....Taxes could fall, and still there would be additional revenue for infrastructure, schools, universities, and, yes, even new green technologies."

So yes, Tommy Frankie, personal behaviors do have very real economic consequences.

Like another reviewer mentioned, Jack Cashill is a political and sociological version of James Burke, making his own "Connections" that are thought provoking. We learn that the White girls who followed Charles Manson in the late 1960's, and the Black gangbangers of Oakland and South Central Los Angeles today, have something very much in common. We also learn that O.J. Simpson and John Walker Lindh had something in common besides growing up in the Greater San Francisco area. This is what happens to a state where divorce is rampant and family breakdown all too prevalent. Indeed, taking out California, the statistics for the rest of the USA look much less alarming in these respects.

I give it four stars rather than five because of the ending chapter, where Jack Cashill hopes for a "Red-State" values revival that he thinks could spread out from the enclaves of the state where such values exist. Sorry, but while such enclaves are more present in California than one might think, there are not enough of them to make a difference.

What possibly *can* save the state, as it has many times before, is a "Revolt Of The Beige", namely, a revolt of the middle class homeowners. (Mr. Cashill has a color-coding system to identify the various socioeconomic groups in California, and a plate tectonics earthquake metaphor to describe when one color coded plate pushes up or back against others). This Beige Plate has yanked the state away from Leftist decline before, from the Proposition 13 tax revolt to the removal of Leftist state judges like Rose Bird to Ronald Reagan himself. Sadly, there is some question of whether this Beige Plate hasn't been smothered or driven to other states.

10 people found this helpful

Kindle Customer

what is the matter with California

Reviewed in the United States on 2 May 2011

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I live in California ad I can tell you it is on a decline and I am sorry to see a beautiful state ruined. We will be bankrupt before long. It is state run by Democrats and I have yet to see them improve anything.

9 people found this helpful

Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass

Forget California. What's the Matter with the Kindle editors?

Reviewed in the United States on 9 March 2012

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The Kindle edition has TWO chapter 37s, repeating the material verbatim.The editors slipped up considerably there.
I've lived in L.A. for 32 years now, and his statements are plausible enough.

One person found this helpful

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What's the Matter with California?: Cultural Rumbles from the Golden State and Why the Rest of Us Should Be Shaking Paperback – 1 November 2008

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