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Gravitude in Appalangeles

June 11, 2006
by Howard V. Hendrix

The City and County of Fresno, California, have long been the butt of jokes in the national media. When the Carol Burnett Show crew did a send-up of Dallas, they named their parodic mini-series Fresno. When, in their girl-buddy road movie, the eponymous Thelma and Louise encounter a sexist dirtbag trucker, they learn he hails from Fresno (of course)—before they blow up his tanker truck.

Myriad further examples could be cited. In truth, however, there is more to what some of us locals refer to as the “Fresno factor” than the Hollywood high-concept vision of the Central Valley as California’s atherosclerotic heartland, with Fresno as the de facto capital of the backward red state inside the forward-thinking blue state.

To really understand the Fresno factor, you have to look at what complexity theorists call “sensitive dependence upon initial conditions.” In the Central Valley, those initial conditions were all about extremes. Writing in Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner described the pre-nineteenth century landscape of the Central Valley as “the Serengeti of North America.” This is a nice way of saying that in dry years the place was a desert and in wet years it was a swamp.

The descendants of the nineteenth century immigrants who kicked off or killed off the Indians and Mexicans already living in the Valley went on (with some eventual state and federal assistance) to create a vast network of dams and canals—irrigation that, coupled with mechanized agriculture, helped to make the Valley the most agriculturally productive land on earth. The development first of an extensive rail system, then of trucks and interstate highways, made possible the shipping of this produce throughout the nation.

The Valley’s temperatures, however, were also extreme. The summer heat in Fresno drove Baldassare Forestiere, an Italian immigrant and former Manhattan “tunnel hog,” to dig out by hand what is today known as the Forestiere Underground Gardens, the amazing subterranean labyrinth he called home. Only with the advent of automobiles and, later, air conditioning could conditions in the Valley be ameliorated enough to support intensive urbanization.

The creation of this artificial Fertile Crescent has not been without its downsides. Large-scale agribusiness thrives on cheap, seasonal, often undocumented labor, and so Fresno’s poverty rate consistently rivals that found in Appalachia. Dust from plowing, exhaust from trucks and cars, agricultural waste burning, and even the methane associated with cattle and dairy air all contribute to Fresno’s air pollution levels, which consistently rival those of Los Angeles.

The reasons why little has been done to address these “Appalangeles” downsides likewise go back to initial conditions. The environmental extremes have been tamed, but extremism itself seems to have been displaced onto the social and political culture that developed out of those initial conditions.

Drive up Highway 99 (which my CHP acquaintances refer to, not so affectionately, as the “Joad Road”) and you’ll see, on the outskirts of Modesto, Premier Pools and Spas sharing—without irony—a wall in the same warehouse storefront with Living Water Bible Church. Glance at a recent message-for-the-week on the marquee outside the River Park megachurch in Fresno and you’ll read, “Tolerance is the virtue of those who lack conviction.”

Consider too the fact that the most recent former mayor of Fresno, Jim Patterson, was an evangelical Christian broadcaster. The current mayor, Alan Autry (besides being an actor who played Deputy Bubba on the In the Heat of the Night TV series) is similarly a man of prominent faith. Separation of church and state? Maybe not so much, here.

Most of our local politicians base their appeal on what might be called “gravitude.” The gravitas of their mature years must always bear a lingering whiff of bad-boy attitude from the days of their youthful indiscretions. All these reformed bad boys have long since accepted Jesus into their hearts and been forgiven, of course—a handy thing, since neither Patterson nor Autry would likely have attained the mayoralty without the bloc-voting of the megachurches.

Blue-statism here is driven to the extreme of Urban Chauvinism among the Tower District Left, who shoot themselves in the foot by embracing the rhetoric of Reconquista or by mounting misdirected (and unsuccessful) campaigns to kill zoo bonds on the grounds that “zoos serve white suburbanites and any zoo growth cuts into urban parkland.” Among the rural agribusiness and land-development Right, red-statism here is driven to the extreme of Fascist Pastoralism, complete with the same they’re-threatening-our-way-of-life rhetoric that was earlier used against the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Armenians in the Valley. For some reason, the blood-and-soil musings of the fascist pastoralists never cease to call to my mind the opening scene of Gladiator, in which a soldier of Rome lovingly passes his hand through the bearded grain of his fields. . . .

Movies, you see, do matter. Although Hollywood might like to portray Fresno as Day of the Locust meets Day without a Mexican, the more intriguing possibility is not that Fresno is on its way to becoming more like the rest of America, but rather that the rest of America is on its way to becoming more like Fresno. Fresnans already know, and have long known, what it’s like to live in a place that thrives on imported labor—a place to which all empires eventually come.

Reformed bad-boy gravitude? Think George W. Bush in New Orleans after Katrina, alluding to partying too much in that town during his youthful-indiscretion days. Churches swinging elections? Blue-state urban chauvinism? Red-state fascist pastoralism? Seemingly intractable problems of poverty, pollution, immigration? The microcosm of Fresno and the macrocosm of America resemble each other more and more.

The California and—through Hollywood—the national joke has always been that Fresno is so behind the times. If the future turns out to look a lot like Fresno, however, that joke will seem a lot less funny.