California Dreaming

The joke about Canada goes like this: Canada could have had American ingenuity, French culture and English government, but instead it ended up with English ingenuity, American culture and French government. I was thinking about this as I was sitting in a restaurant on the beach in Los Angeles. California has managed to combine the French version of the good life (sitting outside in a café drinking wine) with American ingenuity (computers, biotech, entertainment). But somehow we haven’t managed to get the third part right. Not only did we not get English government, we ended up with Italian government!

But if you could only get two right, I think we picked the right two. Which is maybe why most people don’t really care about political theories. Libertarian, communitarian, goofytarian; how can it matter when the sun is shining and the surf is high?