Welcome to the Lucy Ricardo Memorial Bus Tour of Californian Politics!
Janan Ganesh is your tour guide. Political Observer.
Our first stop Richard Riordan. I worker for Sun America in 1999, in Century City, and ‘we’ as trainees viewed Mrs. Riordan’s nine million in investments. It was like working in a Company Town- seeing Mr. Broad on the elevators was an event! Broad selling to AIG was______________________!
Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Yorba Linda and Orange County are next. I lived in Orange County in the 70’s and 80’, just two streets away from Garden Grove Blvd. where Little Hanoi. In those days I wasn’t out of place to see young white male’s in street rods with anti-Asian stickers prominently displayed.
Old Money New Democrat Newsom is next, with the barest mention ‘Arnold’! And then : ‘The phrase here is “partisan sorting”. This urge of liberals and conservatives to live among their own, in distinct states, has marred the US for a while.’
The Hoover Institution & the Claremont Review Books are next. Be sure to book a table ‘The Hoover’, as it is known, in the ultra elegant Versailles Dining Room. Where diners can do some people watching: Margaret Hoover , Niall Ferguson and Francis Fukuyama seen in animated conversation…Skip The Clairmont Review, but read The L.A. Review of Books!
Three paragraphs follow on Asians - Ganesh is the perfect L.A. Type, a kind of pseudo cosmopolitan, who reads the restaurant reviews of a deceased food critic! Asians, Hispanics of all types, and Mexicans is what California is about!
My fourth and fifth grade teacher, in 54’and 55’, was Miss Ester Lopez who taught ‘us’ to appreciate Music, Art, History and Mexican Culture. Our class danced at the L.A. County Fair, doing a traditional early California dance!
That Carey McWilliams, who edited The Nation from 1955 to 1975. even gets a mention …
A cult hero today, Carey McWilliams (1905–80) was a remarkably productive author, journalist, and editor of The Nation from 1955 to 1975. Between 1939 and 1950 alone, McWilliams wrote nine first-rate books as well as hundreds of articles for The Nation , Harper's , The New Republic , and other leading periodicals. He also headed California's Division of Immigration and Housing (DIH), chaired the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, helped soothe Los Angeles during and after the Zoot Suit Riots, and drafted an amicus brief for the Hollywood Ten's Supreme Court appeal. But the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans offers a prime example of both his extraordinary skills and the opposition he faced from mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike.
https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Carey_McWilliams/
Political Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/734b8a0e-380c-4a32-ad68-731ea9ab4a80