No cringe in Californian culture
Travel, we are told, broadens the mind. Getting out of town and examining other cultures and ways of cutting up the cake is often thought a necessity by politicians and high ranking bureaucrats keen to exhaust the junket budget.
I have just returned from three weeks on the west coast of the USA and parts of Canada.
If I were, say, a DHB chairman or a senior manager in a polytechnic, how would my report read?
One area in which we are sadly lacking is that of didactic signage. Judging by the placards that festoon most every street and business in their state, Californians have a robust understanding of what causes cancer and determination to communicate these facts as boldly as possible.
When it comes to deleterious effects of alcohol or fast food these public service announcements might be thought a small price to pay for getting drunk or gorging yourself on McDonald’s. However, when the sign suggests that Disneyland itself is likely to contribute to your tumour or malignant growth, things have surely gone too far. If the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ gives you cancer what do you get from the rest of the world? Talk about a downer.
I was too polite to ask whether cancer warnings are in any way related to the dire state of the American medical system. Presumably one needs to be all the more forewarned if the consequences of under insurance entail painful and premature death. At least if you are a terminal case securing medicinal marijuana is a cinch. Other, less health conscious signs declare the dope business is now totally legitimate.
The irony of liberal marijuana laws co-existing with pedantic rules governing licensed premises was not lost on this unrepentant drinker. At first I thought it utmost flattery, in my 52nd year, to be asked for ID at the entranceway to a bar. Later, a local explained that in the state of California it is mandatory to carry identification in a public house.
The actual drinking age is 21, though you can smoke a joint legally at 18 and join the military a year younger than that. Old enough to die for your country, just not old enough to drink to its health. Unlike Hamilton, the streets are not filled with drunken teenagers or hoards of university students on a Friday or Saturday night. Frat houses sighted on or about the University of Washington campus, suspiciously similar to those frequented by Jim Belushi circa 1978, suggest tertiary imbibing is done closer to home.
The police, strangely enough, are rarely sighted. This lack of gun-toting peace officers was felt most keenly when we visited San Juan Bautista State Historic Park and the adjacent Mission San Juan Bautista, respectively a genuine old western town, preserved in a condition remarkably close to its
19th century prime, and a Catholic church that dates back to the time of the Spanish.
My initial impression of Mission San Juan Bautista related to the reason we were there in the first place: the fact that it serves as the climactic location in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo. Precious little has changed in the intervening six decades, meaning that to walk its grounds, particularly if blessed with sunlight, is like stepping back into the film itself. A dream made concrete.
Beyond the Hitchcock connection though I was struck by the sheer beauty of the architecture, simple and functional on the outside, ornate, if tasteful and timeless on the inside. How remarkable that this building has survived intact, through wars and changes in nationality and the challenges posed by natural disasters. After all, it is built along the infamous San Andreas fault line.
I felt the same way when we finally made it to Mission Dolores, the San Francisco church and cemetery which also feature in a key Vertigo sequence. Completed in 1791, the first mass was celebrated on the site in 1776. In
1906, it survived one of the most famous earthquakes – and fires – in history.
It pains me to compare the attitudes and behaviour of our local Catholic clergy with generations of San Franciscans who dutifully maintained these places of worship. Just over twelve months ago, Euphrasie House in Hamilton East was demolished, a building that was barely 78 years old, somehow thought an earthquake risk in New Zealand’s safest city. Before that, the historic
1912 presbytery building, just around the corner, was reduced to rubble. Where is our appreciation of the past?