An excerpt from GOLDEN STATE, the 2014 novel that predicts California secession, or Calexit, after the election of a right-wing presidential candidate who runs on a border-wall platform.
Today, the people of California are voting. At issue: our very identity, at its most fundamental level. The ballot boxes are ready, the people are poised to act. What once seemed like an outlandish notion has, almost overnight, become a real possibility.
In retrospect, is it possible to pinpoint a moment when things began to change, an event that set all of this madness in motion? I remember certain items from the news, vaguely anxious conversations with friends and colleagues, a growing sense of excitement coupled with an equal measure of unease. I remember twenty-somethings in leg warmers and bomber jackets, dressed as if they’d just discovered the ironic eighties, standing on street corners with their clipboards and ball point pens and petitions, shouting, “C’mon people. Let’s put it on the ballot!” Even their anthem was a throwback to a time when they were toddlers: The Scorpions, “Winds of Change,” blasting from portable speakers.
“Boy, that takes me back,” Tom said one night several weeks ago. We were sitting in a sidewalk café, having just come from the mediator’s office, where a young woman in an inappropriate dress had assured us that our divorce need not be rancorous.
That night at the café, “Winds of Change” started blasting from the window of an apartment across the street. I heard those soaring notes and thought of Berlin, 1989?—?the dramatic events on which the song was based. “Junior year at Mississippi State,” I said to Tom. “I was glued to the TV in the dorm lounge, watching the wall come down. I wanted to be over there, in Eastern Europe, where the world was changing.”
“It’s changing here, now,” my husband said. “These kids, they’re on a mission.”
True enough. “The student volunteers are the real heroes in this fight,” our governor has said. You have to admire their righteous aggression, as if daring you to pass them by without signing your name to the cause. It was so easy to pick up the pen and scribble one’s name, never bothering to read the fine print. After all, a signature seems so harmless until one considers the fact that, in California, the number of signatures required to put an initiative on the ballot is laughably small, a tiny drop in the bucket of our state’s population. And once an initiative is passed, the state legislature is powerless to reverse it. Which is to say: a vote to secede cannot be seen merely as an act of protest, on par with bouncing a ballot Ralph Nader’s way. If Californians vote to secede, it will result in the end of the nation as we know it. Of course, in the beginning, no one viewed it that way. It was little more than an amusing distraction or an idiotic annoyance, depending on one’s perspective.
However, after the success of the petition, the campaigns began in earnest. There were editorials in every newspaper, commercials on television and radio, town hall meetings across the state. The president of the United States weighed in (“foolish”), along with the minority whip (“ludicrous”), not to mention every D-list celebrity who could book fifteen minutes on prime time.
And yet, if there were some way to revisit these moments, to watch myself and others, eavesdrop on the conversations, I think I would be struck by our nonchalance. Up until a few weeks ago, in fact, it all seemed like so much babble. Very few of us believed that anything could become of it. After all, one becomes accustomed to a certain level of security, a certain level of, well, certainty. We understand the possibility of change up to a point. What we are not prepared for, what we lack the capacity to imagine, is a seismic shift. The winds of change. The wall going up, or coming down, the familiar boundaries dissolving. The kind of change that reorders the world, or at the very least, our corner of it.
“Call the cartographers,” our governor said last week. “We will have to draw a new map.”
It was a rather melodramatic thing to say, but he is that kind of governor. I’m convinced that his flair for drama is what got him elected in the first place. Before he was the governor, he was the mayor of San Francisco. Although San Franciscans were proud of him when he went on to the highest office in the state, they also felt abandoned. Everyone assumed he’d soon be making a bid for the White House, that each office he’d held in California was only a stepping stone to something bigger. Which was why almost everyone was stunned when he threw his hat into the ring with the secessionists.
One morning three months ago, I was standing at the bedside of one of my longtime patients, Mr. Luongo, a silent slab of a man known throughout the ward for his unusual habit of addressing everyone, even the youngest orderlies and volunteers, as ma’am or sir. My residents were gathered around me, discussing Mr. Luongo’s recent seizures, when he grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume on the television mounted on the wall. “There comes a time when a state can no longer lie in bed with a federal government that mocks our most deeply held beliefs,” a familiar voice said.
I turned and looked up at the screen. There was the mayor?—?I still think of him as the mayor, even though he’s the governor now?—?standing on the steps of San Francisco City Hall in a sharp gray suit, his signature hair holding its own against the September wind, the gold dome rising behind him. “A government that insists on attacking civil rights, waging preemptive war, neglecting science to the extreme detriment of our bodily health and the health of our planet,” he continued. “There comes a time when a state must cease to feed the federal coffers at the expense of its own infrastructure, a time when the people must make the painful but moral decision to stand up for what they believe in. There comes a time when states’ rights must be more than a catch phrase. That time has come for California. It is our right and our destiny?—?our responsibility?—?to become a sovereign nation.”
“Fucking idiot,” said Mr. Luongo.
“It’s about time,” said Debbie, a first-year resident in podiatry who was gazing up at the television with a look of undisguised admiration. She met the mayor once at a fundraising event in Berkeley. He’d touched her back while moving through the crowded room, his hand lingering a moment longer than necessary; she’d never gotten over it.
“What happens to you?—?to everyone here?—?if this goes through?” asked Norman, a second-year resident, one of my favorites. The residents rotate month to month, getting their hands in as many medical pies as possible. Soon, Norman will be moving on to Cal Pacific, and then to UCSF, but he hopes to land a position at the VA after he completes his residency.
“I don’t know,” I said. It occurred to me what a strange limbo I would be left in, should the initiative succeed. “Technically, the VA campus is federal property,” I said. “I suppose we could all keep our jobs if the Feds were to maintain control of the facility. On the other hand, California might try to claim the land for itself. We’re sitting on prime real estate, after all. It could be Fort Sumter all over again. Anything is possible.”
It was true, anything was possible. But when I tried to picture a ragtag band of state militia storming the VA campus, seizing the hospital for the state, I couldn’t. It was hard to imagine even the most hard-line secessionists wielding anything more dangerous than a clipboard. Still, one never knew how passionate the different parties might become, how far each faction was willing to go to defend its own agenda. The most unsettling aspect of all of this was the uncertainty.
In the coming days, the governor’s courthouse performance would be played ad infinitum on the national and local news, parsed by the pundits, analyzed by the lawyers, much maligned by other politicians, even those of his own party. He would be called a traitor, a hero, a fool. One powerful Southern senator would say, with no small degree of vitriol, “Is it really surprising, coming from that immoral, elitist hotbed of wacko liberalism called California?” Many Californians were ashamed and enraged by the governor’s performance. But a great many were inspired. Before the governor’s announcement of support, the secessionists had been considered a fringe faction, percolating their extreme ideas on the sidelines for decades, not to be taken seriously. The governor’s speech, combined with a perfect storm out of Washington, D.C.?—?the success of a radically conservative presidential ticket, an impending attack on Iran, the appointment of a Supreme Court justice who openly favored revoking Roe vs. Wade, a legislative ban on stem cell research, a federal roll-back on offshore drilling regulation that targeted the California Coast?—?changed all that. By the following morning, vendors were already hawking secession-ware on Market Street, T-shirts and bumper stickers and key chains and underpants declaring, “California is my country.”
I bought one of each. Not that I thought it could ever really happen. But I did appreciate the historical significance of the moment.
Today is the day, then: democracy in action. It’s up to the voters to decide whether we will stay or go. Whether we will protect the union or destroy it. In the past two months, a tech billionaire from Woodside has poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaign for secession. Rumor has it that Bill Gates himself is footing a big chunk of the secessionist bill. Money has also flowed in from New York and Connecticut, where enough people are interested in testing secession as a state right to keep a close eye on our experiment. The opposition was slow to organize, even slower to pony up funds for a fight they didn’t think they could lose. It wasn’t until the governor made his move that they recognized the threat, by which point it was too late to stage anything but a frantic, eleventh-hour defense.
“The last time states attempted to secede,” a leading Democrat in the California Senate said in a news conference last week, “the result was a full-blown civil war.”
“This is a different time, and we are a different country,” our governor replied. He eschewed the traditional press conference and instead posted his reply on Twitter, with 83 characters to spare. He refrained from mentioning the obvious: certain states were salivating at the thought of a California secession, dreaming of a nation unfettered by our left-leaning electoral votes.
Years before, in the rural Mississippi church that swallowed up the Sunday mornings of my childhood, the thickly toupeed and eternally sweaty pastor had been fond of delivering sermons on hedonism, in which “the dark cavern of Hollywood” and “that modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah they call San Francisco” featured prominently. “It would do us no harm,” Brother Bill used to say, “if the whole Godless state slid right into the Pacific.”
I imagined a giant party boat carrying Californians to their doom, or possibly their salvation. I wanted to be on that boat.
Excerpted from Golden State, by Michelle Richmond (Random House, 2014)
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“There’s no denying the suspenseful thrill.” The Washington Times
“Mesmerizing and intricate, Richmond’s dissection of California on the violent brink of secession from the nation provides the backdrop for her deeper inspection of the fragile relationship between siblings…riveting.” Booklist, starred review
“Gripping, multi-layered, must-read fiction.” Library Journal, starred review