What's the Matter with California: Cultural Rumbles from the Golden State and Why the Rest of Us Should Be Shaking

(Paperback)

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Description

There's an unspoken fault line in California. No, not the San Andreas Fault nor any of the geologic ones we all know about. This fault line is cultural -- formed by the waves of ethnic and social groups that have rammed willy-nilly into California and now refuse to get along. Californians today worry about "The Big One," but it's a cultural cataclysm they -- and the rest of us -- should fear.

When writer and columnist Jack Cashill was skewered along with Kansas (despite the fact that he lives in Missouri) in Thomas Frank's New York Times bestseller What's the Matter with Kansas, he decided to fight back with a riposte from the heart -- an honest, biting, and wickedly funny look at what's wrong with the purplest of blue states: almighty California itself.

The media moguls, multiculturalists, union bosses, and eco-warriors who run California have abandoned liberalism for total insanity. They have transformed the Golden State from America's future into America's Rome. Spectacularly sybaritic and self-indulgent, overtaxed and overregulated, California lives on past glories, and even Conan the Republican cannot muster the will to defend its borders. Now, finally, Jack Cashill is here to rally the right-thinking citizens of the state (and the nation) and rescue this gorgeous chunk of real estate from its increasingly shaky future.

Reviews

"Wonderful, a thorough, thoughtful, impressive effort.... [Cashill] exposes our blindness, and offers a diagnosis so dead-on, so compelling, that it ought to leave 36 million bewildered Californians scratching their heads, wondering, 'Why didn't I think of that'"

-- Chris Weinkopf, Los Angeles Daily News
"Far from being a simplistic 'right vs. left' take on California and why the rest of the country should learn from its example, Cashill's book provides a rich tapestry of time and place.... What's the Matter with California demonstrates what exactly ails the Golden State."

-- Cinnamon Stillwell, online columnist, SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle)
"Thoroughly brave, unsparingly clear-eyed, and absolutely entertaining. Like California, it's an exploration of the sublime and the ridiculous, a juxtaposition of the awful, the titillating, and the hopeful.... Cashill does America a true service by exposing the decay of the country's most dysfunctional state -- and providing real solutions."

-- Ben Shapiro, author of Porn Generation

Author Bio

An independent writer and producer, Jack Cashill has written a dozen nonfiction books and appeared on C-SPANs Book TV ten times. He also produced a score of feature-length documentaries. Jack serves as executive editor of Ingrams Magazine. He writes regularly for American Thinker, American Spectator, and WorldNetDaily and has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard. Jack has a Ph.D. from Purdue University in American studies and has taught at a French university under the auspices of the Fulbright program.