I wonder if it would be terribly unseemly of me to just fall down laughing at the state that California is in. Honest to god...

Anybody who knows me could testify that I don't have a malicious bone in my body, but another thing about me is that I have a seriously wicked taste for justice. I sure do love to see the whip crack on anyone who really deserves it. I guess the thing that gives me pause about shooting off rockets over what I'm seeing out there right now is the prospect of sorting out the individuals who deserve it -- whether from their beliefs or actually involved responsibility -- from those who wouldn't have any part of it and who know when sausage-fingered mooks have gummed up the works.

Because of how I generally despise California culture, though, it's really hard. On my worst days, I couldn't care less if the whole loopy place just fell right off the edge of the continent with one giant splash, and some of my worst days have been in California. So, when I hear all this fretting over how the lights might start winking out, I tick-off a mental checklist of about a dozen people I know out there who I would hope could get through it, and I figure the rest of them should just light up their Rachel Carson Memorial votive candles and shiver while the rain drives 'em nuts.

All that is easy enough to deal with. What's a lot more menacing is how the awesome lie of blaming capitalism and "free markets" lumbers on, now, into its second century with this episode as a landmark. Television news anchors hawk the lie like parrots. For example, on January 11, Jennings opened his report with the rapier insight that "the deregulation of the electric power industry in California is causing one problem after another," and Rather naturally howled about "mother nature contribut[ing] a storm to a man-made deregulation disaster." It's not appalling enough that morons like these don't know anything about markets in general or particular. No, they're also ignorant of the facts, or of the meanings of words, or both, any of which is a remarkable state of affairs for people in their business.

One might begin analysis of the scene with the assumption that people like this object to "deregulation" -- taking the word for what it would mean to people familiar with concepts rendered in plain English. The ways in which they throw words around might help one to conclude on when they mean to speak in general terms. If THAT was ever true, and taken together with objection to "deregulation," then one would naturally expect them to argue for complete state ownership and operation of things like power generation plants. On the other hand, and however, they never really argue for anything, do they? Not out loud, that is. The wink is as good as the nod to heads talking in thirty-second code, and so it's a bit much to expect them to come right out for a Kaliphornia Elektrikwerke.

At the same time, it's handy enough for them to refer to "deregulation" of electrical power when the cappuccino machines are in danger for a couple hours at a time. Someone who had just dropped in to notice all the noise could crank up a mental picture of a line of gray pinstriped suiters reaching to the horizon, and ready to disappear in a trampling cloud of dust headed for the golden shore at the drop of the "deregulation" handkerchief. I'm not one much for "subtexts," except when people like the heads are talking in their winking nodding style, and that's when I know 'em because I hear 'em and see 'em.

Of course, they -- the subtexts -- are everywhere around this flaming hematoma. Just today, those gray people uptown, who fit all the news to print, asked the first thing to flit into their ditzy minds: "Where'd all the money go?" What a story. It's sternly pointed out that the wholesale energy unit of Houston-based Reliant Energy knocked off ninety million bucks in the third quarter of last year "in California alone." Jeez. One can almost see the poor little tykes breaking open piggy-banks to hand over nickels to the spats & vests robber barons at the door in order to keep the PlayStation 2's going through the next highest round. One can almost see it, that is, until one takes a look at Reliant's quarterly stockholder report and observes an increase of expenses in the wholesale energy unit from $2.9B to $6.7B in the third quarter of '00 over Q3 '99. I guess stuff like all those windmills out in West Texas -- the largest single megawatt-installation in the world -- soaks up a lot of nickels. I sure hope it pays off. I mean, it's not where I would put my money, but I'm not the one gouging the poor little tykes of California, so I guess I get to shut up about it.

"Where did the money go?" indeed. What would it take to make clear to people who ask such questions in times like these that the money goes where it's needed? To me, it's unbelievable that over a century and a half of industrial life has not been able to render these lessons clearly to some goddamned dolts. It's what money does. That's in its nature. It simply is what it is. Like oil through the looking glass, so is the dough of our lives: going where the going's good when human beings want it or need it that way, which is universally all the time. It's unfortunate that Governor Gray Davis can suddenly feel the cold grip of commerce around his neck -- in the form of the incipient personal disaster of eventually having to find a real job if he doesn't get out there and do his best ordained savior act by screaming about "out-of-state profiteers" -- but that doesn't mean that he can do anything to alter the immutable ebb and flow of the grease of life.

Now, these matters really are not terribly difficult. In spite of how dismally the science of economics acquitted itself throughout nearly all the twentieth century, nothing about what causes these kinds of horrentia is essentially opaque to ordinary understanding. Henry Hazlitt -- once hailed by H. L. Mencken as "one of the few economists in human history who could really write" -- explained things tidily and amply with his "Economics In One Lesson" of 1946. Governor Davis could save himself a lot of anguish by sitting down to read ten pages on "Government Price Fixing," if he were really anguished about whether the cappuccino machines and PlayStations will keep going. The thing is: that's not what he's concerned with. Mel Brooks knew the score: "We must protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen!"

See, Davis has got a seller's market, too. In a world in which I've seen even "conservative" commentators remarking on "the failure of a state to provide energy for its citizens," it's no great task to figure out that people like Davis only have to grab the nearest microphone or collar a stenographer...er, "reporter," and start hollering about "the citizens" and they'll come running to join the hue & cry for whatever he can duct-tape together in the legislature. And, of course, it's a safe bet that "deregulation" won't be on "the agenda," to coin a term abominated to ghastly proportions in recent times.

"Deregulation" is now become the stake to be driven through the heart of the machine. The air is filled with all kinds of wailing over something gone terribly wrong, and has been for many months. In August of last year, Patrick Dorinson of the California Independent System Operators was already quoted by the Environmental News Network, moaning, "In 1991, how were we to know there would be such a surging economy in the year 2000?" I wonder if he meant that if anyone had known, then the "deregulation" scheme might have allowed buyers and sellers to negotiate their own contracts instead of forcing everyone to agree to the same price on any given day in the Power Exchange at Pasadena, or that utilities might have been permitted to set their own rates to consumers. I rather doubt all that, but I guess I'm doubting that anything was "deregulated," too.

It won't do any good to point out that, for instance, the rise of digital technology should have been, uhm, "deregulated," in all the same sorts of ways as the electrical power industry. Taking someone like Dorinson at his miserable whining word, it's easy for me to sit here after the turn of the century and point out to him that someone should have seen the day coming when all those nasty evil Web-server farms should have been "deregulated" before they sprang up to their present greedy bloated proportions of about fifteen times the square-foot power requirements of an average commercial office building. Of course, there were only about five hundred documents on the entire World Wide Web in the year he moaned about, but I have to say I find it just hilarious the way the grease of life wends its way into places where morons can't see, and why it takes people of real vision to both make that happen and deal with it when it does.

Now, however, it's happened, and the vampire hunters are out with the stakes in hand. Senator Diane Feinstein is working up legislation to cap wholesale electricity prices in eleven western states, and everybody should bet long on hearing her swearing righteous doom upon every variety of greed gouging the poor tykes crouching in the glow of the least humming radiance, anywhere. The "experiment" of California is a "colossal and dangerous failure" according to those in the know -- like Governor Davis, for instance -- and officials flock across the land to poke and study the twitching monster in its terrible throes.

In a way, it's a damned good thing that authentic Americans are a species dwindling in numbers below those of panda bears and about fifty-six different kinds of bugs anymore. That's because their embarrassment at the prospect of East European-styled blackouts anywhere in their homeland would have been simply mortifying to behold. Some would say that we can afford it now that the Soviet Union isn't around to make political hay on such a scene -- the Cold War is over, you see, and "globalization" means never having to say you live better than the furthest dirt-scratching savages.

But I can't help it if I'm going to have to laugh my ass off when it gets down to some dirt-brain standing at a record store counter in the dark and asking, "How come I can't see where to click on this to hear a sample?"