But California never runs out of ingenuity. Southern California, founded on real estate speculation and good weather, always offers something new, whether movies, the aircraft industry, or merely the sense of the new. Northern California now thrives on the newer new thing, the Internet, which is reshaping the economy and the psychic landscape of San Jose and the Silicon Valley in ways that cannot yet be calibrated. But not so far out of memory are some of the troubling events of the 1990s - biblical curses like an earthquake, drought, floods and fires, social failures like race riots and gang warfare, political failures like the drive to purge immigrants, an economic crisis that led state revenues to fall by 40 percent. The unbridled optimism suddenly was gone.
People expect Massachusetts to be smart and colorful, but nobody expects it to be utopian.
And it wasn't. The great horizons were cloudy, and not only with smog. Yes, people still have huge hopes and they still make gobs of money. They still even put pineapple on their pizzas. But California, shaped by a gold rush, molded by Americans' dreams and the American Dream, punch drunk on optimism, is a lot more sober now.